The McKinsey Leadership Project—an initiative to help professional women at McKinsey and elsewhere—has distilled a leadership model comprising five broad and interrelated dimensions: meaning, managing energy, positive framing, connecting, and engaging. Our September 2008 article “Centered leadership: How talented women thrive” describes the model. This new article reports results of a survey we undertook to learn how executives act on these dimensions. Read the article, then join our online conversation.
To further explore the centered leadership model, McKinsey recently asked senior and midlevel executives of both genders from around the world to respond to a series of questions that ask how they think about—and how they act on—each of the five dimensions.1 The survey shows that many executives at all levels and in organizations of all kinds, sizes, and locations often behave in ways that reflect the dimensions of the model. The findings also support the idea that these five dimensions—when executives apply them all at once—are associated with higher satisfaction and self-reported career success, regardless of their title, tenure, or gender.
Among the detailed results are that female respondents, on the whole, are more satisfied with their jobs than men are, a counterintuitive finding likely...