All Women Leaders are Imperfect

Duh!  Everyone is imperfect.

I bet you can name 10 movies about damaged, highly successful male leaders: Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher), Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), etc. How many women do we see on screen as less-than-textbook leaders? Um, ones that win in the end? Well, there is Helen Mirren as an inflexible, unfeeling Queen Elizabeth II. Meryl Streep in Devil Wears Prada is certainly flawed, but well, she doesn’t really win in the end. There are not many life-like management styles in film for our female bosses, colleagues and lieutenants, mothers, daughters and nieces to emulate.

Go see the documentary 'Maiden' with every young woman you know. It provides an example of one authentic leadership style, not exclusively but especially for women. ‘Maiden’ tells the story of Tracy Edwards, a high school drop-out whose mother reacted to her plan to competitively sail around the world with an all-female crew with the paraphrased statement “You can do it if you really want, of course you have never finished anything you have ever started.”

Yet in the late 1980s, Tracy recruited a highly-qualified crew from a very small pool of candidates, formed them into a high-functioning team and raised millions in capital to buy and refit a yacht. Overcoming misogyny in a male-dominated sport is the predictable plot line. The unexpected narrative was how these women raced in the triennial Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race, now renamed the Volvo Ocean Race, with an unlikely 24-year-old high-school drop-out skipper that threw tantrums, who continually and publicly made mistakes and doubted herself before and during the race. Challenged for leadership, she fired her first mate and navigator days before the race. Interviews with her teammates are mixed with admiration for her tenacity, but also a great deal skepticism about her choices. She is asked repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to smile at the opening of the film. As journalists dubbed the ship a ‘tin full of tarts’ she at first refused to be labeled as a feminist leader. She could not fit into any pre-made mold. She is portrayed with all her multifaceted flaws as a skipper and as an activist.