What will make a good leader in the future? Girls can give us a clue

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Sydney, Australia, June 10, 2022. Reuters

If there is a group of eight people, statistically speaking, one of them is likely to be a girl under 15. And if you’re in Africa, that number rises to around one in five. The Beyonce line “Who run the world? Girls” comes to mind.

But historically, girls haven’t wielded much political, social, economic or cultural power. They are typically dismissed, at the bottom of the pile of who influences our ideas and shapes our world. But when it comes to shaping our ideas about who should be leading our societies, we can and should learn a lot more from them.

I mean, when it feels like many parts of the world have, for years now, been in a mess when it comes to leadership, why not? Strong men declaring war. Politicians having parties while people were locked down during the pandemic or suffering in hospital. Tech tycoons trash talking about smackdowns in cage fights. And that’s not even to include all the leaders we cross paths with in daily life.

Tech titans Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are in a fierce business rivalry that has spilt over into a playground spat, with the two men offering to fight each other in a cage. AFP

The strange thing is, we often think this is how leadership is supposed to be. But to misquote the old adage, we get the leaders we expect. Which means that if want a new kind of leadership, then we have to unwire our brains from our expectations about what leadership should be – expectations we didn’t even realise were holding us back.

That’s not as easy at is sounds. Let’s consider the case study of former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern. She has recently announced she will be writing a book – not about her five-year tenure in office, per se – but about leadership. And she knows a thing or two about expectations of what a leader is “supposed” to look like, and the visceral, almost wild reactions of people around the world when leaders break with those expectations. Public reaction to her leadership covered everything from rage and denial to questioning her competence, saying she shouldn’t be saying such things, how her life wasn’t structured to be a proper leader and, in particular, how her expressions of her vulnerabilities were apparently not appropriate to leadership. At every stage this smacks of how our expectations keep us tied to past ideas of leadership.

Having a baby while in office, as Ms Ardern did, was apparently not what we expected leaders to do (never mind that plenty of men have had babies while in office). And what perhaps surprised people more than anything else is stepping down because she had “no more in the tank”. Who does that? Well, perhaps not the leaders we expect to have, but the ones we actually need.

Our expectations of what a leader “should” be like are formed by influencers, thinkers, philosophers, societal norms and the vested interests of those seeking power, money and societal status. Like the dissonance we experienced with Ms Ardern – or even the likes of Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousufzai – what we need to do is unpack those expectations and challenge them. Until we can do that, the future of leadership is not what we are expecting.

One of the many challenges girls face today are the societal expectations imposed on them about what they “should” look like, and in particular beauty ideals. Those ideals are not an objective truth, and the reality is that those expectations make girls miserable by undermining their self-esteem and even stopping them from going out and achieving their goals. Which means those expectations go on to affect women their whole lives. And the knock on is on men who have skewed ideas of what “real” women look like, what a successful woman is and how to have real relationships.

I talk to girls about how those “ideals” are formed – through the same expectations set by influencers, thinking, philosophers, societal norms and vested interests. Which means it doesn’t have to be like that. They – we – can decide for ourselves. And if young girls can start the process of unwiring their brains from societal expectations about beauty – we can learn from them to do the same when it comes to leadership ideals.

What AI does to perpetuate previous expectations is a superb lesson in how past biases shape future outputs. The large language models simply search for what already exists to predict what things “should” be like. Amazon, for example, ran into trouble using AI in recruitment processing when it discovered that women’s CVs were routinely being sifted out because… it was all men who had done those roles in the past. The perils of expectations writ large.

The future of leadership might well lie in one of those girls under 15, and she might even be from Africa. I don’t know that she will be. But I do know that it’s a possibility – politically, socially, economically and culturally. Which means that if you’re dismissing that, then ask yourself why. It’s probably your expectations that are holding you back, and that means that those expectations are prejudicing all of our future leadership possibilities.