There’s a difference between (1) matching skills together, leveraging work efforts toward successful completion of a task, and (2) that other experience where women expect “someone” to help them in the home or in their business affairs.

The first situation involves leverage where two come together to make it easier to accomplish an objective. The second situation, in a home or in a relationship, is where the goal is dependency, co-dependency or “do this for me to make my life easier, to make me happy or to make the world a better place.”

In the Grameen Bank microfinance model, leverage is brought down to the individual and personal level. Each woman who is a member of a financing circle shares responsibility. It’s not simply the bonding or networking of the women villagers. It is also the mental and emotional leverage applied. The women in the circle expect all of the women to carry their share: each woman must come up with a realistic business model to improve her own financial self-sufficiency. If each woman does not come up with her own option, the others will not do it for her. The others in the group also will not support a lame-brain idea for a loan. They will not co-sign to show support unless she herself demonstrates an ability to repay the loan from her viable business idea.

Men are better at building effective leveraged teams, today, only because they’ve been practicing it much longer than women. Team building is a learnable skill. But, learn it we must.

Business cases teach the benefits of team building to leverage diverse skills in the creation of complex infrastructures, networks and solutions to difficult problems. Men still choose to go to business schools at twice the rate of enrollment as women: men represent 67% of current business class enrollment, women represent 33%. Once there, women have a relatively small inventory of business cases about women in key leadership roles.

Women represent barely 25% of the total tenured faculty at business schools, and only a few of these women teach women how to leverage business skills into successful teams.

Women too often overlook the skills, resources and competencies already available to them in the marketplace.

A recent Stanford University Business School newsletter mentioned that a handful of women students decided to “write their own” business cases. We wonder how many of those graduates had even examined the body of knowledge already available to them at the host of 200 plus business case studies on women in business at Harvard Business School. (Over 50 of them were written by Dr. Myra M. Hart, alone.)

Women too often simply relocate the dependencies they learned in the home setting to another form of dependency in the business setting. “Help me clean; help me cook; help me do the laundry, raise the children, do the finances” becomes “mentor me, teach me, promote me, make it easy for me” in the workplace.

When women bring the drudgery part of home or life into the workplace, they infect it with dependency that even women cannot abide at the extreme. Women “opt out” when work begins to look like the boring parts of their lives at home. They return home and make that the place to party: the spa, the gym or the Martha Steward-picture perfect dining room doll house.

Bringing unique skills together to create a new solution to a complex problem through leveraging efforts is much more interesting and exciting than “all the work that must be done.” It requires, first, that we respect the skills of those with whom we would do labor. The skills and capabilities of our colleagues must be seen as worthy, useful and valued.
It requires also that we share a willingness to bring our talents together in unknown and unpredictable ways – the “proper” way to accomplish many workplace tasks may not yet have been discovered. That may be part of the collaboration process: learning what we have to do and how best to do it.

Women have to be willing to let others succeed and to let themselves fail, and thereby learn.