By Dr. John Demartini
In a book titled “21st Century Leadership”, my friend Lynne Joy McFarland and her colleagues Larry E. Senn and John R. Childress interviewed 100 business leaders to find out what they thought would be the most significant key to building sustainable businesses in the 21st century. The majority of them believed that business leaders of the future will be moving away from the industrialized, patriarchal, dictatorial approaches of major companies and gradually toward a more balanced and partly decentralized approach whereby creative specialists are doing more of what they love with more equalized and autonomous power. Instead of an extreme oppressor and oppressed approach, they will be more moderated and equilibrated, thereby allowing specialists to be more contributively creative and innovative. They believed that business leaders of the future will discover the power of and demonstrate a more masculine and feminine balance.
Previous selective company leaders who assertively controlled and overextended their workers eventually forced those workers to organize retaliating unions in order for a collective feminine force to balance the masculine dominance that concentrated primarily on immediate profits. These unions developed to protect the workers from burn-out and to teach the patriarchal business leaders to care more about the workers they were extracting surplus labor profits from.
Many business leaders lean toward one side or the other in their approaches to leadership, but nature automatically forces business leaders of companies to oscillate between these masculine (visionary and profit-driven) and feminine (feeling and nurture-driven) sides. Effective business leaders of the future will strive to maintain this essential balance of masculine and feminine forces within their businesses.
Values and Profitability
I recently received an email from a small company in Massachusetts that had a turnover of $32 million dollars, but a slim profit margin of just over $1 million (a profit of about three per cent). No one on this company’s board had ever earned more than $1 million previously. The board was very family, education, and altruistically oriented. Therefore, the company was led and guided according to these values. The business leaders’ hierarchy of values dictated the destiny of the company and, consequently, the profit margins. As a result, I was among many consultants who were brought into the company to focus the leaders effectively on the objective of increasing profitability, which meant bringing an essential masculine side to the equation.
If a business leader does not have a high value on making profits, but places a higher value on managing and taking care of his or her people only, the likely result is that the company may be a great place to work, but their its margins are likely to be sacrificed. If a leader is too focused on the bottom line and focused only on making profits, the company is likely not to be the best of workplaces and employees may burn out or leave.
Business leaders of the future, who allow for a balance of masculine and feminine forces, oscillating between these two poles yet striking a synchronous balance, will be the most loved, loving, and sustainable.
In studying business management ideals for over three decades, I have found fluctuating trends return every seven to ten years like a slow swinging pendulum which always returns to balance. Currently, as the world is emerging from an extended economic recessionary period, companies are temporarily focusing on building their muscle and trimming their excess fat. This means they are likely to find ways of becoming more efficient and focused, cutting spending to maximize profits. But, before the recession, many companies were allocating funds for health and wellness programs and day care services for their teams along with fostering and supporting more “social” work environments. In a few more years, the present masculine side and structure will once again begin to give way to the feminine side.
Equilibrium of Complementary Opposites
Business wisdom maintains a close balance of the more extremes in complementary opposite gender polarities. A company is the most basic unit of socio-economics and is wisely led and managed when it demonstrates the principle of gender balance. The more competitive and assertive some leaders become within the company, the more cooperative and passive the other workers will become in order to maintain this innate striving for gender balance.
A company is a collective version of what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus called a dynamic equilibrium. It contains complementary balancing views and acts. All opposing values organically emerge naturally. For instance, in companies there are the assertive over-workers or drivers and the passive under-workers and driven (the empowered and the entitled). If a business leader over-infatuates with the former, he or she will also breed the latter. If an over-worker gets to work early and stays late and is labeled by others as a workaholic, they will be balanced by the under-worker who will come and go at the scheduled times and do nothing more than what is expected. If the leader infatuates with one, they will reject the other. Business leaders of the future, though, would be wise to understand how complementary pairs of gender opposites are necessary for the overall balance and not try to get every worker to become one-sided, which nature will not allow.
As with all reproducing pairs of organisms found within nature where there must be a gender balance, so too for all sustaining business organizations there must be such a balance. Inspired business leaders of the future will remain conscious of this most important principle and aim to maintain poise in relationship to the gender roles within their companies or organizations. They will integrate before their companies disintegrate.
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Dr. John Demartini is an internationally published author, educator, and human behavior specialist. To book Dr. Demartini, contact the Demartini Institute by email at info@DrDemartini.co.za. You can also visit his website at www.DrDemartini.com. To download a free Value Determination Process Workbook, please visit www.DrDemartini.com/pm_determine_your_values.
