Culture, Gender, Leadership and
the Year-2000 Problem Mark A.
Frautschi, Ph.D. Abstract An unacceptably large number of businesses, government agencies and other organizations worldwide are failing to meet the minimal requirements for the Year-2000 compliance, validation, verification and contingency planning for their most critical business systems and processes. Prior to a series of critical dates (of which 1 January 2000 is most prominent), these systems must be assessed, repaired and tested. Otherwise, the existence of these institutions is threatened. A hypothesis is offered. The Year-2000 problem confronts and challenges male-associated leadership characteristics significantly more severely than female-associated leadership characteristics. This has resulted in a vacuum of upper leadership that is responsible for the present failure to adequately address the issue. Further, female-associated leadership characteristics are critical for addressing the unprecedented, unpredictable, distributed and interrelated nature of this issue. Gender-associated differences in leadership characteristics are correlated with differences in the ability to produce results in life. This result generating ability, which may be called a winning formula, develops before adulthood, in response to one or more confronting events. Women and men have, on balance, somewhat different ways to produce results in work and life. Men succeed through their ability to identify, focus on and solve problems. Women succeed through their ability to identify and cultivate relationships. The Year-2000 problem, also known as Y2k, is global and systemic. The ultimate impact and extent of the technical failures is unknown. It has emerged that purely technological fixes are out of reach due to the large number and diversity of systems that must be addressed, rather than to any inherently technical barriers. The inability to apply a purely technical fix leaves men with one key to success in a disabled state. Men tend to avoid talking about this condition with others or thinking about it themselves. The result is denial or other absence of leadership on several levels and fronts. Where leadership is exercised, it is often late and reactive in nature. This article will offer possible characteristics of male and female leadership styles, connect these with functional and dysfunctional leadership in the context of Y2k and speculate as to some of the opportunities for new leadership through the Y2k time frame and beyond. Request The author asks the reader's permission to use gender-stereotypic shorthand, to use "women" and "men" or "male" and "female" to refer to characteristics that are more often associated with a particular gender then not. This is not a reflection of actual life, where almost everyone will be able to identify some aspects of the 'other' gender in themselves, however it may serve to highlight gender associated differences in leadership effectiveness presenced by the Year-2000 problem. Introduction Human beings have the ability to produce results. One's approach to accomplishing results may be called a "winning strategy" or "winning formula." [1-3]. What is its origin? One of the essential ontological characteristics of a winning strategy is that it is formed, usually in several stages, at a relatively early age and in general is complete by the onset of adulthood. It arises in the presence of a 'failure to be' (or a failure to do or to have) that confronts the developing individual. For example, the daughter that failed to be as attractive as her older sister, she might compensate by choosing to 'be smart' and live her life in accordance from that point forward. This choice may have profound implications in later life. She develops a number of skills, attitudes, and practices and in many cases a career, all associated with and reinforcing the choice made as a child. She also avoids the practices of the sort of person that she decided that she was not - for example becoming invested in wearing fashionable clothes. A portion of a person's identity, their sense of self, lies in the way he or she produces results. This relationship is both natural and functional. It serves to promote the survival of the individual, not only as a living organism, but also as an identity. (For the identity to survive, the organism must also survive, so it is arguable that the existence of winning formulas in humans has a history comparable with that of intelligence - also a survival enhancement.) Consider the experience of a person in circumstances that overwhelm their winning formula, a situation that prevents them from winning in the ways to which they have become accustomed, indeed in ways through which they have come to know themselves. One possible outcome is that the individual is returned, for a time, to their original failure to be. They may respond not as an adult, but as a younger person or a child. They may lose that sense of self, of identity, that has carried them successfully through life. They may withdraw in one of a number of ways including denial. [4] Consider such an experience a type of ego-death. The Year-2000 problem [5] contains a number of confronting possibilities. It challenges any winning formula. A hypothesis is presented where the unsolvable (from a purely technical standpoint) nature of the Year-2000 problem presents a significantly greater challenge to male-associated winning formulas than to those associated with females. Since organizational and technical leadership continues to be disproportionately male, Y2k presents an unprecedented challenge to technocrats [6]. It is an equally unprecedented opportunity for new models of leadership; the formation of new partnerships and for underrepresented groups to contribute at all levels, including the highest. The Year-2000 problem confronts and challenges male-associated leadership characteristics significantly more severely than female-associated leadership characteristics. This has resulted in a vacuum of upper leadership that is responsible for the present failure to adequately address the issue. Further, female-associated leadership characteristics are critical for addressing the unprecedented, unpredictable, distributed and interrelated nature of this issue. Gender-associated differences in leadership characteristics are correlated with differences in the ability to produce results in life. This result generating ability, which may be called a winning formula, develops before adulthood, in response to one or more confronting events. Discussion What is the nature of the impact of the Year-2000 Problem on female and male models of leadership? Suppose that women and men have different methods to producing results in life. That is, in the world of work, at home and at play, women and men are somewhat different in how they win. Candidates for gender-associated elements of winning strategies are listed below: Female Associated Winning Strategies: • Ability to identify
relationships and dependencies Male Associated Winning Strategies: • Ability to focus,
compartmentalize Female Associated Leadership Traits: • A willingness to lead while
being publicly vulnerable Male Associated Leadership Traits: • A willingness to lead from past
experience and qualifications In addition to these differences of winning strategies and leadership traits, there are differences in communication between women and men. [9,11-13]. For example, men may take a woman's desire to be simply heard (and nothing more) as a request for assistance or for some solution to a problem, leading to frustration for both parties. [14]. Background Somewhere between one third and half of Year-2000 project leaders in U.S. Fortune 500 corporations are female, in contrast to the overall representation of women in upper management of approximately five percent. [15] Overall, women comprise about one forth of the professional IT workforce. [16] In all likelihood, many of these Y2k project leaders are self-selected. However, there may also be some women who were relegated to this assignment by overt, covert or unconscious sexism or prejudice. [17] Before the mid-1990s, the Year-2000 problem was a decidedly "dead-end" project in the minds of most businesspeople that were aware of it. It may have had some of the following characteristics for the managers who considered taking it on: Attractiveness of Y2k Project Management Positions Pre-1997: • There will be no
return on the investment for the company The Glass Ceiling Today many of these Y2k project leaders hold the future of their organizations in the palms of their hands. They are moving from middle to senior management. If there are large differences in the outcomes of y2k programs, these are likely to become widely publicized beginning in 1999 as more systems that 'look ahead' reach their event horizons and fail. This may result in the advancement of the leaders of successful Y2k programs and move more women into higher levels of organizations. Will this be viewed as a fundamental irony by historians of the transmillennial period; that sexism was a key in the placement of large numbers of female leaders into positions where their contributions were visible and impossible to ignore? The fact that Y2k brings a definite performance measure that cannot be ignored may be what solidly anchors the contributions of these Y2k managers in the social mindset and allows more women access to upper management. Could a parallel be drawn with racial and ethnic integration of professional sports? Society realized that to have the best games, the best players must participate, and that meant all the best players. This is not the first time that a vacuum of leadership (whether identified before the fact or not) became an opportunity for an underrepresented group. For example, according to one account of five motion-picture studio executives [18] Jews had been historically absent from the highest levels of management in large American corporations. The rise of the motion-picture industry was based on a technological paradigm-shift, a technology with an uncertain future and without an established hierarchy. Jews were among the first to seize this opportunity to join the upper echelons of management and ownership and founded several of the first motion-picture studios. Culture and Leadership The American culture (including the press and political associations) has historically shown a low tolerance for vulnerability and uncertainty in its leaders. The political 'flip-flop' television advertisement is an example of how a person can be denigrated for appearing to be uncertain. Alternating, photographically left-right reversed images of the incumbent candidate are presented with alternating quotations that appear to support contradictory positions about a particular issue. Vulnerability is generally displayed voluntarily only after a leader has accepted some form of defeat, whether losing a campaign, acknowledging a scandal, or resigning from office. These are not day-to-day occurrences. The unknowable dimensions and potentially disastrous nature of the Year-2000 problem seem to require willingness for leaders to be comfortable with their own vulnerability and lack of clarity or certainty. Otherwise, they run the risk of losing credibility through their absent authenticity. The distributed, grass roots nature of the problem also requires leaders willing to accept these new requirements and willing to provide that same leadership locally in their communities, places of work and worship and with their extended families. It also requires that the population of followers needs to accept a different model of leadership. The paradigm of leaders and followers may soon give way to the model of leaders causing leadership in others. We live in a culture that has a degree of addiction to predictability and certainty. Our unwillingness to go 'cold turkey' on certainty is one of the greatest barriers to our leaders seeing a way to lead us into the next millennium. Without permission to lead with a degree of uncertainty and vulnerability, we are not likely to have leaders come forth. It's just not safe in a culture where we assassinate the character of leaders for these same vulnerabilities and uncertainties. Summary and Conclusions The Year-2000 problem poses challenges that extend from the personal to the social core. There are an abundance of un- and under-managed risks to key business, government and societal processes upon which citizens depend. This paper has offered the hypothesis that these challenges stem, in part, from an absence of leadership on many levels and that one element of this lapse is the male gender. The Year-2000 problem appears to confront each gender somewhat differently. This stems, in part, from underlying differences in how each produces results. These are reinforced by cultural norms. The unprecedented, widespread nature of the technical risks coupled with the absence of a purely technical solution is challenging to the typical male set of winning strategies. Women, with their ability to identify and build relationships are well suited as leaders in the rapidly evolving, uncertain environment of Y2k. Perhaps this explains why women remain as leaders of the majority of large, succeeding (none have succeeded as yet; the ultimate performance measures will come after 1/1/2000 when we will know whether they succeed or not) Year-2000 projects in the private sector. Among the leadership practices that they display are an ability to lead with a measure of public vulnerability and lead in the absence of complete knowledge or predictability regarding the nature of the technical failures or the societal response. It has not been the purpose of this paper to place this hypothesis on rigorous scholarly footing or to disprove it. That work will come in the new century, after the recovery period. Instead, a plausibility argument is offered. Citizens and leaders should examine the effectiveness of leadership and incorporate some of the aspects of successful Y2k leaders. In addition, this is a call for leadership to come to the fore from previously underrepresented ranks, not only women, but also other populations, in particular, those who may count themselves among the led. This interpretation is also offered as an opportunity for compassion and empathy in encouraging and supporting leaders as they confront the Y2k challenges. It may be taken as a cautionary tale. Criticizing leaders for their failures in the face of these enormous challenges may be particularly ineffective with men. It is not a call for leaders to reengineer their leadership style. Rather it is a call to allow the emergence of leadership characteristics that may already be present to be more fully developed and expressed. Female associated leadership traits as well as female leaders may constitute one of the key characteristics of society successfully meeting its Year-2000 challenge. These may remain as part of the legacy of new paradigms for leadership that emerge thereafter. Acknowledgements Teresa Bennett was the first to point out to the author that she did not go "numb" upon considering the widespread implications of Year-2000 risks. This provided an early clue that there might be gender-associated differences in internalizing the implications of Y2k with implications for leadership. The Y2k work of Ina Kamenz of Marriott International, Liz McInerney of Fidelity Investments, Carol Teasley of Fannie Mae Corporation and Suzette Mullooly of Alliant Energy provided early indications in the development of this hypothesis. Jon Huntress, Phil Simshauser, Douglass Carmichael and Suzanne Taylor provided useful and stimulating discussion and correspondence and anecdotal support. About the Author Mark Frautschi lives in Silver Spring, MD. He is an experimental elementary particle physicist by training. His interest in the effectiveness of large scientific and technical organizations provided an entry point to study the Year-2000 problem. One result was a study of the embedded systems problem [1]. Another was the shared realization that the social impact of Y2k might be the determining, if not dominant, factor in the overall outcome of Y2k. The gender and cultural components began to figure in his thinking on this issue. He enjoys photography, film and music. A biographical sketch and associated information may be found at http://www.tmn.com/~frautsch/. Comments for the author may be directed to frautsch @ tmn.com. 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