What is leadership?
Having recently read Walking on Broken Glass, I’ve been reflecting on how little the world has adapted to women’s growing economic contributions.
Women have been expected to follow the “male” model rather than lead from their own strengths. Is that because their way wasn’t recognized or valued? Or because they internalized the way things are?
Two stories (91, 84) shared on this platform suggest the answer is both, and that one feeds the other.
One describes women who reached senior ranks and adopted the worst habits of the boys’ club, including ego, bullying, retaliation and refusing to help others up, to hold on to their status. That makes the betrayal of other women cut deeper.
In the other, a senior manager with a long record of bullying, harassment and discrimination manipulated numbers, eliminated competition and witnesses through layoffs, and took credit for others’ work. The complaints were well documented. Leadership buried them, kept the manager, and the executive who provided cover kept rising.
We still mistake noise for leadership: swagger, boastful promises of success, deciding alone what others should weigh in on, steamrolling the employee with an idea or the auditor with a question, reversing course with confidence so no one dares object.
Strength, space and volume, like a gorilla beating its chest. Meanwhile, others quietly do the work, build consensus, and count on results to speak for themselves. Too often they don’t get heard.
Part of the problem is that many organizations can’t recognize good leadership when they see it. Quiet competence reads as lack of ambition, and the people deciding who gets promoted were often promoted for their volume. So the pattern reproduces itself.
We also confuse leadership with positional power. A title gives you authority, but it doesn’t make anyone want to follow you. People who lead from their position tend to abuse authority to solve problems: overruling, silencing, reorganizing people out of the way.
That’s faster than engaging the hearts and minds of the people around them, and it looks decisive. But compliance isn’t commitment. The test is simple: if you lost the title tomorrow, would anyone still follow you?
It’s tempting to call one style male and the other female, and the generalities aren’t baseless. But the first story shows that’s not the point.
Some women didn’t adopt the chest-beating because it’s better leadership. They adopted it because it’s what gets rewarded.
Manipulating behind the scenes and stabbing colleagues in the back doesn’t make you a leader. It just makes you sneaky and toxic, with a title. There’s no glory in that.
So here’s my answer. Leadership isn’t how much space you take up. It’s what happens to the people and the work around you: whether people speak up or go quiet, whether questions are welcomed or punished, whether credit flows down and accountability flows up.
An organization’s leadership is defined by what it does when that manager is reported.
It cuts straight to the heart of why so many corporate diversity and leadership initiatives stall out: they try to fix the individual instead of fixing the system.
We cannot fix this trap by simply telling women to ‘lean in’ or act more like men.
The problem isn’t that women need to change how they lead; it’s that our institutions reward toxicity and punish collaboration.
Until companies stop protecting bullies who hit their numbers, every diversity initiative is just window dressing.