What can 360 Feedback data tell us about the differences between male and female leaders?

What can 360 Feedback data tell us about the differences between male and female leaders? June 2012 Executive Summary Gender differences are evident in a large study of 360 degree feedback data from managers and leaders in a wide variety of British organisations,, based on Talent Innovations generic leadership model which has recently undergone an extensive psychometric review. We have found that, overall, 360 degree feedback recipients ents tend to be somewhat modest, giving themselves lower scores than their colleagues, and that this is particularly true of women.. Conversely, females tend to give higher scores to others, particularly to other women. When looking at specific competencies, we found that women are consistently seen as better at managing and planning activities, taking personal responsibility (saying sorry ) and relating & empathising with people. Men are consistently seen as being much more commercially-oriented oriented and stronger as strategic leaders. There are also several competencies where females see women as being stronger (largely those that have a strong element of relationships with others,, including the interpersonal aspects of leadership), and yet others where males see s men as being stronger (largely those that do not have a strong element of relating to others, as well as more challenging competencies such as innovation and personal impact). These therefore indicate two leadership forms male leadership is the intellectual planning / visionary type and the female leadership is the more social type. We also found that the specific areas where women saw themselves as being much weaker (relative to how their colleagues saw them) were the same areas where males generally see women as being weaker than men. This seems to indicate that women s self-image is unduly influenced by the opinions of their male colleagues. We feel that it is important to understand these tendencies whenever one is looking at a 360 degree feedback report, and feedback facilitators should interpret an individual s set of data with these norms in mind. However, these differences in perception are not simple. They may indicate differences in the quality of relationships rather than real differences in current performance; they may indicate the cultural norms people are operating within; or indeed they may reflect the gender filters each of us uses when evaluating and judging others effectiveness at work. In addition to this the differences noted between self and others ratings serve as a useful reminder that self-only assessments may at best be missing something and at worst will systematically under-value women s capabilities. We conclude that most companies will be strengthened by embracing the differences that exist between male and female leadership styles, by supporting a diverse mix of women and men in all parts of their organisations. Page 1

Background Almost 14,000 people have completed Talent Innovations off-the-shelf leadership 360 degree feedback tool 1, called The Inspiring Leader. These people come from a variety of organisations and sectors, including many from the public and education sectors, though the majority were from the private sector. s All but a handful of the feedbacks were gathered from organisations based in the UK. The questionnaire consists of 107 management, leadership and business behaviours, evaluated on a 5- point scale from poor to excellent. Such ratings are gathered from the individual completing a self- assessment together with a variety of their colleagues including their manager, direct reports and peers, but often also other types of rater such as clients, suppliers and other partners, and other more senior or junior colleagues. It takes the typical survey y respondent approximately 10 minutes to complete these ratings. This tool has recently undergone an extensive psychometric review, which has resulted in the questions being reorganised into a new set of 18 competencies. Each of these competencies has been arrived at using a combination of factor analysis and reliability analysis, giving a new structure that is robust, valid, and gives us an unprecedented opportunity to understand the real dynamics of management and leadership behaviours. All individuals, both feedback recipients and feedback givers (raters), who use our 360 feedback software have their gender stored in our database 2. This is done in order to allow emails and other communications to be suitably tailored (the system can print What are his strengths or What are her strengths rather than the usual What are the individual s strengths ). This has the useful side-effect effect that we can examine if there are any systematic differences in how men and women are perceived and perceive others. For reference, ence, the table below shows the number of combinations of men and women in the total sample: Feedback Recipient Man Woman Male 6,184 2,018 Feedback Giver (Rater) Female 2,650 1,778 Self 953 406 1 360 degree feedback, also known as 360 degree evaluation, 360 degree appraisal or multi-rater feedback, is the process of gathering feedback on employees performance and behaviours from all around them: above them (their manager), below them (their direct reports), and from beside them (from peers in their team, from peers and partners outside of their team, and sometimes from external partners such as customers or suppliers). Such feedback is normally gathered by asking each individual to assess how well the focus of the feedback demonstrates each of a number of business-relevant behaviours. It is normal to also provide open-text forms in the questionnaire to allow the raters to comment on the individual s strengths, areas in need of development and make other constructive points relevant to their current role and future career. The focus also completes this same questionnaire on themselves. 2 To avoid confusion, throughout this document we have adopted the convention of writing male / female when describing the givers of feedback (the raters ), and writing men / women when describing the recipients of feedback (the focuses ). Page 2

Interestingly, those women who received 360 degree feedback had relatively more female raters. This is mainly due to the mix of organisations many female managers are in evenly balanced organisations with similar numbers of men and women. However, there are also plenty of organisations with over 80% of managers being male, such as engineering firms, leading to lots of men with very male-heavy feedback. The Inspiring Leader Model of Leadership The leadership model that emerged from our review of the Inspiring Leader data looks like this: Intellect Grasping Complexities Innovation Specialist Knowledge Action Decisive Action Managing & Planning Activities Commercial Focus Customer-centric Leadership Strategic Vision - Leading with Intellect Managing Performance - Leading with Action Leading Teams - Leading with Inspiration/Connection Connection Relating with Others Respect & Empathy Personal Responsibility Openness / Flexibility Inspiration Energy & Enthusiasm Personal Impact Striving to Grow Clear Communication Each of the four outer domains of behaviour a are relatively distinct from each other: individuals can often be strong in one domain but can be weaker in the other domains. In the centre are a set of leadership behaviours that tend to bridge across all of these domains: rare is the person who is seen as a great leader without also being strong across many of the domains. Nevertheless we found three distinct flavours of leadership which are focused on these different outer domains: Strategic Vision (Leadership that draws on the Intellect competencies such as Grasping Complexities); Managing Performance (Leadership that draws on the Action competencies such as Managing Activities and Decisive Action); and Leading Teams (Leadership that draws on the other competencies, m most particularly Energy & Enthusiasm, Communication, Personal Impact and Relating). Health Warning Before we get into any findings about the differences between men and women, the first point to make is that there are huge amounts of overlap between men and women. If we find that, on average, men are perceived as better than women at something that definitely doesn t mean that all men are better than all women. To put these differences in context, most of the statistically significant differences between the sexes are of the order of 0.1 on a 5 5-point rating scale. (E.g. Men get an average score of 3.8 and women get an average score of 3.9). On the other hand, the difference between the best- scoring men and the worst-scoring scoring men will often be 10x x bigger than this. Page 3

Nevertheless we do find systematic differences between the genders. Throughout this paper we will only describe a difference if it has been found to be statistically significant 3. How men and women differ How they rate people (and themselves) overall One of the first things to observe is that people are generally lower-scoring about themselves. Perhaps this is part of a British modesty? Or perhaps this is an indicator of a common strategy deployed by people as they down-grade their own ratings in order to ensure they are not disappointed or shown up. This is a very significant difference however, with individuals almost never r giving themselves elves top marks (i.e. giving themselves all or mostly 5s), whereas a reasonable number of non-self raters do give their colleagues overall average scores in the territory of 4.8 and above. The second thing we found was that females are much more generous in the scores they give to other women.. On the other hand, they are even more low-scoring about themselves. This pattern of results is shown in the chart below,, in which the area of the bubbles is proportional to the number of questionnaires the result is based on. 4.05 Average score (1-5 scale) 4.00 3.95 3.90 3.85 3.80 Gender of Focus Man Woman 3.75 3.70 Male Female Self Gender of rater Why might this be? It is an established result in the academic psychology literature on personality that females generally score higher on measures of agreeableness, i.e. being nice. It seems entirely plausible that this would play out as females giving high scores to their colleagues,, although why this should be focused on their female colleagues is not clear.. Likewise, giving low scores for oneself is, if seen as simply a form of modesty, also a generally nice attribute, in British culture ure at least. Alternatively this highlights a systematic pattern of under-confidence among women. This may also be explained by the perceived 3 Tests of statistical significance were conducted using ANOVA and t-tests,, and we have reported only differences that are a significant at the 95% level. Most are in fact significant at the 99% level. Page 4

areas of strength for men being the dominant, highly valued ones in some businesses which might lead to lower self-image for women. Throughout the rest of the analysis conducted for this study, all self ratings have been excluded unless otherwise noted.. Whilst a valid, and indeed essential, perspective when conducting an individual 360 degree feedback review, we consider self ratings to be a distraction from the intention of this study, which is to understand the areas of management and leadership behaviours where men and women differ,, and how this is perceived by colleagues. Where are men and women seen to be different? The really interesting question is: In what areas are men better than women, or vice versa? Indeed, can one say whether men or women make better leaders? The chart below shows all of the average scores across all of the competencies,, including self scores. The pink lines represent the scores obtained by women and the blue lines the scores for the men. They are listed in order of the men s scores. 4.2 4.1 Men Women Average Score 4.0 3.9 3.8 3.7 3.6 Competency Some clear patterns seem to emerge: men get higher scores than women in Commercial, Strategic Vision and Innovative, whilst women get visibly higher scores than men in Managing Activities and Respect & Empathy. However, as we ve seen above, there s more to gender differences than just the average score they receive. Women and men also rate each other differently,, in particular females are more generous in their scores of women, and women are more modest when rating themselves.. This is very important to take account of, because we ve already seen that female managers tend to more often have female raters than the men. This will automatically lead to women obtaining somewhat higher scores than men. Whilst a true observation of the score women get in their 360 feedbacks, one could also argue that this is an artefact of the tendency for females to rate others, especially women, higher. Another possibility is Page 5

that because women are seen to manage relationships better than men, this may be affecting the ratings overall as 360 data can be seen primarily as a sign of the quality of relationships. So to discover the true gender differences that are statistically significant we must dig a little deeper. The chart below shows all of the permutations of gender, both of raters and of feedback recipients,, and with self scores separated. To make sure the patterns that relate to gender are clear, the chart shows the scores relative to the overall average for that competency.. Blue and pink lines continue to r represent men and women respectively, but here the dashed lines show the female raters, the solid lines are the male raters,, and the dotted lines are self scores.. The competencies are ordered by the overall size of the difference between men and women once e self scores are excluded. +0.2 Relative Average Score (0 = Overall Average) +0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 Males rating Men Females rating Men Men self-rating Males rating Women Females rating Women Women self-rating Competency There are plenty of interesting patterns to take in here! One critical challenge is identifying which differences are statistically significant. This is shown in the table on the following page. This analysis was done twice once from the perspective of the male raters and once from the perspective of the females.. This allows us to identify the areas of consensus and the areas of disagreement. The all-- important Leadership competencies are shown underlined. Page 6

Males rate Women better Males rate Men and Women the same Males rate Men better Agreement Disagreement Agreement Disagreement Agreement Managing Activities Personal Responsibility Respect & Empathy Decisive Action Customer-centric Energetic Striving to Grow Clear Communication Relating Specialist Knowledge Personal Impact Open Thinking Grasping Complexity Innovative Commercial Focus Strategic Vision Managing Performance Leading Teams Females rate Women better Females rate Men and Women the same Females rate Men better What are the themes that emerge here? There are three competencies where both genders agree women are better than men. These are largely recognisable as being generally-understood female strengths. Respect & Empathy this competency covers things like Effective listening,, Noticing how others are feeling, Showing care and empathy for others etc. These are all aspects of social sensitivity, a stereotypical female strength. Managing & Planning Activities.. This is all about organising, prioritising and p planning, in order to meet deadlines and deliver on promises.. One could perhaps align this with the stereotype of women being good at multi-tasking, tasking, and would imply that women would more often make good project managers. Personal Responsibility is all about admitting your mistakes, owning the consequences of your decisions, and being open and honest,, and this would seem to imply that men just aren t so good at saying sorry when things go wrong in business! This may be connected to the cultural norm observed that failure is bad, which when combined with competitiveness, could be more of an issue for men. There are also two competencies where both genders agree men are better than women: Commercial Focus is about hard-nose nosed business behaviours,, such as Has strong commercial instincts, Drives improved business results and Strives to manage key financial measures. The gap between men and women from the male raters perspective in this competency is very large indeed. Interestingly, tingly, women give themselves extremely low self scores in this competency. This is an area which could also be connected to organisational norms, where it is often the case that commercial success is seen as more important than having good quality relationships. Indeed, the two are often seen as being antagonistic, such as when a company cuts employees to save money or extracts a better price out of a supplier, both actions which would be to commercial advantage at the cost of worsened relationships with employees or external partners respectively. Thus if i f women are generally being seen as stronger at relating then they Page 7

are simultaneously going to be seen as weaker at having commercial focus. This may be an area where cultural and language norms define perceived reality. If a woman is not expected to put value on commercial issues then her commercial language may not be acknowledged and built on,, and thereby not reinforced. Strategic Vision can be thought of as Leading with Intellect,, and here men r reliably get much higher scores than women. Example behaviours include having an inspiring vision for the organisation, seeing the long-term impact of decisions, creating a strategic plan, thinking about financial issues, and considering the big picture. Compared to Managing Performance, these feel much more like the kinds of behaviours that one would like to see in the main board of an organisation. On the face of it this sounds like a possible explanation for the glass ceiling and why women are so rarely at the top of big organisations. On the other hand, many of these behaviours are hard to really demonstrate unless you are actually in that organisational position. Because so few women are at the top of their organisations, this also means that relatively fewer of the women in our data set will have been very senior, and so it is likely that this is at least partly a consequence of the glass ceiling. Men s strength in Personal Impact (as perceived by the men at least) is interesting. This competency covers behaviours such as making a strong first impression, expressing views with confidence, being visible across the organisation and making their presence felt.. These are all characteristics that one might describe as being aggressive if taken to extreme, but are probably also behaviours that help in progressing one s career in an organisation.. Perhaps this is a small part of the explanation for the gender pay g gap? This area will also be affected by personal self-confidence and expectations of others which may be affecting women more than men we have already seen that women give themselves low self scores overall. Several l of the competencies that males rated higher for men (Innovative, Grasping Complexities) are notable for their relative lack of a need for social sensitivity and being more about the rational / practical aspects of achieving results. Conversely, most of the competencies that female raters rated higher for women are those with a clear element of social connection: Customer-centric, Striving to Grow, Clear Communication, Relating, Managing Performance, and Leading Teams. It t is worthy of note that two of the Leadership competencies are those where e female raters gave higher scores to women: Managing Performance is Leading with Action, with behaviours including delegating appropriately, clearly setting expected standards of performance, providing constructive and objective feedback. Leading Teams is Leading with Connection/Inspiration, and includes such behaviours as energising people towards their goals, celebrating team success, gaining commitment, inspiring a positive attitude, and instilling a desire to succeed in others. In both of these forms of social leadership, men tend to get similar scores from both male and female raters,, but women get higher scores from female raters. Page 8

Discussion How Men and Women Differ as leaders There are some significant differences in competency ratings between the genders and they are not entirely unexpected. Women are seen as being stronger at managing activities, taking personal responsibility and empathising with others, whilst men are seen as being commercially hard-nosed and having strategic vision. There are also a host of other competencies where, although there isn t clear consensus from both sexes whether men or women are better, they tell a similar story of women s strengths being more e based around relationships and men s strengths being based around the aspects of business (such as innovation and grasping complexities) which do not rely on relationships. Women give themselves extremely low self scores on almost exactly the same competencies (Commercial, Strategic Vision, Innovative, Grasping Complexities, Personal Impact) that men s see women as being worse at it s t s as if women s self-perception is an amplified reflection of men s views. This would not be surprising given that most people in the same organisation had more male colleagues rating them than females. Perception or Reality? But of course, this leads us to a major enquiry how do current expectations (connected of course to our cultural and social norms) affect our perceptions, affect how easily people engage in undeveloped areas, affect how many experiences and conversations others have in those areas i.e. affect the 360 data? These results could be showing us how our culture is forming and creating our men and our women rather than how truly different we are from each other. It may well be even more profound than this our Inspiring Leader model could be seen to represent the current cultural norms that have been (and still are it seems) male dominated so we are reinforcing these norms by assessing people on this framework. The framework was derived from the question asked of current senior leaders what makes for future success in your organisation? This question flows from a value of corporate career success. It would be interesting instead to ask men separately from women: what behaviours do you see making the most difference in this world? A rather different value set underpins this question. We intend to get a clearer picture of this in our future research. The Message for the Individuals in Organisations What does this mean for our talent management strategies and diversity agenda? Firstly, it reminds us that caution should be taken in interpreting any one person s 360 data. Its s true meaning should always be considered in the light of the cultural and gender context. Our results are indicating two leadership forms the male leadership is the intellectual planning / visionary type and the female leadership is the more social type. When considering an individual and his or her 360 feedback, the enquiry leads us to invite a man with weaker respect and humility to expand their bandwidth of style and to develop p their listening and empathy. Being really clear on the commercial advantages of focusing on these e areas will likely be critical for commitment from a stereotypical man!! Encouraging a woman to expand her strategic and commercial impact may again be a useful way forward from the perspective of that woman, but this may need to be sold from an objective of enhancing relationships. The results of this study also clearly highlight the limitations of using self-assessments of employees strengths and weaknesses. We have seen that women consistently score themselves much lower than their colleagues do on the competencies that males generally think women are worse at. This is good evidence that 360 degree feedback is not only a valuable tool in supporting individual development (by Page 9

helping individuals overcome their blind spots ), but in doing so may also support port an organisation s diversity agenda by mitigating women s lower self-confidence in the male areas of strength. The Message for Organisations Whilst one might seek to improve organisational performance by getting individuals to work on their weaknesses s (e.g. by encouraging men to develop more empathy and women to be more commercial), an alternative approach is to relish the true natural styles of all individuals, ividuals, whatever they may be, encourage the mix and the differences, enhance the positive talents, and exaggerate different types. It is worth highlighting and questioning the current values of the organisations as illustrated by the 360 feedback results, and checking the impact and suitability for today s (and tomorrow s) organisational needs and challenges. lenges. It is clear from recent research 4 that businesses do better when there is a mix of both genders at Board level and a balance of both types of leadership would make sense in many situations. It is highly likely that an organisation will be stronger when its leadership has a complementary mix of different styles, and the results of this study give yet more support to the idea that a healthy mix of men and women will be an excellent step in that direction. About Talent Innovations We are Devoted to Development.. We help our clients to transform the talent in their organisation with brilliant online HR tools and insightful psychological expertise. We develop flexible and innovative software that adds value through clever, unique features, improving the user experience and the effectiveness of the information gathered. In particular, we are recognised experts in providing 360 degree feedback that really makes a difference. Read more at www.talentinnovations.com,, or call us on 0845 362 3269,, or +44 1923 277912 from outside the UK. The Authors of this Paper Mark Ainsworth Technical Consultant to Talent Innovations The Whole Story (UK) Ltd www.thewholestory.biz/about/ mark@talentinnovations.co.uk mark@thewholestory.biz 07968 096035 Elva Ainsworth Founder and Transformational Consultant Talent Innovations Ltd www.talentinnovations.com/s114/about-elva-ainsworthainsworth elva@talentinnovations.co.uk elva@dynamicwoman.co.uk 0845 3623269 4 e.g. McKinsey s research on diversity - http://www.mckinsey.com/features/women_matter ) Page 10