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Cinderella Stories of Women Leaders: Connecting Leadership Contexts and Competencies

February 26, 2004 

"For hundreds of years, stories and fairy tales have played an important role in Western and Eastern cultures.  Stories are harbingers of challenges and crises that call for our attention.  They are conveyors of problems that beg solutions; they are vehicles for gaining insights into relationships, making decisions, implementing policies, and overcoming problems of morale and injustice.  Stories and fairy tales provide a moral compass for what is right and wrong and serve as a barometer of change.

 Most of us are familiar with the Cinderella fairy tale.  While the Brothers Grimm's version is the most popular one, the fairy tale is told around the world, focusing on the unbearable family situation produced by the father's remarriage and persecution of the heroine by an evil stepmother.

 There has been a growing interest in the leadership, management and organizational behavior literature in storytelling, both as a qualitative methodology and a vehicle for organizational change and transformation.  Storytelling is a powerful tool that gives us access to the living part of an organization.  Stories can be used to rally leaders and followers around a specific social, political or cultural issue or cause.  They can be placed in the service of change efforts that will initially be seen as difficult, even impossible, upsetting and strange.

 Denning (2001) coined the term springboard story to narratives that enable a leap in understanding by the audience so as to grasp how an event, organization, community or complex system may change.  A springboard story has an impact not so much through transferring large amounts of information but by catalyzing information into action congruent with the personal experience of members of the audience.

 Organizational stories are a medium for communicating an organization's central myths to outsiders and infuse them into everyday decisions, policies and practices (Bolman & Deal, 1991).  Stories emphasize the non-linear, irrational aspects of organizational life, the part not often considered by scientists or organizational scholars. 

 Ruth Simmons was born in rural Texas, the youngest of 12 children.  Her parents' stories about 'what mattered in life' taught her that 'decency and concern for other people' were of paramount importance.  From her mother she also learned that whatever you do 'even if it is scrubbing floors in other people's houses, do it well, and do it thoroughly.'  After completing her bachelor's degree she won a Fulbright and studied in France for a year.  She completed her doctorate at Harvard in 1973 and then began at Princeton University as Acting Director of the Afro-American Studies program and as Associate Dean of the Faculty.  Ruth continued to make history when she became President of Smith College in 1995 and was hailed as the first black president of one of the most selective women's colleges called the Seven Sisters.  Last year Ruth made history again when she was named President of Brown University and became the first African-American to head an Ivy League School.

 It is a new moment, a new age, a new era, and Simmons is the personification of that.  She represents opportunity for women, opportunity for minorities, and opportunities for people born of humble experience.  The message embedded in her leadership is that you can transcend these in the new millennium. 

 Mary Kay Ash, was founder and chairwoman emeritus of Mary Kay Cosmetics.  Once-divorced, twice-widowed, Mary Kay was twice-born.  From the age of seven, she kept house in Hot Wells, TX and cooked and cared for her father who was bedridden with tuberculosis.  Mary Kay Ash is what Harvard psychologist William James (1902) called twice born.  She, according to Zaleznik (1977) who commented on the twice born concept, 'grew through mastering painful conflict during the developmental years.  Leaders are twice born individuals who endure major events and crises that lead to a sense of separateness and estrangement from their environment.'  In Mary Kay Ash's case the twice born encounters came from her childhood and significant relationships with people close to her.  Instead of being traumatized by these experiences, never to recover, Mary Kay mastered her personal tragedies.    Mary Kay had a vision based on the emerging needs of women in the 1960s and 1970s which offered women an appealing career as beauty consultants, not salespeople, they could pursue in their homes.  Today, Mary Kay beauty consultants are found all over the world. 

 The culture of Mary Kay is also transmitted through stories about the company, which are routed and shared among the beauty consultants and headquarter staff.  At May Kay, successful beauty consultants are rewarded with a twelve-carat pin shaped like a bumblebee.  The story goes that the bee has a large body that is too large for its wings and therefore should not be able to fly.  But it does.  And so it is with women.  They were not expected to succeed in the work force, but have done so.  Mary Kay is committed to selling women on themselves. She had strong ideas about women's roles in the workforce and has gained a national reputation as a forceful supporter of women's rights.

 Born to unwed teenage parents in rural Mississippi, Oprah [Winfrey] spent her early years in poverty on a farm in extreme poverty with her Bible-thumping grandmother.  She moved in with her mother in Milwaukee as a preteen and was raped by a cousin and gave birth to a baby which was born prematurely when Oprah was 14.   As a youngster, she was constantly in trouble.  Moving to Nashville to live with her father, turned her life around.  With strict rules and the structure of a good value system, Oprah landed her first job as a radio station reporter while still in high school.  She enrolled in Tennessee State University and switched to television broadcasting at age 19, anchoring the news at Nashville's WTVF-TV.  One of the first black women in college as well as in varsity, Oprah was edging her way into a white man's appearance-obsessed world and became the youngest person and first Afro-American woman to anchor the news at the Nashville station.

 In 1984 Oprah moved to Chicago to host 'AM Chicago,' facing the national talk show hosted by Phil Donahue as her competition.  In 1994, eight years into her successful show, Oprah took a bold step that could have seriously threatened her ratings.  In an era when talk shows were fiercely competing to present the most controversial topics with people revealing the most intimate details on national TV, Oprah decided to leave sensationalism to others.  She has become one of America's most well-known and effective advocates of a host of social and educational causes. 

 Oprah did not believe that being poor, black, overweight and female in Mississippi was holder her back to pursuer her dreams.  She has become one of the most powerful people on television, a super celebrity who translated her success into a thriving business empire, while maintaining a persona that makes people feel like she is their best friend.  Oprah shares her fortune of millions with numerous charities and friends. 

 These three women leaders presented here exercise leadership in significantly different contexts: academia, corporate and the media.  Ruth Simmons's world is the world of academia and education where intellectual leadership, academic freedom, and collegiality are some of the hallmarks of this context.  Mary Kay Ash led in an entrepreneurial environment where business acumen, innovation and concern for the customers make all the difference.  Prior to founding her own company, Mary Kay worked for years in a formal organization, a context that at the time was openly hostile to women.  The media, which provide the context for Oprah Winfrey's leadership is a setting, which has romanticized leadership successes and failures. 

 Beyond the differences in context, Simmons, Ash, and Winfrey exemplify three attributes that play a focal role in current leadership research;  transforming/transformational leadership, emotional intelligence, and the ability to trust.

 Transformational leadership is a popular and widely researched topic in the contemporary leadership literature.  Bass (1995) built on the prior work of Burns when he proposed that the transformational leader articulates a realistic vision of the future that can be shared, stimulates subordinates intellectually, is likely to become charismatic in the eyes of their followers.  Ruth Simmons, Mary Kay Ash and Oprah Winfrey, are women who possess the elusive quality known as charisma.  These three women illustrate several specific charismatic attributes such as a transcendent vision, the ability to inspire and build confidence, rhetorical ability and a 'powerful aura.' 

The concept of emotional intelligence gained popularity with the publication of Goleman's (1995) book entitled Emotional Intelligence.  Reduced to its simplest description, emotional intelligence (EI) can be defined as a group of mental activities that help people recognize their own feelings and those of others.

 Emotionally intelligent leaders like Simmons, Ash and Winfrey demonstrate their ability to motivate themselves, persist in the face of frustration and make lasting commitments to the common good.  They are driven to perform beyond expectations and are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve.  Achievement motivation in these women combines with self-regulation that helps them overcome frustrations and setbacks.  They create an atmosphere of openness in the organizations they lead, deal with difficult issues straightforward, listen well and share information fully.

 Few aspects of a relationship are more important than trust.  Without trust, you cannot lead.  Without trust, people become self-protective and controlling.  A trusting relationship between leaders and their constituencies is essential in order to accomplish extraordinary things.  Our three women leaders, in their respective contexts, have built trust among their constituencies through caring, competence, and commitment by establishing trustworthy relationships with students and faculty, consumers, and TV audiences.  Their trust comes from character and integrity and their willingness to accept accountability for their personal and public lives.

 The fairy tale of Cinderella served as the springboard to provide a bridge between the central themes of the story and the experiences of three contemporary women leaders who bring significant, personal, cognitive and emotional competencies to their leadership.  Like many successful leaders, these women have a strong set of core values, a relentless drive for progress, and a remarkable ability to communicate their visions (Klenke, 2002,  p. 18-28)."

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Reference: Klenke, K. (2002).  Cinderella stories of women leaders: connecting leadership contexts and competencies. The Journal of Leadership Studies, 9, No 2.

The Journal of Leadership Studies is available on loan from the OSU Leadership Center.  A complete listing of all the Leadership Center's resources is available on our website http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu

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Created: 2007-11-13, Updated: 2009-02-17