Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 23, 1990                   TAG: 9007230024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

AUTHOR: WOMEN DON'T NEED TO ACT LIKE MEN ON THE JOB

In a new book that follows four top female executives through their workday, Helgesen argues that women shouldn't scrap the values they were reared with to try and think and act like men in the work place.

For more than a decade, thousands of aspiring women executives in tailored pinstripes and floppy bow-ties have been told they need to act more like men in the corporate jungle.

So they took up golf, learned to like - or at least understand - football, and suppressed their emotions. And just like their male counterparts, they sacrificed their personal lives.

Instead, they should focus on "the values that women recognize as a source of their strength - values that for too long have been dismissed as signs of weakness," Helgesen writes in "The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership."

Those values include listening, teaching, favoring cooperation with colleagues over competition and encouraging subordinates rather than dominating them.

At a time when a Fortune magazine cover story wonders "Why Women Still Aren't Getting to the Top?" Helgesen's book looks at "women's skills, talents and values as a plus that can add to companies and organizations," she said during a recent interview.

The book takes a close look at the work day of four women: the national executive director of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, in New York; the president of a Denver, Colo.-based industrial contracting company; the chief of Ford Motor Co.'s executive development center in Detroit and the head of a Baltimore-based broadcasting company that owns three radio stations.

Influenced by a 1973 landmark study by organization expert Henry Mintzberg, who followed five male executives through their day, Helgesen observed the work habits of four women who already hold senior positions, writing down everything that happened to them from opening mail in the morning to meetings and telephone calls into the evening.

In contrast to the traditional corporate leaders, "men of vision" who impose that vision from the top down, Helgesen's four women have found what she terms "a distinctive voice" for "stressing empowerment and human development rather than subordination to the chain of command."

She said these women make time in their schedules to reflect, read or simply rest. They make time for their families and expect their staff to do likewise. They encourage creativity and downplay hierarchy - using structures that resemble a circle or web rather than a pyramid.

But she said the book is not meant as an attack on the way men manage.

"One of the things I believe is that women have benefited tremendously over the last 20 years by really studying how men do things," said Helgesen, 42, a free-lance writer who was drawn to business topics after writing a book about Texas oil men.

The old-fashioned, male dominated, power-oriented corporate hierarchy is on its way out, she believes, forced to change by global competition, changing technology and an increasing female work force.

In its place, corporate structures are evolving where innovation is encouraged and winning the corner office at all costs is not as important as being a well-rounded person who is fulfilled on and off the job.