Excerpt from a YouTube interview where Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani discusses gender dynamics in the workplace, arguing that women often have a natural advantage in leadership due to greater emotional intuition and nurturing abilities learned through caregiving. She recounts experiences of being overlooked in meetings and frames leadership as primarily people-work where emotional attunement aids team performance and commitment.
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There have been cases where in a meeting, I would say an opinion and it's not heard, and then a man repeats it, and then this opinion is credited to the man. Again, how important is that? Normally, I don't talk about feminine or female, male gender inequality or equality or balance. I actually normally talk about business, about happiness, about personal growth. And I talk about that from the perspective of just one human being, not like a man or a woman. It just happened so that I was invited to speak at a big women's forum in Kazakhstan. And this topic is interesting. It was a very interesting experience for me. And when we planned this episode, it was very high on our gender. And somehow conversation moved actually from business, purely business, into female, male interaction. In the workplace, women tend to be more intuitive. They tend to be more emotionally plugged in because that's biologically necessary for us to raise children. So our intuition tends to be higher naturally, and we are more attuned to other people's emotions and feelings, right? Theoretically, women have advantage to be emotionally very mature. They have an advantage. Especially if you have a child, a little human being at home. You will learn so many things. I've learned patience with my children to the degree I've never learned it anywhere outside family environment. So when it comes to leadership, there are a lot of different styles. But one thing that really helps in leadership, because leadership is essentially about working with people. It's mostly people. If you can work with people, if you can nurture your people and get them to be the best versions of themselves and be committed to the goal that you all share, then logically, your team should be succeeding. Right? And in that aspect, we women have a natural advantage. We are attuned to other people's emotions. All these things are so good for leadership. You can always keep tabs on so many things. You're attuned to other people's feelings. I think we women could make much better leaders.
