Ita Buttrose is a bit of a hero of mine. She’s tenacious, successful and a woman who seems to ‘know herself’ well. Watching a re-run of the ABC TV show Australian Story recently, Ita talked about being a tough boss and what that means. For Ita it means she ‘won’t suffer fools lightly’ and wants her staff to ‘give her the absolute best they can’. She stated that “being tough doesn’t make you mean” and “doesn’t make you a difficult person to work for. It just means that within your makeup there is a certain resilience”. How fantastic is that? Ita is a great example of someone who knows how to ‘be tough’ but hasn’t lost the ability to care or ‘be nice’. It seems that many women in business struggle with that tension. They think they need to be one or the other, without understanding that to be an effective manager of people, both are required. This is not to say that men don’t struggle with similar tensions related to gender expectations (for example, not wanting to be seen as too ‘soft’). But for entrepreneurial women, there does seem to be mixed messages about what it takes to be successful. What expectations do you encounter as a female boss? Do you let those expectations shape how you operate your business and relate to staff and customers? If other people have an opinion about how women should ‘be’, you need to ignore those assumptions. It’s vital to learn to deal effectively with people (and by that I mean women often do have to learn to be ‘tougher’) but it’s also important not to be swayed by how others think you should behave.

Michelle Grice writes a weekly column for business women in The Western Weekender