Slideshow: The election of Pope Francis

Cardinals from around the world gathered in the Vatican to elect the next leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

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He dresses modestly, pays his own hotel bills, personally greets parishioners and insists on taking the bus with his colleagues instead of riding in his lush private car.

Pope Francis has held Catholicism’s highest position for less than a week, and yet he has already grabbed the attention of Catholics and non-Catholics alike with his humble, down-to-earth style of leadership.

Experts say it’s a smart move for a man who has just picked to lead an organization desperate to regain the public’s trust and reinvigorate its many workers. In fact, it’s something that many American chief executive officers could learn from.

“Leadership of anything means mission first and your self-interest last,” said Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “That’s the very definition of what it means to lead.”

There’s no doubt that most chief executives work hard on behalf of their employees, customers and shareholders. But experts note that in recent years, many also have become further and further removed from both the lifestyle of their employees and workings of their companies.

“Weirdly enough, in this Woodstock generation, (CEOs) are more insulated and pampered and elevated than any before,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, head of The Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management.

Many large-company CEOs travel by corporate jet and work in offices that could be thousands of miles from the shop floor, surrounded by a staff of aides and public relations experts who limit their exposure to employees, investors and the public.

It’s also no longer uncommon to demand compensation packages in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. The lavish pay was a main theme of recent protests about the growing gap between the so-called 1 percent of the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers and the remaining 99 percent of the public.

Pope Francis seems intent on going in the opposite direction. His now-famous frugal lifestyle is in contrast even to many others in the Roman Catholic Church and also is a powerful symbol of his commitment to building what he recently termed “a poor church for the poor.”

That mission comes after several years in which the church has been plagued by scandal and struggled to adjust to changing mores.

Chief executives acting in a time of crisis also can build, or ruin, their reputations depending on the examples they set.

Former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit drew accolades in 2009 when he agreed to take a salary of just $1 as the nation was grappling with a recession and the results of the financial crisis. But not long after, he was seen as a symbol of overly lavish pay when Citi’s shareholders voted down his $15 million pay package. He stepped down last fall.

It’s about perks as well as pay. Newly appointed Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer drew intense criticism from some working parents after her company’s decision to ban employees from working from home, especially when reports surfaced that Mayer had allegedly built a nursery next to her office for her own young son.

Some chief executives have found that they are able to build morale, and gain customers, by regularly mixing among their workers. Sonnenfeld noted that JetBlue Airways founder David Neeleman was known for regularly flying in coach alongside his customers and even occasionally working as a flight attendant.

The style drew a lot of acclaim, but he was replaced in 2007 after the company suffered a big black eye over storm-related travel snafus. He has since founded Azul Brazilian Airlines.

Donald Hambrick, a management professor at Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of Business who has studied CEO narcissism, said chief executives who spend time with rank-and-file employees may have more information on which to base decisions than those who only surround themselves with top execs and other CEOs.

Still, he said that to be an effective leader you also have to make clear that although you are listening to your employees and customers, you are in charge and will ultimately make the tough calls.

Hambrick said there’s no strong evidence that being humble makes you a better leader. But he also noted that there’s no evidence that being particularly authoritarian works better, either.

“If you can lead an organization without making people miserable, why don’t you do it that way?” Hambrick said. “There’s no evidence that you have to make people miserable to be a good leader.”

Related:

How the Vatican's finances work

Slideshow: Bald and beautiful

EPA. AP

Some of Hollywood's toughest leading men sport shaved heads.

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Looking for an edge at work? Break out your razor. A new study says that men with shaved heads are perceived as more dominant, more masculine, and more suited for leadership roles.

The lead researcher, Albert Mannes at the Wharton School of Business, decided to go "bare up there" in his mid-thirties when he was starting to lose his hair. And people started treated him differently. He then designed a series of experiments to test what people really thought of guys with shaved heads.

In the first tests, he showed participants pictures of similar-looking men with shaved heads and those with hair. The men without hair rated statistically significantly higher for dominance. They were also rated as being 3 years older, and slightly less attractive.

To isolate the results further, Mannes devised a second experiment. He showed a panel pictures of men with hair. He also showed pictures of the same men with their hair Photoshopped out. The panel rated the men with shaved heads higher for dominance, confidence, masculinity, and leadership potential.

But get this: The panel also said the guys with shaved heads were an inch taller and could bench-press 13 percent more weight than the guys with full hair.

Remember, these are the same guys, just with their hair digitally erased.

The third and final test used no photographs. Just words. Mannes asked subjects to read a two-sentence description of a man and rate him on the same attributes as the second experiment. The paragraph was the same each time, with one difference, whether the man was described as having a "shaved head," "thinning brown hair," or "thick brown hair."

Even when responding to just the text, the guys with the shaved heads ranked higher on those alpha-dog traits.

However, there was a much smaller margin between the "shaved" head and the "thick brown hair." The greatest difference was between "shaved" and "thinning." Which means that men with all their hair looking to jump up the ladder shouldn't rush out and go under the clipper. Only men experiencing hair loss will have a total net benefit from shaving their head. Men with all their hair who shave it all off will lose more in social and psychological ranking than they gain, said Mannes. 

So if you have luscious locks, don't let this study be the Delilah to your Samson. Keep your hair.

The big takeaway is that men who are losing their hair, Mannes said, "might better improve their well-being by finishing what Mother Nature has started," and shave it all off. It can give you social and psychological boost, and could open up pathways at work and in life.

This doesn't mean that men with shaved heads are in fact better leaders. Then again, perceptions can become reality.

"People may afford you opportunities to demonstrate your leadership if you look like someone who could be a leader. There is a reinforcement process that does happen with social perception," said Mannes. "How you're perceived affects how people treat you, which can alter your future."

But if you're experiencing male pattern baldness, a receding hairline, or thinning hair, Mannes said, "the simple act of shaving is a viable alternative to medical or surgical procedures, at a lower cost."

Best of all, if you try the look out and decide you don't like it, it's not irreversible.

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Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg delivers a keynote address at a Facebook's marketing event in February 2012.

IBM recently named Virginia Rometty as its the first female CEO, and Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg is on her way to becoming one of the richest women in technology when the company goes public.

But despite these noteworthy feats by these female leaders, the number of women chief information officers at U.S. corporations has declined for the second year in a row. It hit less than 10 percent this year, and about one-third of CIOs report they have no women in management positions working for them, according to a survey released Monday by Harvey Nash, a recruiting firm.

“There’s an overall skill set shortage in U.S., across men and women, as far as the IT space,” said Anna Frazzetto, Senior Vice President of Technology Solutions, Harvey Nash USA. But, she added, this has become even more pronounced among women, creating a growing underrepresentation problem for women in technology.

A number of factors are contributing to the dearth of women, she said, including that the industry isn’t thought of as the most social or exciting out there, and that not enough young women are choosing to study technology when they go to college.

Discrimination and preconceived notions about women’s commitment to their jobs also is contributing to the problem, she added.

The lack-of-women dilemma isn’t just a corner office issue. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women comprised only 25 percent of all computer-related occupations last year, pointed out Jenny Slade, a spokeswoman for the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Women represented about 25 percent of computer and information systems managers; 38.6 percent of web developers, and 19 percent of software developers. 

Have you and your spouse ever competed for the same job?

In 2011, women made up only about 18 percent of those getting bachelor's degrees in computer and information sciences, a percentage that's held steady for the past four years, she said.

“Unconscious bias” against women in IT is a big problem, she said, and “women don’t always know what the trajectory is to obtain a leadership role.”

A study done by the Center in 2010 found that “56 percent of women in technology leave their employers at the mid-level point in their careers.”

There are a number of factors causing women to leave, said Slade, but the top reasons were bad relationships with supervisors; feeling they were not on the fast track to promotion; feeling they don’t get credit for their work and a hostile work environment.

One women who made it to the top of the IT biz is Patricia Andersen CIO at Apartments.com. She said she was lucky to have worked for companies in her career, including Waste Management, that didn’t discriminate against women when it came to women and technology roles.

“I really haven’t worked at a place where gender was an issue in moving up,” she explained.

Apartments.com, she added, is looking to get even more women in management and one focus of the strategy will be mentoring.

“I’ve had several mentors through my life,” she noted. The mentors helped her learn one of the most important skills you need when it comes to climbing the ladder of success, she said, “how to handle political situations.” 

Women are often told if they want power they have to speak up. So you’d think women leaders are chatting up a storm in boardrooms and in the halls of Congress.

Think again.

New research finds that even among women who hold powerful positions in government and business, they’re not making their voices heard as much as their powerful male counterparts, and for good reason.

“When women get power, talking a lot is seen negatively by other people,” said Victoria Brescoll, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. “They’re seen as domineering and controlling.”

Courtesy Yale University

Victoria Brescoll

Brescoll’s study of leaders and their vocalizing is titled “Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations” and was published in the current issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.

In doing her research, Brescoll studied data from the U.S. Senate floor where the words spoken by all senators are recorded. She found that the most powerful male senators talked much more than powerful female senators.

In the study, she surmised that the difference could be a function of different genders having different ways of establishing rapport, “or because women are concerned about the potential backlash stemming from appearing to talk too much.”

The idea that women would be treated negatively if they did blab too much was supported by Brescoll’s additional research, where she had subjects rate hypothetical CEOs and politicians she created for research.

The women leaders who talked too much, according to the study, were rated as “significantly less competent and less suitable for leadership than a male CEO who was reported as speaking for the same amount.”

And both male and female participants in the study held this perception.

So should women leaders just shut up? No way, according to Brescoll.

“Women don’t do things because they anticipate a backlash, but that just reinforces stereotypes and becomes a collective action problem,” she stressed. If women don’t all join voices and start chattering away, she added, “then the stereotype will persist and we’ll continue to have this double standard at work.”

Time to start bending some ears, gals!