Will Client Pressure be the Tipping Point for Women?

I’ve been working with companies on developing women leaders for the past 20 years. In that time, I’ve seen women’s programs and leadership initiatives go through 3 stages. Each has used a different strategy and each has been driven by different concerns. As you’ll see, I believe we’re at a point where women’s leadership initiatives are about to get more serious and more effective because the concern driving them has become a real imperative.

In Stage One, though much of the 1990s, companies were mostly focused on attracting high quality women.

Most experts in this period believed that women’s leadership was a pipeline issue: if you could get enough good women in the door, you would automatically have women positioned for leadership in 10-15 years time. As long as a company made sure that the numbers were good, and that the women coming in had opportunities to develop their skills and perceived the company as a good place to work (flex time, a lack of obvious discrimination), the problem of women’s leadership would take care of itself.

The impetus behind women’s programs in these years often came from a desire to be compliant with government or industry mandates requiring workforce equality. It also came from a recognition that women worked better in companies that they perceived as fair.

In Stage Two, which lasted from the late nineties until 2009, women’s initiatives began to focus on retention rather than attraction as companies and experts began to realize that just feeding the pipeline was never going to be enough.

Although more and more companies—especially professional service firms—were hiring at parity (that is, near 50 percent), women were still not making it to the top in proportion to their numbers.The result was the widely noted “Female Brain Drain” noted by fellow Forbes blogger Sylvia Ann Hewlett. Quite simply, many of the best women–– the women with the most choices–– were leaving companies that had hired and in many cases nurtured their talent.

As Julie Johnson and I found in our book The Female Vision, many of these women had grown weary of battling a difficult culture and had decided that what they were doing “just wasn’t worth it.” They didn’t want out of the workforce, but they did want work that felt more intrinsically satisfying—work that gave them more ability to control their pace, more capacity to develop rewarding relationships with customers, clients, and colleagues.

Companies that began women’s initiatives in this era were usually motivated by the recognition that they were wasting resources and talent. Despite the recession kicked off in 2008, many leaders were recognizing that their dependence on talent was structural in a knowledge economy. It didn’t make sense to invest in employees only to have them leave, so companies began to turn attention to what they could do to keep good women. They set mentoring programs in place and began to adapt principles of workforce customization such as were detailed in Anne Weisberg and Kathy Benko’s research.

Stage 3, in my view, is just beginning, and we’re not sure just what it’s going to look like yet. My guess is that instead of focusing on retention, companies are going to be trying to figure out how to strategically integrate their women’s initiatives into their long-term business goals.

In other words, they’re going to be moving beyond a silo’d hr-based approach (attraction, retention, flex time), and looking at the big picture: where are they going and what specifically can women provide that will help them get there?

Why do I think this? How dare I be optimistic in a time of such uncertainty? For a simple reason: I think the pressure to move women into meaningful leadership positions is coming from a much more powerful source these days: it’s coming clients. I hear more and more stories about potential client pushback to heavily male leadership these days.

For example, I recently interviewed the male CEO of a computer components company. The company is heavily male, but it has never regarded this as a problem because it is privately owned and women are not a top priority with the founders, who still hold the majority of stock. But the CEO got a wake-up call recently when he made a major client call at one of the world’s largest purchasers of components.

The CEO said, “I walked into that meeting with a team of 9 engineers, all white males. The client’s VP for purchasing was an African-American woman, and the team she had in place was highly diverse. I knew who she was, but I had never thought of it making a difference for us until I walked into that room. I saw immediately, having 9 white guys here isn’t going to count in our favor because it makes us look like we’re behind the curve, like either we can’t hire women or we can’t keep them around. At that moment I got it: more and more people in client leadership positions come from different backgrounds and this is not going to change. And if we don’t change, we’re going to stand out like a sore thumb.”

Client skepticism is something executives take seriously. I think it’s going to lead us to a very different place in terms of the efforts companies make to develop the best talents of their women. In my next blog, I’ll explore what this means for different kinds of companies.

Filed under: Julie Johnson, leadership, Sally Helgesen, Women in the Workplace, women's advancement, Workplace and Business Trends , Sylvia Ann Hewlett, The Female Vision

Women and the Art of Self-Marketing

For many women, self-marketing can be a challenge. This is because women often underplay the value of what they bring to the table—their skills, their insights, their achievements, their capacity to lead. This kind of modesty has often held women back in organizations, but the need to use social media professionally makes it overcoming a reluctance to self-market more important.
I first got a picture of how this reluctance created problems when I worked on a study of women partners in professional service firms, such as law, accounting, investment banking and consulting. When I asked the women partners about the strengths of younger women in their firms, most of them said that the younger women did outstanding work: meticulous, dependable, A-plus” were typical descriptions.
When I asked the women partners what the younger women were worst at, their responses were also consistent: “They are worst at letting people know about the quality of the work they do.’
I tested this out on the younger women to see if it resonated for them. Most agreed that it did. “I’m just not comfortable blowing my own horn” was a typical response. Though I see evidence that this is improving in my work with women in organizations, I still routinely hear women describe themselves as poor self promoters.
I’ve been pretty good at helping clients address this roadblock because I too have a voice in my head which suggests that promoting myself is somehow unbecoming. A part of me is always hoping that other people will recognize my contributions without my having to do the work of drawing their notice.
It would be nice if the world worked this way, but it rarely does. If we want to be recognized in an increasingly crowded and hectic environment, we have to take responsibility for making it happen.
This has always been true in organizations, but now it’s also true in a much bigger arena—the expanded professional space that social media provides. Social media offers every one of us a forum for letting the world know what we have to offer, a means for building a public professional profile based on our actual achievements and blasting it out to the world.
Empty bragging of course gets notoriously punished in the social media space, sometimes in withering comments and sometimes by generating a lot of “hide this post” clicks. But digital hot-dogging is not the same as reality-based representation of real achievements, skills and legitimate honors.
They key is finding the midpoint between overly modest self-effacement and tiresome and relentless self-congratulation. It’s a tough sweet spot to find but we can do so if we make a clear distinction between self-marketing and self-promotion.
My friend Marshall Goldsmith, the famous coach, talks a lot about self-marketing. He points out that if you had a product you thought was terrific, you’d want people to know about it because you’d figure that knowing about it would be of benefit to them. If Frontline Plus got rid of your dog’s ticks you wouldn’t be shy about sharing the news—you’d want people to have the information so they could do what’s right for their dogs.
And if you were the manufacturer of Frontline Plus, you wouldn’t just hope people found out about it on their own, you’d want to help them do so. You’d need to be accurate and avoid ridiculous claims—and you’d need to avoid bombarding people with unwanted solicitations and information. But you’d want to make sure people got the message.
The same principal applies to what we are genuinely good at in our professional lives. Giving people accurate information is a kind of service. Sharing what we have to offer with the world in an honest and straightforward way that keeps it real is both a responsibility and a good thing. It’s not just blowing our own horn, it’s adding to the sum of the world’s information. As Ina Garten would say, what’s not to like?

Filed under: Uncategorized

The importance of shoes

I am thrilled to celebrate International Women’s Month by sharing this slide show of Chanel’s Paris show this week: http://tiny.cc/mts4r. Yes, the clothes, while gorgeous, are sometimes a bit gloomy– all that black just when we were getting used to colors. But the big news is that, contrary to the other shows, the models on this runway are all sporting wearable shoes— shoes that you can walk not just to your front door in but could actually wear on a walk. Okay, some of the combat boots are a bit clunky, but there’s nothing outrageous about this footwear– no 9 in heels, no absurd platforms, no clubby looking feet, no models tripping on the catwalk. All the monstrosities in the other shows suddenly look outdated as well as hideous. A good sign of things ahead!

Filed under: Chanel, fashion, International Women's Day, shoes , Chanel, International Women's Day, platform shoes

Seeding Egypt’s Rise

John Kuo has written about the links between the 60′s counterculture and the entrepreneurial/tech boom that started in the 80s. Now this morning he writes in the Daily Beast about how Egypt’s homegrown and peaceful revolt may jump start a wave of entrepreneurialism in the Middle East http://tiny.cc/e82zm.
This reminded me of 1997, when I was lucky to spend a month in Cairo evaluating a number of UNDP projects in the region. My favorite was a non-profit called RITSEC (Regional Information Technology and Software Engineering Center) that focused on building tech skills and providing email access to young Egyptians, and creating a regional database of documents in Arabic. I remember sitting in the beautiful old crumbling palace where the group was house, amid palm trees and orange blossoms on Zamalek, and listening to the director describe how one day the internet– still in dial-up phase in the US– might provide a way for young people in the Middle East to feel more powerful and connected. When I feel besieged by tech overload, I like to think of this. Kuo’s piece this morning filled me with joy.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Workplace and Business Trends , Daily Beast, John Kuo

Leadership Guru # 15

I was thrilled this morning to open an email from the Athena Group and find I had been named the #15 most influential leadership guru in the world! http://tiny.cc/bu9uz I see great friends of mine like Marshall Goldsmith, Tom Peters, and John Baldoni also on the list. These wonderful guys routinely get awards, but this one means a lot to me. And I take it as a sign that the divide between “leadership expert” and “women’s leadership expert” that I’ve been trying to bridge for 22 years may finally be eroding!

Filed under: Gender Communications, leadership , John Baldoni, Marshall Goldsmith, Tom Peters