Ready to unleash your Female Leadership Advantage as a freelancer? Or is The Divine Feminine your way to success in an On-Demand World? 

So, you are a freelancer (or contract worker as some call us). You are also possibly female. That’s good. Or, perhaps you are not female but actively channelling your female nature, traits and behaviours. Also good. Or you may be an old school male in search of some enlightenment — even better. 

We all sense, intuitively at least, that the rise of female potential, capability, and the more collaborative, respectful and open nature of working that seems to accompany it can only be a good thing. 

It is also worth noting though that there are already a number of shades of ‘female’ organisational behaviour and accompanying traits that are being organised and ordered into frameworks we can study and be inspired by.

A Tale of Two Approaches

On closer inspection, there seem to be two broad natures and approaches to what some see as a universal female ascendency in the workplace with many points in between. They both have vast depth and complexity in them if you care to dive in — but this should give you a flavour of them.

Female Leadership Advantage

The first — Female Leadership Advantage — is a rather hyper-functional framing, a rationalist Harvard Business Review-minded framing of the competitive advantage to be gained by embracing and adopting female leadership attributes and traits (and one would hope more of the women they inhabit) within any and all kinds of organisations leading to exceptional working practices, more vibrant and fairer cultures and representation and in some instances increased GDP! The majority of transformation think tanks and consultancies seem to agree.

Gender diversity is not just a social concern. Our new study suggests that it could also create a competitive edge to address the global challenges that corporations are going to face in the near future.

McKinsey, in their paper Female Leaderships Competitive Edge

This may be the more corporate big media mindset of female ascendency — but hey! what’s wrong with a little ‘Succession’ style powering up to get the world moving faster towards better?

Advocates and celebrators of Female Leadership Advantage? — the queen of social Arianna Huffington, and the likes of Karen Lynch powering CVS into a whole new role in US society.

But if that all feels quite far unreachable and too away from the more intimate virtual environment and working nature of your world, let’s see if the second chimes a little more. 

The Divine Feminine

The second — the Divine Feminine — as opposed to the historically Divine masculine workplace of old, seeks to draw the more spiritual, metaphysical and connected nature and lore of a more ancient female being and belief into the workplace to operate at multiple levels to create better.

Sarah Blakely famously decided to lead her company SPANX with “feminine principles” of intuition, empathy, kindness and vulnerability.

From MIT and the hard-edged tech world of the 90s, through setting up her NGO JUCCE,  shaping the New China Dream*, publishing articles like celebrating women’s moon cycles, to the publication of her book, Mesmerize the Media, Peggy Liu has been making her way in the world – and in doing so, using her Divine Feminine and Qi to aid and guide her.

In people like Liu we find an inspirational bridge between the US-aspected pilgrim-powered tech-obsessed puritan work ethic and culture of Everything Now – and the Chinese-aspected ancient, Taoist, Buddhic nuance, studied opacity and holistic sensibility of the Zen of When.

So, does finding more about the big picture strategic Female Leadership Advantage thing excite you? Might that inspire you in your day to day life as a freelancer?

Or does the Divine Feminine speak to you more, with its more intuitive and karmic nature and mind set?

There seems to be no set right or wrong in this — just a whole spectrum of variations between the two points — so perhaps do some more homework, right down the pieces that speak to you most, and feel most relevant to managing your opportunities and capabilities — and shape a Divine Feminine Advantage of your own.

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