This week will end with National Women’s Day on Saturday and it is in keeping with this important celebration that I wish to introduce readers to Mary Parker Follett. If anyone has heard of her, I’ll be very surprised. But a modern business writer as well-known as Peter Drucker described her as “ the prophet of management” and his “guru”. Mary Parker was a social worker who lived in America and wrote books on management and leadership. She also lectured in business matters – at the London School of Economics, for example, where she was a teacher just before her death in 1933. This date will show you just how unusual it was for a woman to claim management expertise. Even in this far more enlightened age, most business books are written by men. In the first half of the twentieth century, a woman and business were seldom if ever associated. It is a tragedy in many ways that Mary Follett has been long forgotten without any of the tribute that she deserved for her radical views, views, by the way, which are very relevant and popular now – over 75 years later.

What struck me in reading some of her thoughts was that she was expressing in many ways fundamental differences between the leadership outlooks of men and women. For example, writing of power, very much a male tool in the management arena, she differentiated between what she called ‘power-over’ and ‘power-with’. She wrote: “It seems to me that whereas power usually means ‘power-over’, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of ‘power-with’, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not coercive power.” Therefore, “the aim of every form of organisation, should be not to share power, but to increase power, to seek the methods by which power can be increased in all.”

The true and inherent nature of women is not to seek power as a means of control, but to harness power in order to produce a more constructive outcome. Fathers control and discipline their offspring, especially their sons; mothers work hard to identify their strengths and to bring them into collective existence. Except for those women who deliberately try to emulate the male management and leadership model, it is this characteristic that is the greatest strength that women bring to the boardroom table and the office of the CEO. It is the somewhat better understanding of human aspiration and the great strength of acting together. “Unity,” wrote Ms Follett, “not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated or simply absorbed.”

Not only do we women provide a style of leadership that is rich with potential and strength, but we bring to it concerns that are fundamentally more significant than the result of Saturday’s rugby test or Bafana Bafana’s latest upset. I suspect that the reason lies in our innate motherhood, whether we have children or not. Everyone is someone’s child and for this reason we are sensitive to hopelessness, powerlessness and the oppression by many social forces of the time.

It is a difficult time for working people whose spending power has been so badly eroded, and whose attempts to forge comfortable lives for themselves and their families have run across many obstacles. If it is not the high price of fuel or food, it is the increased pressure at work in companies which are also feeling the pinch or the ever-present danger of HIV and AIDS. Employment as a relationship of trust was never more urgently required and for this a woman’s touch is often more successful for the reasons I have set out above.

Zinhle Sokhela - PCB President

This article appeared in the Edendale Eyethu on the 7 August 2008