IN the opening paragraphs of her new book, Rebecca Holman describes a familiar scenario. In an office meeting dominated by big voices and still larger egos, one woman sits quietly. Yet in contrast to her louder male colleagues, she is performing brilliantly. “While they’re getting sucked into a pointless argument,” writes Holman in Beta: There’s More Than One Way To Be The Boss, “she’s trying to solve the problem. And, to save time, she’ll probably email her thoughts after the meeting ... She realises she may not get credit for solving the problem, like that, but it’s the easiest way to do it.”

The character Holman is describing is what she calls a beta woman. It’s women like these, the author believes, women like herself, who are often quietly running things.

But what does she mean by beta? Most of us think have some idea of what an alpha male is. It’s Julius Caesar, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, James Bond, William the Conqueror. Ever since the 1960s, when a theory of alpha male behaviour among chimpanzee social groups began to be applied to humans, the term has been used to describe a brash, macho, boss man. Last year, Nigel Farage even defended Donald Trump’s obscene bragging about groping women – “When you’re a star they let you do ... do anything. Grab ’em by the p*** –– as “alpha male boasting” and compared him to a silverback gorilla. But less attention is given to betas. And a beta male, or beta female, is just the next person down the pecking order from the alpha, the sidekick, the deputy, the subordinate.

At one point Holman describes herself thus: “I’m a good sidekick: I’ll always help to realise someone else’s ambition even if it’s at odds with my own – if that’s what it takes to keep the peace (this isn’t necessarily a good thing) – and I find relinquishing control and ultimate responsibility to someone else ultimately quite freeing.”

In keeping with her inclusive, beta attitude, Holman says of her book: “I didn’t want it to be only about a certain type of woman. I wanted it to be about how as women, we don’t get that kind of latitude. I feel like women, all women, are only allowed to present themselves in a certain way in the workplace.”

It may come as surprise therefore to learn that 34-year-old Holman is currently editor of the Debrief digital magazine, and editorial director of Bauer Xcel lifestyle titles online, which includes Grazia, Closer, Heat and Mother And Baby online, all of which would make one suspect she must be fairly alpha, and nobody’s sidekick. Holman recalls that the germ of the idea for the book came from a Telegraph article she wrote in early 2016, titled: “Are you a ‘beta woman’ like me? Here’s how to be the boss – without screaming.”

“When you’re a female editor,” she says, “people expect you to have that Miranda Priestly [the terrifying editor played by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada] or Anna Wintour [the famous American Vogue editor thought to have inspired her], alpha character and I absolutely do not have that. I also felt that people were a bit disappointed in that. They wanted me to be this slightly legendary character that I wasn’t.”

The article set out to answer the question: “Do you have to be alpha to be a good boss?” But, as Holman began to research, it became “much more about, women in the workplace, partially because I wanted to give a voice to all women at work”.

Subtitled “Quiet girls can run the world”, her new book is the story of how one type of person, the “alpha male” (or alpha female), tends to get all the glory in our culture, and is considered the paradigm of success, while another, the beta, gets on with doing a good job relatively unnoticed. This, Holman argues, should not be so.

What Holman is really trying to do is expand our image of what success is, to point out that there is a different way of leading, empathetic and communal in approach, which simply isn’t acknowledged or prized enough in our culture. “The traits that are found more often in women than in men aren’t those that are considered traditional markers of success,” she writes. “There’s a simple reason why our view of success is so bizarrely narrow. Men have always dominated the workplace and still do. Of course we automatically – wrongly – use traditionally male traits as markers for professional success and rarely question it.”

These traits may be learned behaviours, and not essential to either men or women, but nevertheless the statistics reveal a difference in their distribution. “Everyone I spoke to,” she observes, “and all the reading I did around it, concluded that there’s a slight bias towards alpha behaviour in men and a slight bias towards beta behaviour in women. And how much of that bias is down to learned behaviour we don’t know.”

Is she saying that beta women, or beta men, can be as good, perhaps better leaders, than alphas? “100 per cent,” she says. Yet, in the media and in the public eye, she observes, that’s not often what we see. “I think when you look at what we expect a good leader to be it is still very much the classic American general idea, leading from the front, really dogmatic and focused, someone who makes quick decisions and is quite forceful. And in some circumstances that is really what you need. But not always.”

At her book’s heart is an attack on the idolisation of alpha behaviour in our culture. “What is wrong currently,” she says, “is the overvaluing of extreme alpha males in particular, and without question. This doesn’t happen so much with alpha females. When you think of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, she was written off as too alpha, and he was just alpha enough apparently, which is bizarre.”

Holman also lists examples of alpha bosses, mainly men, who have been disastrously poor, or dangerous – Trump, being one.

Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, was once forced to apologise after he was caught on camera saying to one of his drivers who had complained about the company’s pay rates and business model: “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”

As Holman points out: “Kalanick went on to say that he realised he needed to change as a leader and receive help. We have no way of knowing how sincere he was in his apology, but it’s interesting that he knew he needed to make it, that his brash, arrogant (and extremely alpha) leadership model wasn’t impressing anyone even if it worked for him in Uber’s fast-moving, fast-growing early years.”

But is Holman really all that beta? After all she does television appearances, public speaking, is boss of a team of alpha women, all of which would suggest more than a hint of the alpha. And there’s also something very alpha about the fact that she’s written this book and is now being interviewed about it. “I have to put a bit of an alpha front on in order to do that. You have to project a certain level of confidence.”

She describes how, while researching the book, she did a personality theory test with a career coach, who told her, “You’re basically like the most beta person on the planet.” That was a relief, says Holman, because it “confirmed what I thought I knew about myself”.

One of the odd things about Holman’s book is that, for all it’s explicitly about beta women, she never seems to really take seriously the whole notion of alpha and beta types. From the very first page she admits that the whole alpha v beta paradigm is reductive, and she never bothers to look at other social group hierarchies, outside the workplace – in the playground or the family – or investigate any of the chimpanzee theory from which the whole alpha male/female notion comes, and in which alpha female behaviour looks very different from alpha male behaviour.

It turns out, meanwhile, that very few of the women she talks to identify entirely with being either beta or alpha. “I interviewed tonnes of women for the book,” says Holman, “and what I found really interesting is that none of them could tell me if they were alpha or beta. Everyone thought they had elements of alpha-ness and beta-ness at different points.”

Even women who appear extremely alpha, she observes, tend to see at least a bit of beta in themselves. She gives the example of her mother, Jackie Holman, who features strongly in the book, and was, formerly, a company secretary, good at her job, successful. She worked, while Holman’s father was, for some time, a stay-at-home father. “I’m pretty sure all my mum’s colleagues would have viewed her as an alpha woman,” says Holman. “She’s very articulate, decisive and precise in how she talks and deals with people. She isn’t afraid of making difficult decisions.” Yet, she observes, her mother always characterised herself as beta.

So, who are the beta women currently in the limelight, the quiet girls who are running the world? Holman says when she was writing the book, she struggled to think of almost any in the public eye. Most of the high-profile women who came to mind, from Hillary Clinton through to Angela Merkel, and also looking back in history to Margaret Thatcher, were alphas. The one person she did come up with was Bridget Jones, not even a real person, but a fictional character. “Or there’s [Sex And The City character] Carrie Bradshaw.”

However, she believes, behind the scenes beta women are responsible for making sure swathes of companies run well. They are the working world’s unsung heroes, who prove, day after day, that you can make good decisions without shouting anyone down. The skills and approaches they bring to the workplace, meanwhile, are increasingly being valued. The World Economic Forum’s 2016 job report highlighted emotional intelligence as one of the top 10 skills required in the workplace by 2020.

A phenomenon that features large in her book is Imposter Syndrome, which is the term used to describe the feeling many women have that they do not deserve their success and are somehow frauds. Every single one of the women she interviewed, she says, said they had struggled with it at some point. “I think that in itself is really telling. I never hear it from men. It’s such a female thing. No matter how well we’re doing, if you’re not that person who can come in and be decisive, and inspire confidence, and also terrify everyone, and always clear their in-box and always get to the gym at 5am in the morning and do all this amazing networking, it’s like you’re failing.”

Holman mentions the gym a lot. She doesn’t like it. It appears she has a problem with those women that get up early, get down there and post on social media about their work-outs. Part of being beta, it seems for her, is also about not getting involved in the endless race to prove yourself. Indeed, her ultimate message is to cut women some slack; to tell them it’s not necessary to live up to this narrow image of success. “I think the way we’re told to look and behave,” she says, “is so homogenous that most of us can’t match up to that. And if we’re all trying to fake it all the time, that’s exhausting.”

We should learn, in other words, to stop worrying and love our inner, or even outer, beta. “Most of us,” says Holman, “don’t have the strength or weaknesses of the classic alpha CEO. We’ve got different strengths and weaknesses, and so if we try and accept that, who we are, and know how we work and what we do well and what we don’t do well, and work within those parameters, we would all just be a lot happier.”

Beta: There’s More Than One Way To Be The Boss is published by Coronet, £18.99