Collaboration

There is power in collaboration. The masculine tends to be more, ‘I did this. I did that.’ In general, women tend to talk more in the ‘we’ because we realise that the power of the team is diversity, and the best teams have different kinds of skills and thought leadership at the table. If we were all the same, companies would not be able to evolve, and would remain blinded by the warrior at the helm.

Great work doesn’t happen in silos. If you want to drive innovation, you need to connect and collaborate with others who have different skill sets, experiences and perspectives.

We all have both feminine and masculine traits. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. In each of us one may be more dominant than the other.

In a man’s world, where success is synonymous with hard-nosed-don’t-take-no-BS-from-anyone drive and arrogance, it can be easy to dismiss our feminine traits. To do so deprives us of becoming a complete person, causing us to alienate our clients and staff. By showing our feminine traits of thoughtfulness, compassion, vulnerability, intuition and patience, we make ourselves and our business more approachable and open to new possibilities.

You don’t need technology and science to create breakthrough innovations. You just have to be tuned in enough and hold a big enough vision to see a gap in the marketplace and the determination to keep iterating until you find a winning solution.