Malta’s first female Prime Minister

Kevin-James Fenech is the founder and owner of JOB Search - jobsearch.mt and FENCI Consulting fenci.eu. He is a management consultant and business advisor by profession, focusing on strategy, human resources and recruitment. He has a passion for anything related to business and has written about the topic for over 10 years in most major newspapers or journals.

The time has come for our country to have its first female Prime Minister. I think we have as a country finally managed to break out of our conservative mould and become socially progressive enough to have the privilege of welcoming our first female Prime Minister.

From my experience, in recruitment and talent management, women leaders offer a completely different skill set to men. I find women leaders are empathetic; they have a strong understanding of what motivates people and they make great listeners.

I also find women to be more capable of multitasking than men; and leadership by definition requires you to wear different hats and multitask on a daily basis.

Finally, I find women exhibit their ego differently to men; my point is that they can take a decision with their ego out of the equation if need be, whereas men in general frequently struggle to do this.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying women make better leaders; they don’t. I am just stating that women bring a different compliment of skills to the power-table and depending on the context or the organisation, such skills are more suited sometimes.

For example, if I have a financially successful organisation but morale is flat, the female CEO could be a better option but if I have a start-up or high-growth business pursuing a game-changing strategy, I’d expect the male CEO to fare better.

Clearly, I am generalising; my point is that one gender isn’t better than the other, it’s more a question of different situations, contexts and/or organisations require different types of leaders sometimes one sex is more suitable than the other.

Malta in 2019, is ripe for the first female Prime Minister. We’ve been through so much socially progressive change recently and women in the workplace occupying positions of power and influence is today much more of a common occurrence, that I think it is only a matter of time before we have our first female PM.  

The benefits will be plenty. I think a female Prime Minister will inspire a generation of women to pursue with more conviction and self-belief top leadership positions everywhere and that surely can only be good.

John Kotter defines leadership as ‘…creating a vision of the future and strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision; aligning people around the vision; and motivating them to overcome barriers and produce the changes needed to achieve the vision…’. I see female leaders as better equipped on most fronts to do precisely this i.e. aligning people around a vision; motivating people; implementing the change.

Interestingly, men in general tend to be better at crafting strategy therefore the first part of Kotter’s definition is where female leaders still lack the cutting edge over men.

But you put a female Prime Minister in a position where she inherits a well-articulated vision and strategy, and I think she would be an excellent successor and executor of same vision and Strategy.

In fact, Zenger Folkman’s (2011) 30-year research on the subject, with over 7,000 leaders, revealed that out of sixteen leadership competences, women outscored men in 15 out of 16 except when it came to ‘developing strategic perspective’.

To be fair men only marginally won (51% vs. 49%) and in the remaining 15 competences there were some scores were women not just won but they did so by a large margin ranging from +9% to +11% (namely: ‘Taking Initiative’, ‘Self-Development’, ‘High Integrity & Honesty’ and ‘Results Driven’).  

My point is that there is also the research to support my assertion that female leaders are excellent material for great leaders.  

I hope I haven’t offended my fellow male counterparts; there have been many excellent male leaders in business, sports, politics and society in general over the decades.

But I do think it is high time that more women rise to the summit and lead not just companies but even our beloved country. I think we have a lot to gain as a people.

Sure, it must be based on merit and not any form of positive discrimination but the time is ripe for this to happen should the right female step forward.

Admittedly men will continue to dominate leadership positions (for a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic reasons) but the time is ripe for us to have our first female Prime Minister and I think we should as a people encourage this historic moment.

Granted there must be the right female leader ready and willing to make the commitment and she must deserve the role but I am sure there is someone out there who is more than capable of leading our country in the near future.  

In the words of Michelle Obama: ‘No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half of its citizens.’