Bidiversity

In this interview, originally published in the New York Times (all rights reserved), Niki Leondakis, chief operating officer of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, says that women don’t need to act like men to get ahead in business. It’s easy for female leaders to feel they have to telegraph their toughness, Leondakis says, but in fact it can be more effective for them to show compassion and play up their people skills.

“You can still do what you have to do, but you don’t have to be a jerk about it,” she says.

This interview,  was conducted, edited and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. Do you remember the first time you were a boss?

A. I was in college at UMass, and I was promoted from a server to a shift-supervisor position at a restaurant called the Hungry U.

Q. How did that go?

A. I took that job pretty seriously. But I would say both in that job and in my first job out of school as an entry-level manager, I experienced what a lot of people experience, which is being too friendly with the people you manage and learning the appropriate boundaries and distances around certain things.

Q. And some people go too far the other way, and start bossing people around.

A. I think people fall into one of two camps. I think very few people become a supervisor or a boss for the first time and know exactly where the right balance is. Both with myself and all the young managers I see, people seem to swing to one end of the pendulum or the other — overzealous with power or, “I’m everybody’s friend, and I want them to like me, and if they like me maybe they’ll do what I ask and then it’ll be easier.”

Q. So how did that play out for you?

A. It was frankly just a long road of mistakes and learning and watching and trials and tribulations, really, about managing people, counseling people, hiring people, letting people go and learning through the actual process of doing all those things over and over again that there’s a middle ground that makes sense.

Q. Did the pendulum swing back and forth for you?

A. When I started advancing in my career, I swung the pendulum the other way. I was at a point where most of my peers were men and they tended to act and behave differently than I did and came across as tough-minded and more rigid, a little more authoritarian. I felt like, to be successful, I needed to do that, too, so I was acting a lot like what I thought successful leadership looked like. That was in the early ’80s. For women in general at that time, we all thought that to be successful or to be considered equal, you tried to really dress like men, act like men and ensure people knew you were tough-minded and could make the tough calls and be decisive.

So I was holding back on some of my leadership strengths — collaboration, inclusion and building and creating teams. I was trying to be somebody I wasn’t, until one day I had to do something disciplinary to someone I really liked and admired.

Human resources got involved and they wanted me to let this person go. I said, “That’s not fair.” So the negotiation between myself and human resources resulted in a week’s suspension without pay for this person. I was struggling with how to communicate with her what had happened, because I couldn’t reconcile for myself what the words were going to be.

The person I worked for at that time could see my struggle and said: “You know what, Niki? Just tap into who you are as a woman and relate to her with compassion, and you’ll be able to do what you need to do. You can still do what you have to do, but you don’t have to be a jerk about it.”

And that was sort of an epiphany for me, because I thought that being tough-minded and decisive and all those qualities and traits that I thought I was supposed to exhibit, that men exhibited, meant that I couldn’t show compassion. It was just a different experience for me to relate to this person with compassion and accountability at the same time, and balance the two. And the fact that it was effective was a huge learning for me.

From that point on, there was an awareness I had that there was this balance I could strike with being myself, being compassionate and holding people accountable. They were not mutually exclusive.

Read the rest of the interview here.