MISS MANNERS AND THE MASK OF COMMAND: I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership. Here are some thoughts. They’re organized around questions of gender, but that’s just because that’s one of the things that initially prompted me to think about this stuff. The gender aspect is really not as important as it appears in what follows. I would fix that, and de-emphasize it, but I don’t have the time….

Much of how leadership is practiced is about what you notice. When I had to take on a leadership position unexpectedly, I found that my perspective shifted radically. I had to see the big picture. I had to watch an entire scene, an entire organization, not simply the parts that happened to interest me. In this respect, leadership is a realm in which the unchosen starts to crowd out the chosen. You have far more ability to shape an institution you lead, but if you’re leading responsibly, you have far less ability to choose what or whom you focus on. You have to notice more things, and different things.

One of the things you have to notice is personal relationships. Leadership requires a high degree of intuitive grasp of how different people think, how they react, how they want, and how they try to get what they want. So at first you might think that leadership would be especially suited to women’s talents, since women tend to be more attuned to these aspects of psychology and relationship. (Insert your own pet theory about whether this is the result of biology or patriarchy or I don’t care what-all. That’s not the point right now.)

But in fact, I’ve found that women are less drawn to leadership and often (whether they’re actually leading an organization or not) have a harder time thinking in the terms that leadership requires. In what I’ve seen, there are two reasons this happens: a) Women get too tangled up in the relationships, and lose the outward, goal-directed focus that’s the whole point of leading in the first place–what you’re leading people toward.

b) Women are less likely to understand “the mask of command”–the way in which leadership requires you to play a role. You’re not faking anything, or lying. But you’re guarding yourself and attempting to react in ways that serve the purpose of your institution, rather than (as comes naturally to us) reacting in ways that serve your own needs first. Because you’re trying to inspire people on a personal level, you have to be up-front and personally available to them, but you also have to keep a tight lid on the parts of your personality that hinder your leadership (temper, say, or difficulty working with a particular person). I’ve had women get very upset with me because they thought I wasn’t being authentic with them–they were mad, basically, because they thought (and said) that I was responding to them out of my role as leader rather than “as a person.”

But to me there was no such separation. My role as leader wasn’t a costume I was wearing. It was a responsibility that I needed to infuse fully with my own personality while infusing my personality with it. It didn’t even feel much like a mask–more like a stance. (A fighting stance, I guess.) If a mask, then a mask that melts partway into the skin. Responding to these women “as a person” meant responding as myself, and one of the important things about me, at that time, was precisely my role.

I don’t want to make the gender point especially strongly, although I see it’s been the focus of the preceding paragraphs. The gender question is really just the spur that prompted me to notice these things about leadership and two differing views of authenticity (role as falsehood vs. role as stance). I’ve seen women both wear and react to the mask of command with perfect understanding, and I’ve seen men be just as unreasonable in their demands for this pseudo-authenticity (authenticity as displaying the parts of yourself that you have excellent reasons for concealing at that moment!) and have just as hard a time negotiating the difference between who you think you are and who you have to convince others that you are in order to lead. I do think more women have trouble with this stuff than men, but really, it’s just a shifted-bell-curve thing.

Anyway, I wish I could hand these demanders of authenticity a copy of any book by Miss Manners. Miss M knows full well that not every inclination of the “authentic” self is fit for public consumption. Leadership, like manners, pushes us to consider other people and their needs rather than simply expressing our own.