This is silly. Don't reduce me to some risk averse weakling because I'm not willing to put my neck out for strangers for little to no reward. If you're like that, and you regularly go to Africa to help people, more power to you. I'm not. Most people are not.
No good leader is taking unnecessary risks. In fact, if you study history, taking unnecessary risks has been the downfall of many otherwise great leaders
That's a very subjective definition of unnecessary risk. Clearly there are potential rewards (ev+ if you're into poker or ai) in starting your own company.
Helping a stranger get promoted? At the risk of ending your career (a massive loss for most people)? With the only reward being feeling good for Doing The Right Thing (tm)? Not so much
Okay then. It took you a while, and a few unnecessary (ho ho ho) downvotes of my posts but we finally agree: The smart move for any male leader is to never spend any 1on1 time with female subordinates, and unfortunately ignore how that might affect her career
How you reach that conclusion and seem to claim that to be an inevitable/logical chain of reasoning is literally beyond my understanding. I started this subthread with the claim that an interesting life is full of risks and that leaders must be willing to take risks that do not have any obvious selfish benefit.
For the record, I have not downvoted a single one of your posts. (You can't downvote posts that are in reply to one of your own anyway, but I haven't downvoted any others either.)
Definitely. But what are you supposed to do? "Don't overstep boundaries", sure, but that's not a very practical advice. In this life you will overstep sometimes. Like bugs in code, it's unfortunate, but unavoidable.
I wouldn't risk my career for a man, so why should I risk it for a woman? The rational thing seems to be playing it safe.
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." (John Shedd, but sidelong relevant to this thread was also cited several times by Grace Hopper in interviews).
If you take the apparent maximally safe course of action at every turn in life, you probably won't achieve much. It's risky to change jobs, to break up with your current partner, to start dating someone, to have kids, to buy a house, to change cities, to pick a college/major, to pick an initial career, to drive in the rain, to play recreational sports, to travel to a different country, to eat sushi, and 100s of other times in any given year.
If you are willing to do something important (and work-related) for a man that you are not willing to do for a woman, IMO, you should not be in a position of leadership.
