You are a Female Leader, and Then What?
Author: Gabriela Azevedo Sansoni
Keywords: Female leadership, Professional development, Professional advancement, organizations
Recently I came across a very interesting piece: Start Your New Leadership Role with the End in Mind by Michael D. Watkins, PhD in Decision Sciences by Harvard and Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the IMD, Switzerland. I found it very inspiring and refreshing, because most of the time I get bombarded with articles and manuals about how to become a leader or to maintain this power position but it is never about when to stop, or how to make sure the next leader is prepared to replace you. There are also many resources out there that also try to guide employees and/or team players that are getting a new department head, CEO or boss. But who is instructing the leaders lost in transition?
Another interesting article I came across at Harvard Business Review was What’s Holding Women in Medicine Back from Leadership by Christina Mangurian, Eleni Linos, Urmimala Sarkar, Carolyn Rodriguez, and Reshma Jagsi, published in 2018. In this one a lot of interesting statistics about female leadership is shared. With this data we can clearly see that not all female leaders are followed by other female leaders, and that there is still significant disparity between the number of healthcare professionals that identify as women and the number of the women who are healthcare leaders.
For a good reason, a lot of manuals and toolkits on how to achieve and maintain a power position are about female leadership. I find it very compelling and necessary, of course. We need more female leadership and this is a long known problem. However, it is hard to find guidance about how to keep such roles in diverse hands, in a good intersectional feminist way. In my opinion, this can be achieved if we talk more about leadership transition, stepping down and mentoring future leaders.
In my small medical student cosmos, I have taken many leadership positions and I have learnt important lessons along the way. I realized that some projects, groups and initiatives would not outlive many leadership transitions and I was right about it. Due to my decision to do my 5th year of medical school abroad through the Erasmus Programme, I knew it was time for a transition in at least two of my projects: The Association of Women Surgeons University of Milan Chapter and InciSioN Italy.
I knew it was hard to keep leadership positions in Italy while living in Austria. I feared I wouldn`t be the leader I wanted to be. It was time to look for colleagues that could continue our ongoing projects, promote the group for first year students, build partnerships with faculty and other groups and apply for grants. Some of these things are extremely challenging to do while being abroad, especially in Italy which is a traditional country where face-to-face communication is more efficient than a ton of emails. My university is known for being extremely demanding. We have classes from 8:30 to 17:30 on most days, and need to find extra time to study and some of us also have to work. Therefore, without any surprise it was a big challenge for us to find colleagues that wanted to take a leading position in our groups as they would add around 10 hours weekly to their schedule without monetary remuneration.
This made me worried in many instances, was it my fault? Was I a bad leader? Did I have problems giving away a position of power? Eventually, from my two biggest projects, one has found a new president to lead the group and another one still has me as the chair while we cannot find a replacement. I consider it a partial victory and an absolute learning experience. Of course, I do realize that some challenges I faced wouldn't necessarily happen in the corporate world, being a leader out there is much more attractive and can even generate competition amongst many people. There are more funds and incentives for being a head of a department in a hospital than being a volunteer leader in an association, so everything needs context. Nevertheless, I tried to put together some of the things I could learn when faced with the leadership transition challenge and that will guide me in my future endeavors.
Some of these potentially helpful tips are:
Engage others in important decisions, in other words, don’t isolate yourself when you are a leader.
Seize your power by sharing it.
Learn how to delegate tasks from an early stage.
Be kind, ethical and thoughtful when dealing with all members of your organization and when planning new projects for your group.
Talk about your role as the chair/president/CEO to your peers. Maybe you can inspire some of them to pursue this position when you are gone, and hopefully you will be leaving your position in good hands.
Work on capacity building for your team.
Acknowledge your temporarity.
Maybe some of these tips can help future leaders or people who find themselves in situations of uncertainty revolving around leadership transition.
About the author: Gabriela is a final year medical student at the University of Milan. She spent last summer on a Neuropediatrics fellowship at the Pediatrics department of the Vienna General Hospital and is currently working on her final dissertation about Krabbe disease in Milan (Find her: LinkedIn)
