Page 189 - Free Yourself From

172 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

Guideline 10: Be a Good Facilitator

Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “We can’t solve problems by
using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
The best companies today appreciate this idea more than ever and
understand that diverse backgrounds and points of view are most
likely to generate new thinking. Therefore, one of the most valuable
things you can do as a leader is to facilitate communication between
the many different people on your team and across your company.
Being able to embrace and connect the multitude of different
dots is something that women tend to do well. Male thinking typi-
cally is methodical and linear and goes sequentially from one pos-
sibility to another. In contrast, women tend toward more integrated
thinking—they can hold seemingly different ideas in their heads
simultaneously and draw a correlation between them, and they can
go back and forth between ideas more easily. You can see how valu-
able the latter skill would be in a diverse workplace where a meet-
ing can generate all kinds of ideas and the team needs a leader who
can coalesce them.

Learning to Connect the Ideas

At IBM, Anne Altman has made a conscious effort to be good at
“connecting the ideas.” Anne explains, “In our meetings, nobody
speaks twice until everyone has spoken. This way we hear all voices,
and it balances the extroverts and the introverts.” She says that get-
ting all views, including opposing ones, onto the table allows the
group to mold them into a collective solution that’s usually richer
than any one idea would have been on its own. “My view is that
meetings are not just to share information, but to see and learn from
others,” she says.
Anne concedes that keeping a handle on this type of meeting isn’t
always easy. People can have competing views and occasionally she has