Every workplace has one—the colleague everyone turns to when things go sideways. She remembers your kid’s soccer tournament, spots team tensions before they explode, and somehow makes everyone feel heard during chaotic projects. You know her as the “team mom” or “office mother hen”.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: She’s demonstrating textbook leadership. And she’s probably not on anyone’s succession plan.
The Leadership Blind Spot
We have dozens of leadership models, each designed for different contexts and challenges. But there’s a pattern: most popular frameworks come from Western business culture and emphasise decisiveness, authority, and results. These traits get coded as “leadership material”.
Meanwhile, empathy, care, and emotional support get labelled “soft skills”—nice to have, rarely rewarded, and definitely not CEO material.
This narrow definition isn’t universal, and it’s costing us.
What India Got Right
Indian organisational psychologist J.B.P. Sinha saw the problem decades ago. His Nurturant-Task Leadership model puts care at the centre, not the periphery. Leaders care for team members, show genuine affection, invest in their wellbeing, and commit to their growth—while still holding people accountable for results.
Sound touchy-feely? Tell that to the research. When scientists compared this model to Western transformational leadership theories in Indian organisations, they found minimal support for Western approaches, while culturally rooted models showed significantly more promise. Caring leadership wasn’t just a feel-good philosophy—it reflected how effective leadership actually works in different cultural contexts.
The model draws from the “Karta” archetype: the family head who provides both direction and nurturance. But even this framework uses paternal language. When we use the word “leader” or “karta”, we still give it a male archetype, going with the “think manager, think male” style of thinking.
But are these qualities really gender-specific?
The Power of Maternal Leadership
Strip away the stereotypes, and maternal qualities look surprisingly like MBA competencies:
- Anticipatory thinking: Spotting problems before they become crises
- Authentic recognition: Offering specific, meaningful appreciation
- Emotional resilience: Providing forgiveness and unconditional support
- Strategic multitasking: Managing competing priorities without dropping balls
- Psychological safety: Creating space where people risk, learn, and grow
Leaders with these traits build deeper trust, foster stronger collaboration, and see measurably higher team effectiveness and retention. The “soft” skills create hard results.
Maternal experience itself develops critical leadership capabilities: crisis management under pressure, radical adaptability, patience under fire, and perhaps most importantly—knowing when to guide versus when to step back and let people figure it out themselves.
These aren’t parenting skills. They’re C-suite skills.
The Pandemic Proved It
COVID-19 became an unexpected leadership laboratory. In corporate settings, women leaders received significantly higher effectiveness ratings during the crisis compared to normal times.
The difference? They acknowledged team members’ fears openly, demonstrated genuine concern for wellbeing, and communicated with compassion instead of bravado. When the world felt like it was ending, supposedly “feminine” traits became the most valuable assets in any leader’s toolkit. This doesn’t aim to demonstrate that women are better than men in any capacity, but rather to get leaders to reflect and identify what women tend to get right.
Crisis demands what maternal leadership delivers: emotional intelligence, the capacity to hold space for anxiety while maintaining forward momentum, and the wisdom to prioritise human wellbeing alongside business goals.
When everything’s uncertain, the “soft” skills become the only currency that matters.
The Price We’re Paying
Despite the evidence, the numbers tell a brutal story:
Men are 10 times more likely to be CEOs in major corporations. Only six of America’s top 100 companies have achieved gender parity in senior leadership. Globally, just 29 countries—15% of nations—have women leading them.
The timeline? Gender parity in senior corporate roles won’t arrive until 2046 for White women and 2072 for women of colour. In politics globally, we’re looking at another 130 years.
This isn’t just unfair. It’s organisationally illogical.
By systematically devaluing maternal leadership qualities, companies are voluntarily operating without proven crisis management capabilities, trust-building expertise, and the emotional intelligence that separates sustainable success from quarterly sugar highs.
Time to Expand the Definition
Effective leadership isn’t either/or. It’s not task orientation versus nurturance, decisiveness versus empathy, or authority versus care.
It’s both. Always has been.
We need to stop celebrating motherhood exclusively in domestic spaces while dismissing those same qualities as “unprofessional” in the boardroom. The colleague holding your team together through impossible deadlines isn’t doing support work—she’s doing leadership work.
She deserves recognition. Compensation. And a clear path to formal authority. The goal isn’t to promote gender stereotypes, but rather to realise that competencies such as empathy and psychological safety are all human traits and strengths.The goal then becomes to make all leaders of all genders and age embrace these traits.
Until we expand leadership beyond the narrow masculine ideal that’s dominated business culture, we’re choosing to operate at half capacity. We’re ignoring leadership talent that’s been right in front of us all along—we just called it the wrong name.
It’s time we got it right.
References and Citations
- Russell Reynolds Associates. (2024). “Gender Diversity in the C-suite: Women’s representation in the 2024 S&P 100.” https://www.russellreynolds.com/en/insights/articles/gender-diversity-in-the-c-suite-women-representation-in-the-2024-sp-100
- McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org. (2024). “Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th-anniversary report.” https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace
- UN Women. (2025). “Facts and figures: Women’s leadership and political participation.” https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-womens-leadership-and-political-participation
- Sudhir, Y.L.N. “Leadership style in the Indian context.” LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-style-indian-context-sudhir-y-l-n
- Palrecha, R., Spangler, W.D., & Yammarino, F.J. (2012). “A comparative study of three leadership approaches in India.” The Leadership Quarterly. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1048984311001755
- Zenger, J. & Folkman, J. (2020). “Research: Women Are Better Leaders During a Crisis.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/12/research-women-are-better-leaders-during-a-crisis
- Braun, S., Stegmann, S., Hernandez Bark, A. S., Junker, N. M., & Van Dick, R. (2017). Think manager—think male, think follower—think female: Gender bias in implicit followership theories. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 47(7), 377-388.
- Center for Creative Leadership. (2025). “How to Encourage Empathetic Leadership.” https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/empathy-in-the-workplace-a-tool-for-effective-leadership/
- Stamper. (2023). “Mothers in Leadership: Unlocking the Power of Maternal Skills for Success.” LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mothers-leadership-unlocking-power-maternal-skills-success-stamper
- Sinha, J. B. (1984). A model of effective leadership styles in India. International Studies of Management & Organization, 14(2-3), 86-98.