I have a confession to make. Men who are highly empathic, soft-spoken, and extremely agreeable make me nervous. I was given reason for this self-reflection today on reading the most recent bargaining post at Harvard’s Program on Negotiation blog.

According to the brainiacs who study these things, women who are able to read the emotional state of others and satisfy their behavioral expectations are more effective team leaders and better negotiators than either their empathy-deficient female or empathy-enabled male colleagues.

As the Harvard post notes, studies by B-School professors Francis Flynn and Daniel Ames, have demonstrated that women who were best able to read their work team’s emotions and alter their own behavior to please them, were rated as being more persuasive, better leaders and more efficient conflict resolvers than their stiff-necked peers.

In a second study, Flynn and Ames found that female people-pleasers not only “outperformed women who didn’t see themselves as especially adaptive” to other’s expectations, but also outperformed people-pleasing men.

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