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buy-in from people until you have bought into them.
    I could prize promptness above all, and expect everyone to show up to every meeting on time and prepared to work. You could think meetings are the worst waste of time because being out in the field getting the job done is your top priority. But we are not that far apart in our shared values. You and I both value dedication to the job, we just approach it differently. If you can demonstrate how those values fit within the broader framework for the success you envision—show that you really are shooting for the same net—suddenly you find you’re on the same side, building a team that you can lead in new directions.
    Research has found that women tend to be particularly good at finding common ground, asking the right questions, the right way, and actively listening for points of potential connection. In a 2011 survey, the Harvard Business Review examined how these “nurturing” competencies of leadership vary between women and men. Using data from 7,280 international leaders in corporate, government and organizationalspheres, private and public, it found that women significantly outscored men in their ability to inspire and motivate others, communicate powerfully, collaborate, build relationships and establish long-term goals. The idea that female leaders are naturally nurturing, sensitive and compassionate might sound like a motherhood issue, but the research discovered that women also excel in areas of taking initiative and driving results, characteristics long thought to be strengths associated with male leaders. That the Harvard Business Review , a venerable bastion of management insight, took the time to analyze these soft-touch attributes, speaks to the larger point that they have become crucial traits of modern leaders, male or female. Increasingly, being a nice guy is simply good for business.
    Whether being a woman shaped my efforts to bridge differences and build a unified team at the CBC, I can’t say. I do know that it wasn’t customary for the male leaders who came before me to leave the so-called “white fortress on Front Street” to travel across the country and ask the CBC’s own people what they thought was up with this place and how they would define success for the CBC. I made it my business to speak to as many people as I could—one-on-one, over coffee, at town halls—from television, radio, news, advertising, marketing, all departments.
    For many of the employees I talked with, “metrics” was the big worry. They feared that I’d be sitting in a corner office dictating how we’d get a million viewers an airing, and that any show that missed that mark would fall from the schedules. They were also sure that chasing ratings would mean I’d be about “dumbing down” the CBC, becausein their interpretation, popular could only mean lowbrow, which fuelled fears that the public broadcaster was about to lose its identity as the country’s hallowed purveyor of high-quality content.
    They were important conversations to have, in part because they gave me a chance to explain my broader mandate. The one-million-viewer mark was a goal, sure, but really just one step in attaining the big prize, which to my mind was, and always had been, for the CBC to really mean something to more Canadians. During the three-month lockout of CBC employees the year before I started, a discouraging Decima poll taken in the midst of the bitter labour dispute had suggested only 10 percent of Canadians missed CBC programming enough to consider the loss of it a “major inconvenience.” I wanted the network to be more vital than that. I felt Canadians deserved to have something they wanted to watch on their public broadcaster. Otherwise they’d be right to think of it as a waste of taxpayers’ money. As I told a reporter in my first interview after accepting the CBC job, my definition of success