The leadership industry spent decades teaching women to lead more like men.
The neuroscience says that was exactly backwards.
Simon Sinek recently made an observation that stopped me in my tracks. When he talks about trusting people, caring for people, and investing in people being good for business, he said women inherently understand that. Men, he noted, ask for case studies first. They want proof.
That is not a flaw. It is a difference in how the brain processes social information.
Simon Baron-Cohen’s research on the empathy bell curve shows women, as a group, sit further toward the empathic end of the spectrum. Not all women. Not no men. A distribution. But the implications for leadership are profound.
Empathy is not softness. In the brain, it is the capacity to accurately model another person’s internal state. That accuracy is what drives faster trust, better decisions, and stronger team cultures.
And here is what the data shows about development. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman studied 16,000 leaders and tracked a competency they called ‘Practising Self Development’ — asking for feedback and acting on it. Both genders start their careers on equal footing. But as careers progress, women keep seeking to improve. Men plateau. The gap widens with age.
Think about a woman in senior leadership you know who led as herself — not a version of herself smoothed down to fit a male template.
What did her leadership feel like to be on the receiving end of?
The data has been here for a long time. The problem was who was designing the leadership models.
#Leadership #Neuroscience #WomenInLeadership #LeadershipDevelopment #NeuroLeadership
