My friend Sabine, a senior leader in a corporate organisation, recently told me about a moment that a female colleague of hers had experienced at work, a moment that many women in leadership will recognise. Her colleague, a top leader at another corporate organisation, had been developing a board presentation when two male colleagues, both less experienced than her, took it apart in a meeting. She watched them replace significant portions she had carefully prepared with material that was, in her view, not appropriate for a board audience, and then congratulate themselves on the result. She did not interrupt, assert her seniority, or challenge her colleagues. Instead, she stayed silent, and spent another day and night tidying the revised presentation to a standard she felt comfortable with. Her silence was not because she lacked grounds to raise concerns. It was because she did not know how to say what she really felt without being perceived as hysterical, bossy, or any number of other things that went through her mind in that moment. In hindsight, she wished she had responded differently.
As Sabine and I talked through what her colleague could have said or done instead that would have been both in line with her values and prevented the additional workload, we came across a summary of a book – described as a “must-have for women in business” – aimed at women in corporate leadership that catalogues behaviours said to hold women back in their careers. Neither of us has read the book itself. Yet the summary of it was already an interesting read, describing themes that reflect discussions about women in the workplace that come up again and again. We felt they were worth exploring here.
According to the summary, the book’s premise is this: many women are socialised from a young age to be modest, harmonious, and undemanding. These qualities can serve them well in their personal lives, but in the workplace they often work against them. Women get overlooked, fail to advocate strongly enough for themselves, and hold back.
The book reportedly identifies multiple behavioural patterns – presented as “common mistakes” – that women in corporate settings tend to display, often unconsciously, that may slow their careers. These include apologising too much, avoiding negotiation, taking on too much emotional labour, and holding back in meetings. The recommendations follow logically: speak up, negotiate more assertively, set clearer boundaries, and stop automatically taking on the caring role.
Reading this from two different vantage points – Sabine from inside corporate life and myself from conflict resolution practice – we found ourselves pausing at almost every issue identified and related recommendation.
When I read that women tend to hold back in meetings before sharing their opinion, my first thought was: that is actually a skill we try to teach people during conflict resolution training. Thinking carefully before speaking, listening before reacting, resisting the urge to fill silence. These are habits that make conversations more productive and outcomes more considered. If everyone in a meeting did this, we would probably have fewer unnecessary arguments and better decisions.
In fact, one of the most critically important skills we teach in our training is not how to raise your opinion early to be seen, but how to listen. Properly listen. Every time someone speaks in a group discussion, they contribute to how an issue gets framed. And sometimes, holding back and truly listening to others first is what allows important perspectives to emerge that might otherwise never surface. This is not a weakness but a craft.
When I read that women respond too modestly to positive feedback, I thought: what a genuinely lovely quality! In a culture that often rewards self-promotion and performative confidence, someone who receives a compliment with grace rather than broadcasting it seems rather refreshing.
When I read about women taking on emotional labour and caring for others in the workplace, I thought: if more people did this, workplaces would be healthier. The capacity to notice when a colleague is struggling, to make space for others, to hold a room with warmth. These are not weaknesses per se, but genuinely valuable human skills.
And when I read that women apologise too much, I thought that as a mediator I see the opposite problem far more often. Apologies are underused, undervalued, and frequently withheld long after they could have repaired something. A well-timed, sincere apology can shift dynamics in many conflicts and be a starting point to repair damaged relationships. Perhaps the issue is not that women apologise but that apologies are offered for things that were never their fault to begin with.
Sabine was particularly struck by a distinction that she felt the book summary did not make clearly enough. These behaviours we describe above are not ineffective, but rather unrewarded, unrecognised, or extracted without return. That is a meaningful difference. It shifts the question away from personal deficiency and toward structural misalignment. The problem is not that women listen carefully, hold back, take on emotional labour, or respond with grace, but that workplaces are often not designed to recognise or reward those contributions.
Sabine also pointed to the organisational conditions that make this mismatch possible in the first place. These include promotion criteria that reward visibility over contribution, meeting cultures that privilege speed and certainty over reflection, leadership models that conflate confidence with competence, and workplaces that expect emotional labour but do not recognise it. These are not neutral environments into which women simply need to fit better. They are environments shaped by particular assumptions about what good leadership looks like, assumptions that do not always hold up under scrutiny.
Many of my hesitations about the recommendations discussed in the book summary were informed by work I developed with my colleague Claire Holland on a Planned Approach to Conflict Engagement, or PACE, based on Bernard Mayer’s book Staying with Conflict. Rather than addressing ad hoc behaviour, PACE focuses on developing a long-term strategy for managing conflicts or challenging settings that are unlikely to go away or change any time soon.
Conflict avoidance is one example. PACE includes a whole module on it, and I would add some nuance to the book’s apparently straightforward treatment of avoidance as problematic. Yes, avoiding conflict can allow problems to fester, and I have both experienced and heard about many situations where avoiding an interaction was not productive. But there are also situations where stepping back, waiting, or choosing not to engage is the wisest move available. Context matters.
There is also something worth saying about authenticity. This is one of the key areas we address in PACE, and for good reason. How we communicate is not just a set of learned habits. It reflects our values. Speaking carefully, making space for others, and prioritising relationships are not accidental behaviours to be corrected. They are deliberate expressions of who they are. And from a strategic standpoint, communicating in ways that feel genuinely aligned with your values tends to build trust, sustain credibility, and hold up under pressure in ways that performed confidence often does not.
That said, self-reflection is always worthwhile. It makes sense to ask ourselves why we think, feel, and act the way we do, and whether any of it comes from fear, conditioning, or assumptions we have never examined. If a woman holds back in a meeting because she genuinely believes in careful listening, that is one thing. If she holds back because she learned early that speaking up was unsafe, that is another. The difference matters. The goal is not to adopt a mainstream, often implicitly male, model of communication simply because it is the dominant one. It is to understand ourselves clearly enough to choose, deliberately and freely, how we want to show up.
And yet, as Sabine pointed out, that choice is rarely as free as it sounds. There is an unspoken trade-off that many women in leadership navigate quietly. Women can remain authentic and risk being overlooked, passed over, or simply not taken seriously, or they can adapt to the dominant model and risk losing something of themselves in the process. Naming that trade-off honestly feels important. It does not resolve the tension, but it does make the conversation more honest. Telling women to simply stay true to their values, without acknowledging the real costs that sometimes come with that, is its own kind of idealism.
In summary, we are not saying the issues identified in the summary are wrong. The patterns described are real for many women, and the consequences for their careers are real. But we kept wondering: what if the goal was not for women to shed these behaviours, but for everyone to develop some of them? What if workplaces actually needed more careful listening, more grace, more modesty, more emotional attentiveness, more willingness to apologise, and less focus on individual egos and self-promotion? Wouldn’t that be a great place to work?
We are currently collecting stories similar to that of Sabine’s colleague described at the opening of this post. If you are a female leader who recalls a particular situation where you did not know what to say or do because of dynamics unique to your gender, and you wish you had said or done something different at the time, we would love to hear from you for research and training development purposes. Please contact me at [email protected].