My very first and only "officially" assigned mentor in the course of my career was a woman. Just not any woman.  The highest ranking woman in the company at the time who just also happened to be the CEO's right hand person.  I was one year back from my maternity leave, had just taken a big new assignment and was gifted with my first official mentor!  I was all at once excited, honored, and intimated.  

 

In our one and only mentoring session together, she shared that the only way for us women to reach our full potential was to not let ourselves get too involved or distracted by our families.  She had just hired a live-in nanny and was contemplating renting an apartment closer to the office so that she could better focus during the week.  And she was in good company with her advice! Just this summer, one of the most respected business leaders of all, Jack Welch, was quoted as having said basically the same thing.

 

What struck me hard was while I was so excited to finally have a very successful woman to talk to, a role model, a mentor, despite the sameness of our gender, we were each very different from the other especially when it came to our personal pictures of success.  Neither one more right or more wrong - just "equal but different".  After my initial disappointment, this became quite a pivotal experience for me! 

 

I realized that I had been making up that inside of our genders, there would be more "sameness" and that the bulk of the differences existed between the genders not inside of them.  How very naive of me to assume that just because we were both successful career women and working moms that we would be "equal and the same".  My disappointment was real until I recognized the gift in it.  I began noticing all of the ways that men and women could be more forgiving and accepting of the differences between men and women than of the differences that exist within our own gender.  Women more apt to judge women.  Men more apt to judge men. 

 

While many years before I had stopped wanting to be seen as equal to or the same as the men in my organization, I then knew that it would be just as wrong to be seen the same as the women in it.  What was important was being clearly seen for who I was and for the unique value that I brought and for me to clearly to see others for theirs.  What I really wanted, no different than anyone else, was to be treated as "different but equal" with the "different" clearly grounded in my core values.

 

Even more to the pivotal point was the realization that nothing that had come before - the comfort, the feeling of belonging, the having each others' backs, the power and the connection that I had so enjoyed in those early years of my career -  had anything at all  to do with gender!  And as I am so very grateful for the authentic leadership of my first managers that both informed and helped to form me, it wasn't their gender that made it so.

 

What creates that powerful, magical team or relationship is the ability to connect with people with whom we share a common set of core values and who are willing to authentically lead from that place.  That was as true about the gift of my first few years as it was about all of the incredible times throughout my career!

 

Having helped hundreds of people to articulate their core values over the past three years as the first and most powerful step of anchoring their leadership, I can tell you that neither gender has a monopoly on the value of nurturing or competition or compassion or bravado!  Neither gender is less susceptible to alpha leadership, bullyism, ego or forgetting or neglecting the fact that relationships are the real work of work. 

 

So, since gender truly does not make the difference, isn't it time we stop hiring, promoting, paying and acting as though it does!  Our generation owes at least that to ourselves and to the generations now following...