协作Vs.统帅：女强人怎么干

    今年十月初，《财富》杂志（Fortune）举办了一年一度的“最具影响力商界女性峰会”（Most Powerful Women Summit）。会上，施乐公司（Xerox）CEO乌苏拉•伯恩斯用幽默风趣的发言赢得了听众们的掌声。许多人频频点头表示赞同。她坦言：“以前，要让我说‘我希望你做这个’，对我来说是个很大的难题。但等我习惯了之后，一切都变得更加容易。”

    所有高管都能正确处理好作为协作者和作为老板之间的关系，但伯恩斯的话却引起了很多女性高管的共鸣。与男性相比，女性领导者更具有包容性，更注重团队合作，这样的说法我们不知道听过多少遍了。哈佛商学院（Harvard Business School）教授罗莎贝斯•莫斯•坎特主要研究领导力与创新，她表示，可能许多女性经理人和冉冉升起的企业明星们确实具备这种特性，“但如果你想脱颖而出，决断力、指挥能力和责任感才是最重要的素质。”

    作为“高管梦之队”系列的一部分，过去几个月，《财富》杂志一直致力于研究高管之间日益普遍的合作趋势。例如，技术买方纷纷与卖方携手；销售与生产高管在规划和执行时也保持步调一致。但正如最具影响力商界女性峰会上发言的CEO们所说，有时候确实需要协作，但有时候则必须要下命令。杜邦公司（DuPont）CEO柯爱伦就表示：“我担任CEO的时候，正值全球银行业危机刚刚爆发。人们并不希望你和他们手挽手一起跑，而是期望你下命令，告诉他们该做什么。这确实会令人身心疲惫。当时的感受是，在我已经厌烦了反复强调同一件事情的时候，他们才刚刚明白过来。”

    当然，协作性与领导力两者并不是相互排斥的关系。实际上，高层管理者有很大的责任来减少组织的封闭性，使其更有助于接纳不同的部门和不同的员工。IBM公司CEO吉尼•罗曼提详细介绍了公司的一个项目。项目的目的是通过召集具有不同技能和背景的团队，共同解决全球性的问题。她说：“我认为，现在是大融合的时代。”但她强调，包容性不仅仅是指增加女性的比重。“可能是指包容地理上的差异、个人方法、风格、学习方式，以及你希望做出贡献的方式，甚至年龄等等。总之，范围非常广泛。”

    之后，本着合作的精神，她又向那些希望在自己公司复制IBM项目的观众详细介绍了项目的细节。

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    The comment drew laughs, then applause and sympathetic nods from the audience. "I used to have really big difficulty in saying, 'I want you to do this,' " Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox (XRX), confessed at Fortune'sannual Most Powerful Women Summit in early October. "When I got used to that, everything got easier."

    All executives walk a fine line between being collaborative and being the boss, but Burns' quip resonates especially with women executives. How many times have we heard that female leaders are more inclusive and more team oriented than their male counterparts? That characterization may be true for many women managers and rising corporate stars, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in leadership and innovation. "But at a certain point, if you are going to emerge, decisiveness, direction, and accountability matter."

    As part of its ongoing Executive Dream Team series,Fortune has spent the past several months exploring the increasingly cooperative nature of executive life: These days, for example, technology buyers are pairing up with marketers; sales and manufacturing officers are planning and executing in lockstep. But as some of the CEOs who spoke at the MPW Summit noted, there's a time for collaboration -- and a time to issue edicts. "I started my job right at the beginning of the global banking crisis," Ellen Kullman, CEO of DuPont (DD), said. "People didn't want to run with you -- they wanted you to tell them what to do. And that's exhausting. I realized that by the time I was really tired of saying the same thing, they were just getting it."

    Collaboration and leadership aren't mutually exclusive, of course. In fact, top management has a big mandate to make organizations less "siloed" and more conducive to work among different units and different people. Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM (IBM), spoke at length about a company program that aims to solve global problems by putting together teams with different skills and backgrounds. "I think this is a time of great inclusion," she said. But inclusiveness today isn't just about adding women to the mix, she noted. "It's geographic, it's approach, it's your style, it's your way of learning, the way you want to contribute, it's your age. It is really broad."

    And then, in the spirit of collaboration, she offered to share the details of the program with some of the attendees who wanted to try to replicate it in their own organizations.