When we think about leadership, we tend to call up masculine images. Is this a bias, or simply the result of many decades during which men occupied the highest positions of authority? An old saying captures the paradox: "Behind every great man there is always a great woman."
Despite so many positive attributes, women in organizations are still not as valued as they could be. Research shows that in many contexts women receive lower compensation than men at equivalent levels of responsibility. They also face bias regarding their leadership style, specifically because they express distinctly feminine characteristics: intuition, heightened perception, sensitivity, concentration, and the capacity to manage multiple activities simultaneously. These qualities are not weaknesses. They are necessary, and they are different.
The Pressure to Perform Masculinity
Because of the dominant masculine reference points in management and leadership, many women have consciously or unconsciously adopted more masculine behaviors at work, from their attire to their decision-making style, in order to be accepted. Today this is slowly changing. Women are gaining ground in the workplace and are increasingly recognizing and valuing their own feminine attributes: sensitivity, intuition, heightened perception, and systemic vision.
It is worth pausing to reflect on the importance of these characteristics in the corporate environment, which is so deeply starved of them. If we look more closely, we find that the feminine dimension, what psychiatrist and analyst Carl Gustav Jung named the "anima," is what most urgently demands presence and development in any human being.
Both Men and Women Carry the Anima
The feminine vector is present in all human beings, not exclusively or necessarily in women. This broadens the perspective: both men and women carry masculine and feminine dimensions within themselves. The task is to work toward integrating and partnering these dimensions in the expression of androgyny, understood as a characteristic of a more angelic or spiritually evolved state of being.
To do this, we must strip away prejudice, revisit ingrained values and beliefs that no longer serve us, and explore all of our potentialities as human beings: the pragmatic, the objective, the resolute, as well as the sensitive, the intuitive, the perceptive, and yes, the loving. This can be an excellent path toward wholeness for the leader.
What This Means for Organizations
Organizations that reward only the masculine dimensions of leadership, assertiveness, control, speed, competition, will consistently underperform those that create conditions for the full range of human capacities to show up. Intuition, empathy, relational attunement, and systemic sensing are not soft skills. They are the precise capabilities that allow leaders to read complex human systems accurately and respond with wisdom.
The integration of the anima is not a personal development luxury. It is a strategic necessity for any leader who wants to develop the depth of vision that 21st-century organizations actually require.