~by Haley Lynn Gray~
There’s an enormous amount of focus on leadership in American business culture. Corporations run leadership programmes, leadership retreats and leadership pipelines. Every conference has a leadership track.
I think the word is vastly overused, and frequently abused. It has become a buzzword in exactly the way “cloud computing” did, and AI is doing now — a term that sounds substantial, gets attached to everything, and ends up meaning very little.
What leadership actually is
Let’s be clear about the boundaries, because most of what gets labelled leadership isn’t.
It isn’t managing a group of people — that’s management, and it’s a different skill. It isn’t project management. It isn’t innovation. Those are all valuable and none of them is the same thing.
Leadership is influencing others to follow your ideas. That’s it. It’s about being the instigator — the one who sets a direction and persuades people it’s worth going.
Which is why you can lead without managing anyone, and manage a large team without leading at all.
Why the inflation matters
When a word covers everything, it stops carrying information. “Leadership training” could mean learning to run a meeting, or learning to set a company’s direction, or a day of trust falls. Nobody can tell from the label.
It also lets organisations look as though they’re developing people while changing nothing. A leadership programme is much easier to announce than a change to who actually gets decisions, opportunities and authority.
If you run a business, the useful discipline is to say what you actually mean. Not “we need better leadership” but “decisions are taking three weeks because everything comes to me,” or “nobody knows what good looks like on this project.” Those are solvable. “Leadership” isn’t.
Being a woman changes how it’s received
Here’s the part I notice most, and it took me years to name.
Being female affects my style — of course it does. It also affects how people perceive that style, and what they expect from me, and those two things are not the same.
People frequently read me as maternal when I’m not being maternal at all. I’m being professional and kind.
I ask how someone is doing because I genuinely care how they’re doing. I check in on people. I notice when something’s going on with them and I follow up. That isn’t mothering anybody — it’s how you build a working relationship with a human being. Caring about the people around you and knowing what’s happening in their lives is simply part of leading them well.
But the same behaviour from a man is usually described differently. He’s engaged, or attentive, or a good manager of people. A woman doing it gets “nurturing,” and nurturing carries a quiet implication: warm, supportive, and not quite the person who makes the hard calls.
I have my own children, thank you. I’m not anyone’s mother at work.
What to do about it
Not to stop caring — that’s the part that works, and giving it up would make you a worse leader, not a more credible one.
Name the behaviour in professional terms. Not “I look after my team” but “I know what my people are working on and what’s blocking them.” Same thing, harder to file under maternal.
Pair warmth with the decision. The check-in and the difficult conversation, from the same person, in the same week. Warmth is only read as softness when it appears alone.
And correct it when it matters. “I’m not being soft about this — this is the standard” costs nothing and resets the frame.
The short version
Leadership is a real thing with a specific meaning: influencing people to follow your ideas. It isn’t management, it isn’t a programme, and it isn’t a word that should be attached to everything.
And if people read your professional care as mothering, that’s a fact about their assumptions rather than about your leadership. Keep doing it. Just describe it accurately.
