Collaborating
We find yet another important implication to be drawn from Gilligan’s work related to the differences among people in their way of connecting with other people—and particularly their orientation toward collaboration. If, as Carol Gilligan suggests, women have often been socialized in Western societies as contextual epistemologists (that is as people who tend to think and reason by considering specific issues within their specific setting or context) then it might also be the case that they have adopted a specific orientation toward interpersonal collaboration.
To reiterate, Carol Gilligan (1982) has observed that women tend to look at specific issues within the specific context surrounding the issue, whereas men (at least European/American White men) tend to look at specific issues in terms of abstract principles that are applied to understanding and resolving the issue. This would suggest that women tend to be influenced as leaders and team members by the context in which they are working and making decisions. This being the case, women might tend to be more effective than men in working in and leading in settings that are complex and volatile with regard to context. VUCA-Plus conditions might require that one moves beyond rigid, abstract reasoning. We can stick with the rules only when our world isn’t dancing beneath our feet (Bergquist, 2021a).
This also means that women are more likely than men to feel comfortable in working collaboratively—which is a much more complex environment in which to work than that of autonomous, isolated work. Furthermore, the sharing of information and the promotion of collective intelligence may be more important for many women then for men—given the value women place on identifying and analyzing the environment and context in which they are operating. This information is typically only available from multiple sources and validated only from multiple perspectives—thus motivating a collaborative orientation among women. Collaboration would seem to be of even greater value given the associated challenge of receiving and interpreting information that is VUCA-Plus saturated. Does this mean that many women are better equipped to handle mid-21st Century conditions than are many men?
Containing and Transforming Anxiety
We can expand our understanding of the role played by women in promoting collaboration by turning to the notion of a holding environment. Wilfred Bion (1995) identifies the role played by leaders in providing a “holding” environment for their followers. This connects with the original Object Relations model of the “holding” environment in psychotherapy and the psychodynamic proposal that parents often provide an environment in which they hold or contains the anxiety of their children. They hold and contain the anxiety until their child can handle the anxiety themselves or until their parent has transformed the anxiety into something that is manageable.
This holding function operates for the leader much like the parent. Effective leaders often provide an environment in which they hold or contains the anxiety of their followers for a period of time. They hold and contain the anxiety until the followers (individually and collectively) can handle the anxiety themselves or until the leader has transformed (catalyzed) the anxiety into something that is manageable, actionable or at least understandable (Bergquist, 2020). The organization’s culture often is a vehicle for this management of anxiety (Menzies Lyth, 1988: Bergquist and Brock, 2008)
