Post 5 – Article Assignment

‘How Men Can Be More Inclusive Leaders’ Summary

Today’s workplaces are changing. Such change is even more remarkable in the global pandemic situation. In the twentieth century,  top-down, and hierarchical approaches were considered as a effective leadership, and leaders often embraced the authoritarian leadership. But now, organizations are more focused on what they do, and their members. In the twentieth century, employees were predominantly male and were consisted of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. On the contrary, the talent pool is much more diverse today, dominated by Millennials and rising Gen Zers. They prefer collaboration, healthy work-life integration, purpose-driven employment, and so on, and these demand a new kind of leadership.

Furthermore, leaders are also required to comprehend the tremendous economic opportunity, to achieve gender equity in the new world of work. Women have secured more college degrees than men since 1981. And although the Covid-19 crisis forced women out of the workforce, they are still the majority of the college-educated talent pool. They have outstanding skills, abilities, and competence, and failing to attract them is missing a huge opportunity. So male leaders need to pursue allyship with women, such as collaborative personal relationships. It was viewed as ‘nice’ to include women in the past, but now male leaders know that doing so is essential.

The Relation with Written Business Communicataion

The article above suggests that male leaders now need a new kind of leadership, considering the growing number of female employees. This sounds true, but since not only males but also females are managing companies today, it seems that both men and women need such a leadership to maintain good relationships with workers. And in written business communications, using bias-free languages can help the members inside an organization doing so. Internal request letters or claim-denying letters are written frequently, and it is important to make neither the leader nor the employees feel frustrated. For example the phrase ‘executives and their wives’ implies that the executives are male, and might offend female executives. Also, words like ‘female doctor’, ‘woman attorney’, or ‘cleaning woman’ should be replaced with ‘doctor’, ‘attorney’, and ‘cleaner’, since they are based on people’s thought that ‘such jobs are mainly for men’. Because of these reasons, leaders and employees need to avoid using words like ‘man’ or ‘woman’, ‘male’ or ‘female’.

References

Smith, D.G., Johnson, W.B., and Stormberg, L. (2021, May 12). How Men Can Be More Inclusive Leaders. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-men-can-be-more-inclusive-leaders#

Guffey, M. E., Du-Babcock, B., and Loewy, D. (2016). Essentials of Business Communication. Cengage Learning.

Hyun, J. H. (n.d.). Introduction to Business Management. Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.