What does a women's "leadership revival" meeting look like?
After I got an intriguing e-mail invitation ("Girl power - like never before!") to the "first ever women's leadership revival" informing me that almost 300 women had signed up, I rushed over to an uptown Toronto theatre one afternoon last week.
I was half-hoping for a praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-empowerment atmosphere. Or maybe a spiritual spa, where your cares and woes are exfoliated and you suddenly feel refreshed (or, like Barack Obama, fired up and ready to go!).
The meeting turned out to be a slightly more subdued charity event - albeit one that offered simple tips to females of all ages, starting as young as 11, on how to be a leader in improving the world.
The dialogue was centred on how women's lives are unfolding on both the big and small stage. The big stage is global and depressing, according to the grim statistics offered up by the leader of the "revival," American organizational expert Margaret Wheatley: Women do 65 per cent of the world's work but earn 5 per cent of the world's resources; women make up 70 per cent of the world's illiterates and 70 per cent of the world's poor; and women are the fastest-growing group of people newly infected with HIV.
Dr. Wheatley is the founder of the Berkana Institute, a non-profit organization that helps women around the world improve their own circumstances with local leadership projects, including sustainable food and microcredit. She quotes former United Nations director general Kofi Annan: "The future of the world depends on women." The idea: The world will be a better place only when the status of women has been improved.
In the 1990s, Dr. Wheatley was hailed as the author of one of the best business books of the decade (Leadership and the New Science), but whatever the ethos of this gathering was, it certainly wasn't corporate. She now describes herself alternately as a "spiritual warrior" and a "lunatic," eschewing all business clichés and instead saying simply, "a leader is anyone who is willing to help."
She offered four basic steps to changing the world: Notice what you care about, start, learn as you go and stay together. If it's founding a community support group for your child's medical problem or implementing a global initiative, that's how leadership begins.
Coincidentally, CBC's The National last week aired the inspiring story of Lorrie Williams, now a city councillor in New Westminster, B.C., who went to Kenya as a teacher 25 years ago and ended up starting an organization that has helped educate almost 3,000 Kenyan girls. This isn't Oprah-scale largesse; this is ordinary women deciding to help.
But the problem, as always, is how to connect the privileged lives of North American women to, say, women in Zimbabwe, who, according to the New York Times, have a shocking average life expectancy of 34 because of the AIDS epidemic.
Dr. Wheatley recalled a visit with a group of South African women and girls, during which she half-jokingly described her own contingent as "very tired Western women." Her South African host was welcoming but perplexed: "What we want to know is what Western women have to be so tired about?"
Everyone in the Toronto audience laughed in embarrassed recognition. What do we have to be tired about? (Maybe we're tired of complaining.) I run into many people these days - primarily women of a certain age - longing to step out their lives and do more for others. They're just trying to figure out how to do it.
So, Dr. Wheatley challenged us to imagine a "big" question we could ask ourselves each day for 30 days to "keep focused and honest." Some women seemed more perfect than real: One said hers would be, "Have I been a blessing to anyone today?" Another added: "Am I an oasis of possibility?"
But other women were endearingly flawed. Members of one office team from the hospitality sector, including a lawyer and a senior manager, were suddenly embarrassed by how "self-focused" they were. One woman, whose sister is in hospital, said she would ask herself every day, "What are my priorities? Another, with a newly diagnosed diabetic son and a promotion, wondered, "How can I best perform my new job tasks?" And a third, in hijab, mused, "How do I become independent?"
I liked these "self-focused" questions better because while they weren't "what the hell am I making for supper," they did speak the truth: Even in privileged North America, no matter how big-hearted and committed women are to helping others, everyday life can suck your good intent right out of you.
Outside the theatre, Dr. Wheatley looked tired as she waited for her ride to the airport. She was taking her tour on to Vancouver. She said she thought women everywhere needed help reviving their spirits.
"If your spirits don't need reviving, then good for you," she called after me a bit anxiously as I left. She needn't have worried. What I was really thinking, as I walked away, is that in the tug of war between "me and we," this was a good day for "we."
jtimson@globeandmail.com
