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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Powerful Women: Servant Leadership: The Unintended Benefits of Taking a Back Seat

Powerful Women: Servant Leadership: The Unintended Benefits of Taking a Back Seat

Servant Leadership: The Unintended Benefits of Taking a Back Seat

In one of those searing moments in life, where every spoken word is remembered in THX and every blink of the eye in HD, someone I cared about told me that even though I was a leader, I took a back seat to social situations. This was clearly not a compliment; rather, it was reason number two that led him to decide that we should no longer date. Aside from the surreal experience of the entire summative and trivial assessment of my value as a potential significant other, the dissonance of that comment struck and stayed with me.

I went home, took out my Myers-Briggs ENTJ personality manual, and reread that I was among one percent of women that should consider being a CEO. I checked for indicators that this personality should also be the center of social situations and found nothing. Of course, he was accusing me of not being a charismatic leader. Clearly, he preferred that I charm groups of people into