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Top 10 Rules for Women in Business
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Rule #7: Leverage the Feminine Management Style

We are in the relationship era: It's all about getting close to customers, striking up joint ventures, partnering with suppliers, says Katherine D'Urso, Director of Marketing, Field Operations at Coopers & Lybrand. Women are great at relationships.

"A company is an organic, living, breathing thing, not just an income sheet and balance sheet," says former Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina. The feminine style of nurturing is becoming more acceptable.

Of course, the best leaders, regardless of gender, have a combination of both masculine and feminine energies. However, it is my experience that many professional women have been taught to downplay the feminine approach.

Sung-Joo Kim, chairman and chief executive of luxury-goods company MCM Worldwide strives to prove that femininity and power aren’t mutually exclusive. She says she leans heavily on motherhood and seeks to run her business with “heart.”

Today's business environment calls for feminine traits, including being great communicators, consensus-builders, community builders, collaborators and connectors. I echo Katherine’s D’Urso’s sentiments when she says, “The power that a woman has when she has the courage to be a woman is mighty!”

Rule #8: Be Willing to Take a Step Down to Move Up

Because we have fought so hard to break through the glass ceiling, we are often afraid to take what feels like a backward step.

Christina Gold, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Western Union Company has at times in her 35-year career taken a step down the corporate ladder in order to learn skills that her advancement had allowed her to skip. "I had never supervised large groups of people," she said. "I was a manager, so I went back to being a supervisor so I could learn to manage a group of 30 or 40 or 50 people.”

Donna Dubinsky, co-founder of Palm and Handspring, met her business partner Hawkins when she was freshly back in the U.S. after a year's sabbatical in France. For a year she studied French, tried painting ("I was terrible," she says), and taught school. "I came back wanting to be CEO of a company."

Brenda Barnes, shocked the business world in 1998 when she left PepsiCo to spend more time with her family. She had been pegged as PepsiCo's first female head and her move seemed foolish to many. She later became President of Sarah Lee.

Taking a position with a lower grade or title in order to get Profit & Loss experience makes sense if you want to lead a business unit one day. Be willing to take nonlinear career paths to grow as a person and a business leader.