The Working Week 29: Michelle Brailsford on corporate women
As we all know, women think differently to men. And in the workplace, a quiet revolution is taking place as female thinking in the form of lateral and collaborative approaches to problem solving quietly start to replace traditional “male” work practices at all levels of corporate life.
That’s the starting point for this week’s Working Week, in which Wayne talks to Michelle Brailsford, a founding partner at at Jupiter Consulting Group, a boutique learning & development consultancy dedicated to adding life back into work.
As Michelle explains, the sort of skills associated with female right brain thinking - intuition, creativity and the ability to collaborate - are becoming as important in the business world as the traditional left brain, rational approaches usually adopted by their male colleagues.
And as women becoming more important in the global marketplace not just as workers, but also as consumers, entrepreneurs, managers and investors, this process of feminisation will only accelerate.
Michelle has also written a new piece for Management-Issues that should be required reading for any women hoping to climb the career ladder - The rules of the game for corporate women.
As she explains to Wayne, many women struggle with playing the corporate game because they have never been taught the rules. Yet they possess all the skills they need to succeed in the political arena and make a real impact at the top of their organizations without having to become a man in a skirt.
