A number of female leadership commentators have lately been arguing that women are better leaders than men. Their argument is that women are more collaborative than men who are essentially competitive. They hope to influence large corporations to promote more women to senior executive roles. They are no doubt onto something because collaboration is certainly vital for success in business today. As if complexity were not enough, we are now in a knowledge-driven era where people want to have their say, not just be told what to do. Organizations have many more vocal stakeholders telling them how to behave – government, environmental lobbyists, shareholders, customers, employee groups, etc. This calls for leaders with better relationship building skills. The ability to collaborate and foster joint ownership is now at a premium. Then there is the greater need to nurture talent. It is not that men can't do these things, but that such skills are more feminine than masculine.

Of course there are collaborative men and competitive women in leadership roles, but this is why the discussion needs to be framed around masculine and feminine traits rather than whether men or women should be in senior executive jobs. Some women have masculine traits and succeed through a balance of feminine relationship building and a masculine competitive streak.  Still, many women shun the executive suite because they don’t want to be so unfeminine, so competitive and tough-minded. In any case, it is clear that the cultures of many organizations are becoming more feminine. All the talk about cultivating better team work and showing more consideration for employees shows that organizational cultures are becoming increasingly feminine regardless of the number or women in top positions.

But there is an important point that this debate is overlooking. The argument that women might be better leaders than men focuses exclusively on what happens within organizations, how people work together. But what about the competitive environment that private sector businesses operate in? To beat competitors, leaders need to foster a strong competitive streak throughout the business and this calls for an unquenchable thirst to win. CEO’s need to keep a constant eye on their competitors and search continuously for new ways to outflank them. The public sector is also under pressure to offer better value for money, but they do not have competitors for the most part. Compare how you would behave as a leader if you were taking a group of boy scouts on a field trip versus coaching a high school sports team. In the latter case you need to foster a very strong competitive streak in all your players.

What this means is that we cannot dispense with the masculine competitive drive if we expect to succeed in a modern business arena. The inference then is that we need to strike a balance between feminine collaborativeness and masculine competitiveness. Male (or female) leaders who are overly masculine need to learn how to channel their competitive urges externally and how to be more collaborative internally. This means moving from being an individual goal scorer to being a coach, hence winning through others rather than on your own merit. “Goal scorers” in business feel a compulsion to offer their own solutions to issues rather than draw solutions out of others with stimulating questions. The masculine tendency is to identify with the role of solution-generator, someone who uses analytical, rational skills to develop better answers to tough questions than anyone else and to be self-reliant in doing so. The drive to win is essential; it just needs to be externally focused.

The bottom line is that this issue is more about organizational culture than it is about the relative numbers of men and women in senior executive jobs. With cultures that are excessively masculine, the drive to win can be self-defeating. In sports, it is not a problem because collaboration is not as complex as it is in a large, diverse and geographically dispersed organization. Unlike sports teams, complex organizations have numerous, very different functions, units and subcultures. All of this makes collaboration more challenging. Producing a complex product requiring hundreds of diverse inputs calls for a much higher level of collaboration than simply scoring a goal in sports.

Collaborative executives need to stimulate knowledge workers to think more creatively and meld diverse inputs into a coherent whole using sharply honed facilitation and collaboration skills. Overly competitive cultures are fine if the only task is to execute fast and efficiently. But where you need to foster creative thinking, too much pressure can be counterproductive. So, the challenge is to create cultures that combine the best of our competitive instincts with our ability to foster collaboration. Women might be better leaders than men in the public sector but we need more androgynous leaders in business or, failing that, a good mixture of men and women at the top.