A Leader Must Have a Systemic Vision, Which Is a Typical Feminine Trait
Professional loneliness weighs heavily when you want to make a new field of work more well-known, which for the first time combines technology, computer science and cognitive science, i.e. how people learn and process information. And if it was a woman entering this new territory, the task would become more difficult, "because at the time companies were highly hierarchical and we didn't call them leaders but bosses," recalls Gianna Martinengo. She started out in the second half of the 1980s working in computer science and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Today she is founder and President of DKTS, a company specializing in technological and social innovation, as well as the creator and President of the Women&Tech association. “Now business organizations have changed and become more agile. We talk about female leadership and young women are more aware of gender issues. So I like to think that in the future we will no longer talk about female leadership but about leaders of any gender and that will be the end of it. Leaders who get chosen not only for their technical and professional skills but also for transversal abilities such as knowing how to manage conflicts or being part of a cohesive team," adds Ms Martinengo. Over the years of her activity has launched various startups and research laboratories, working with several companies and joining many corporate boards.
Her watchword is operational commitment. The advice to young people wanting to emerge and make a difference is to "conceive problems differently, even before solving those highlighted by others. Do this by helping yourself with applied research and the growth of your professionalism, thanks to partnerships with other centers of knowhow, and internationalization." According to the manager and entrepreneur, it is essential for everyone to integrate skills, aptitudes and abilities generally recognized as feminine characteristics and consequently, often not adopted in leadership roles according to a wrong-headed and outmoded view. These skills consist precisely in the ability to have a multidisciplinary and systemic vision, in order to create connections between a general vision and detailed analysis, without neglecting communication skills, flexibility in decision-making and good stress management, among others.
“The leaders of tomorrow, whether women or men, will be chosen on the basis of these all-round characteristics,” says the executive, who graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature at Bocconi University and went on to specialize in cognitive psychology and learning disorders.
“My most difficult moment? When, at the beginning, they would ask me: Who is behind you? Who is sending you? And I – who was used to being operational and raised in a family where women and men helped each other – didn't understand. I looked behind my shoulders. There was no one behind me. The turning point came when I truly made my own a phrase that was often repeated during my Bocconi studies: taking on the courage to rise to the challenge. If others did it, then you can do it too,” says Martinengo. Dealing with one challenge to another, she took specialization courses as an educational technologist at the Stanford Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences from 1982 to 1987, among the first Italian women to do so.
“Never set limits for yourself. I have overcome mine by combining technology and social sciences in an unprecedented way for the times. After this step, I cultivated the intuition of exploring how the tech world could help people and women in particular, for example in the difficult family-work balance, without forgetting the contribution that women can make to development and innovation," concludes Martinengo. “My vision is that technologies must be at the service of people to improve or facilitate their lives. Otherwise, we couldn't even talk about progress or collective intelligence."
