Leadership: qualities that distinguish women; Results from a recent survey provide evidence that women bring distinct personality and motivational strengths to leadership roles--and do so in a style that is more conducive to today's diverse workplace.

• Author: Greenberg, Herbert

When a woman leader, like Dun & Bradstreet Inc. CFO Sara Mathew, talks about her career-defining moments, her success is not what comes to mind first. Instead, she, like other women leaders who participated in a Caliper Corp. survey, says she views her defining moments as those times when she weathered unexpected storms that tested her severely.

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In both a written survey and some follow-up interviews, women leaders shared--with enormous candor--details of failures and mistakes they've made, which could have derailed their careers. They also reflected on what they've learned through adversity, and how they carried on with more determination, focus and a clearer understanding of their own strengths

What emerges is a sense that the best women leaders, inside and outside finance, have taken leadership to a new level. That's not to say that men don't excel at being leaders, or that a more hierarchical, traditional "male" style is passe. But the survey does suggest that a new paradigm is evolving, and that women are in the fore-front of creating it.

Mathew recalls one of her defining moments, which came in a previous position with another Fortune 500 company. She had decided to completely revamp the firm's investor relations program and make it one of the most enviable in the country. As part of the introduction for this program, she coordinated the firm's first live webcast, to which hundreds of investors tuned in. But the webcast fell apart at the seams.

"I did a terrible job, as nearly every major financial publication in the country cited," laments Mathew. In a heartbeat, she says, everyone in the industry knew who she was, but not as she wanted to be known. "I could go on and on, citing what went wrong. It was years ago, and I can still remember every detail like it was yesterday," she says. Ultimately, however, she was able to turn the situation around, and the investor relations program she succeeded in creating for the company several months later has turned out to be one of the best available.

Following the fiasco, she says her CEO was immediately firm about one thing: "that we would never do this, ever again." She knew she had to convince him that the company needed this program, needed to do it right and that the company's stock would eventually rebound.

Mathew says it probably took her a week or two to pick herself back up, shake off the dust and figure out what needed to be done differently. She knew her window of opportunity had closed, and she had to get it open again. Time was finite, and not on her side.

"The most important time [to act] is immediately after something goes wrong," she says. "It's recognizing the situation and admitting that, yes, I made a colossal mistake." Then she went back and figured out exactly where, when and how things went wrong. She examined how she could have handled the situation differently, what resources she had within the organization and, most importantly, how to convince her CEO to ignore the media and the stockholders and give her a second chance.

"The first part was helping him understand how the world was changing around us, and that we couldn't continue down our current path, regardless of how safe it felt," Mathew argues. She let him know that the problem was not the strategy. "It was the poor execution--and I owned that, and my team and I could fix it."

Finally, she expressed her unwavering belief in the project and how it could distinguish the company from its competitors. Mathew says she believes strongly that passion goes a long way in persuading people to try certain things, and its sheer strength brings others to your corner. In this situation, she believes her passion helped to open a door that had been closed and locked.

Ultimately, the qualities she demonstrated--belief in herself and her cause, her disappointment in its failure, her feeling the sting of rejection very personally, her ability to learn quickly from her mistakes, her persuasiveness, her open style of problem solving, her carrying on with a new-found confidence and her willingness to take risks--are those that helped her win.

Coincidentally, those qualities embody the findings of a year-long study that Princeton, N.J.-based management-consulting firm Caliper has recently conducted on the qualities that distinguish women leaders.

The study assessed personality qualities and conducted in-depth interviews with 60 women leaders from top companies in the United Kingdom and the U.S. Participants included women from such firms as Accenture, Bank of America, Deloitte & Touche LLP, Deutsche Bank, Dun & and Bradstreet Inc., The Economist Group, Enterprise Rent-A-Car UK Ltd., Ernst & Young LLP, International Business Machines Corp., International Paper Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Johnson & Johnson Co. Inc., Kohler Co., Lloyds TSB Scotland, Molson Coors Brewing Co., Morgan Stanley and Pella Corp.

For comparison purposes, the female leaders in this study were matched to a representative sample of male leaders drawn from Caliper's extensive database, representing similar industries and job titles. While much research has been published comparing the leadership styles of women and men, this study specifically focused on the personality qualities and motivational factors that serve as the core to the underlying gender differences.

Essentially, key findings show that women leaders are more persuasive, have a stronger need to get things done and are more willing to take risks than their male counterparts. When women leaders combine these qualities with their openness, flexibility, empathy and strong interpersonal skills, a leadership style is created that is inclusive, consensus building and collaborative. It should be emphasized that the male leaders in this study were also exceptional in these areas, but the women set a new standard, as this is the first time such results can be attributed to women leaders.

Leadership, in Mathew's view, is not defined simply by a position, but rather as the ability to set and articulate a vision; then to energize people to go after that vision. And to create results. "Leadership is about results," she says.

The core of this type of leadership starts with having...