Good morning! Bill fighting revenge porn passed by Congress, UPS to cut 20,000 jobs, and Fortune’s Nina Ajemian talks with former Microsoft exec Sabina Nawaz about how managers can overcome the pressures of leadership.
– Management 101. Managers in the workplace adopt a few identities, according to Sabina Nawaz, the ex-Microsoft exec and executive coach behind the new book You’re the Boss. There’s the flash, a leader who gets things done at warp speed in the name of efficiency; the straight-A student, a perfectionist with high standards; and the whack-a-mole, a boss who is always putting out fires. But one identity is more likely to hold women back in the workplace: the caretaker.
Caretaking can, of course, be healthy—but being too caring can often manifest in managers constantly picking up the slack for their employees and “rescuing” their team. This behavior hurts employees’ growth and often makes managers feel like they are being taken advantage of.
Men and women are equally likely to be caretaker-style managers. But that quality can manifest—and be perceived—in different ways. For men, this may look like being a superhero, jumping in when they notice their team is busy. Women, on the other hand, often take their team’s feelings into consideration, not wanting anyone to feel badly if they push too hard, Nawaz shares.
“In many ways, that’s great,” Nawaz says. “It’s that richness of emotional intelligence and that awareness of my impact on other people, which helps with all the other traps that we talk about.”
These qualities often become clear during a person’s first promotion to manager. LeanIn.org and McKinsey have termed that promotion the “broken rung” on the career ladder, when women often fall behind men in the workplace. But Nawaz has found that that time can be risky even for the women who do get promoted. The characteristics that led to their promotion can hurt them as managers. Often, for women, that’s being detail-oriented—an asset for an individual contributor, but an often unfairly misinterpreted signal to leadership that a manager is not a “strategic” thinker.
Through her coaching, Nawaz has heard from women who get that feedback when they are first promoted to manager. “I realize, ‘Oh, you’re plenty strategic. There’s nothing wrong with your strategic thinking,’” she says. “It’s some of that caretaking…and how you’re doing that that get[s] in the way.”
Nawaz, who was Microsoft’s senior director of HR, wrote this book after reflecting on how she changed after her boss left the company—and left Nawaz in charge of professional development for Microsoft’s 90,000 employees. Plus, with increased responsibility came increased visibility, as she was now working more directly with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer.
