Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Men

Thinking menEllen recent­ly wrote a nice post titled Top Ten Tips for Men Who Lead Women, and asked for vol­un­teers to offer a com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tive. I hope you enjoy!

  1. We men know we are hard to lead, and that can be stress­ful for you and for us. You should know that stress affects short term mem­o­ry, so it is impor­tant to be able to man­age stress well, with med­i­ta­tion or oth­er meth­ods. Check here your lev­el of stress to see how much this point applies to you. Please remem­ber, laugh­ing is good for your brain.
  2. Don’t think too much-we don’t. If we do, we try to find ways to self-talk us out of that uncom­fort­able state.
  3. Please remem­ber our hum­ble ori­gins. We are tool-using ani­mals, which is why we like play­ing with all kinds of toys, from a car to that blackberry.
  4. When we are stub­born, you are enti­tled to remind us that even apes can learn-if you help us see the point. Show us that change is pos­si­ble at any age. Believe it or not, we can lis­ten.
  5. Espe­cial­ly if we can find com­mon ground: what about chat­ting about sports psy­chol­o­gy?.
  6. Please moti­vate us to lis­ten and be open mind­ed to learn with wise words. If that does­n’t work, please per­se­vere with nice words. Please don’t ever say that we are worse than pink dol­phins-if we feel attacked, we’ll just disengage.
  7. Some­times we don’t coop­er­ate enough?. Please give us time for our brains to ful­ly evolve, we have been try­ing for a while!
  8. You can help us grow. For the next lead­er­ship work­shop, buy us copies of the Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain book. You may think we don’t need this… but at our core we real­ly want to get bet­ter at Grat­i­tude and Altru­ism. We want to be able to play with the ulti­mate toy: our genes!
  9. If that book is sold out, we could also ben­e­fit from read­ing Dama­sio’s Descartes Error and dis­cov­er how emo­tions are impor­tant for good deci­sion-mak­ing. Or help us improve our abil­i­ty to read emo­tion­al mes­sages. As long as we believe we can some­how ben­e­fit from it, we’ll try!
  10. If you lead some­one with Bill Gates-like Frontal Lobes, con­grat­u­late him for his brain. If you don’t, encour­age him to fol­low track. Please be patient

Now, any tak­ers for Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Women or Men Who Lead Men?

4 Comments

  1. Robyn on August 3, 2007 at 1:17

    Alvaro, you brought sev­er­al chuck­les as I read your response to Ellen. Inter­est­ing­ly, I was­n’t aware that men don’t like to think much. Hmmm… that stirred my den­drites [I’m think­ing of a response!]



  2. Alvaro on August 3, 2007 at 6:14

    Hi Robyn,

    Yes, lat­est neu­ro­science has shown that adult neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis and neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty only hap­pens in women, which may con­tribute to explain that point :-)

    (for new read­ers: that is a joke!-both gen­ders can ben­e­fit from the excit­ing emerg­ing research around how our brains can lit­er­al­ly grow)



  3. Patricia on August 10, 2007 at 7:28

    As a woman leader, I think that there are is no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between lead­ing men and lead­ing women. 

    I pay atten­tion to indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences among peo­ple. I try to moti­vate them in the way they like. For exam­ple, many peo­ple are moti­vat­ed by mon­ey; oth­ers pre­fer praise in pub­lic, oth­ers crave sim­ple thanks and con­grat­u­la­tions in private.

    In short: Reward peo­ple in the ways they pre­fer to moti­vate bet­ter performance.



  4. Alvaro on August 10, 2007 at 1:49

    Dear Patri­cia,

    I agree with you in that there is much more intra-gen­der vari­abil­i­ty that the sim­plis­tic men vs. women par­a­digm. That is why I adopt­ed a fun­ny tone. 

    And you are doing the right thing: pay­ing atten­tion to wwhat moti­vates each indi­vid­ual. Thanks for the tips



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SHARPBRAINS is an independent think-tank and consulting firm providing services at the frontier of applied neuroscience, health, leadership and innovation.
SHARPBRAINS es un think-tank y consultoría independiente proporcionando servicios para la neurociencia aplicada, salud, liderazgo e innovación.

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