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

Cassandra Was a Woman

Adam Cohen writes in today’s New York Times that ours is becoming an age of Cassandras—voices raised to warn of impending disasters that are doomed to be ignored. Clearly there’s a strong element of this in the unfolding financial crisis, but Cohen neglects to note s key fact: that the Cassandra role has traditionally been played by women.

As Julie Johnson and I note in our forthcoming book, “The Female Vision”, Cassandra was known in the Classical world as the “cursed prophetess”. She foresaw the destruction of her home country Troy, but was unable to get anyone (including her father, the King) to pay attention.

In the world of myth, Cassandra set a template for women’s best observations being overlooked and undervalued. We’ve seen that play out over several millennia since. And certainly in the present crisis, women played a particularly impressive role in articulating how a system was about to collapse!

I like that Cohen put the analogy out there into the world, but do also wish he’d mentioned the very important point, that Cassandra was most definitely a woman!

Filed under: Featured, Julie Johnson, Sally Helgesen, Workplace and Business Trends, Adam Cohen, Cassandra, early warning, Female Vision, financial crisis, Julie Johnson, New York Times, Women

Women and the Wall Street Culture

Women and the Wall Street Culture

Following the financial meltdown, I’ve had many occasions to reflect on the research Julie Johnson and I have been doing on differences in how men and women perceive, define and pursue satisfaction in their work, how they are motivated and where they find meaning. Both our interviews and our quantitative research suggest that insights gained from our study can help us understand what has happened and help lead us out of the present mess.

I was reminded of this yesterday when, following the uproar over the bonuses paid out at Merrill Lynch in the waning days of 2008, I read a piece in the New York Times written by a former Merrill banker about the culture of the bonus on Wall Street. One of his observations caught my attention: that the people he worked with felt gigantic bonuses were required because they “justified the days on end of working into the wee hours, the months on end without a single day off, the never-ending ‘fire drills’ — when a client wanted something and wanted it now, whether it was 7 p.m. or 7 a.m. — that kept the stress and adrenaline levels high.” The writer also noted that, no matter how outsized the bonus, it was perceived as satisfying only if it was bigger than what was being handed out to everyone else.

This struck me for two reasons. First, our research suggests that the high adrenaline levels he referred to have a different impact on women than on men. Neuroscientists find that women are more likely to experience excessive adrenal stimulation as highly stressful rather than motivating. Men are more difficult to motivate—their motivation point is set lower and they are more prone to distraction—so a flood of cortisol really gets them going. Women are more easily motivated, less in need to adrenal stimulation, and more likely to be pushed by cortisol into overload.

Neuroscientists also find that women’s neural networks receive more positive stimulation from social interaction than from the prospect of monetary rewards. This data is supported by our own study, which indicates that women place a high value on affiliation and connection in the workplace and a lower value on material rewards than men in similar sectors and at similar levels. Women in our study reported that achievement was important to them, but were less likely to see it in the context of competition, whereas men associates status with winning out over others.

What does all this have to do with the meltdown on Wall Street or culture of bonuses? I would suggest quite a lot. The distinguishing aspects of pre-bust Wall Street have been an habitual reliance on adrenal stimulation to motivate people; an assumption that extremely high financial rewards can compensate the most talented individuals for a daily existence based on unremitting stress; and a belief that compensation had to be based on competitive measures. Julie had in fact seen evidence of this last characteristic in her work with financial services executives. One company she observed used to hand out bonuses of, say, $1,000,001—the $1 being the signifier that that confirmed the superior status of whomever received over coworkers who received a mere $1 million.

Our research suggests that the Wall Street culture that led us into the meltdown was in part the result of male values and measures of satisfaction run wild. It’s no wonder that women Julie and I interviewed who had left Wall Street before the debacle said they had done so because “it wasn’t worth it.” They didn’t need the adrenaline and didn’t find the money an adequate compensation for the stress.

The giant bonus culture today lies in ruins, which means that Wall Street is going to have to find new ways of motivating their people. Simply throwing enormous sums of money at employees—an outmoded tactic in the age of bailouts¬¬—will no longer work. As a result, companies will be less able to “justify” the kind of inhuman work hours to which the former banker writing in the Times referred. The nature of the people who work there will begin to change as the implicit terms of their employment contract adjust to meet the demands of a different world. The notion of working 80 hour weeks (and what, in the end, did those 80 hour weeks achieve?) will no longer considered acceptable. In reforming the out-of-whack culture that led to wildly exaggerated results, what remains of Wall Street would do well to look to women, and to the values they bring to the world of work.

Filed under: Featured, Julie Johnson, Women in the Workplace, Employment, Financial services, Julie Johnson, Merrill Lynch, New York Times, Wall Street

The Satisfaction Project – Julie Johnson – Sally Helgesen

Almost five years ago, I teamed up with Julie Johnson, one of America’s most successful executive coaches, to create a project aimed at looking at differences and similarities in how men and women perceived, defined and pursued satisfaction in their work.

The project was inspired by the fact that Julie and I kept hearing the same thing from an unsettling number of very successful women who were either leaving high profile jobs or deciding to assume positions as individual contributors in their organizations—jobs that often required great skills and hard work, but did not put them on track for senior management.

What was it we kept hearing?

“It’s not worth it.”

What did this mean?

The women we talked to were in essence telling us that the tradeoffs their companies were asking them to make—in terms of time, stress, lifestyle, whatever–– were simply not worth the rewards their organizations offered.

Notice: the women were not saying they were unwilling to sacrifice their time or live with the adrenaline rush we all experience when we’re over-extended (or thrillingly involved).

They were saying that what their organizations offered in return was not sufficient reward. They did not value it enough for it to be worth it.

Of course, we did not hear this from all the women we talked to– not by a long shot. Some women joyously judged the rewards their organizations offered as well worth the effort, and embraced the opportunities they fought for with zest. Others took a stoic approach.

But we heard the “it’s not worth it” line enough, and in high enough places, that we decided we wanted to explore what these women really meant.

Why were jobs or positions that had been valued without question by generations of men viewed as not necessarily or entirely desirable by women?

As we pondered this, we began to realize was that most workplaces, most organizations, most jobs were designed in the industrial era for men, which meant that they reflected purely male definitions of worth in terms of tradeoff.

Now, there’s been a lot of focus–– research, articles, books, seminars, you name it–– on the fact that the structure of work was designed to reflect male realities (realities that we might note are changing fast). But there has been precisely nothing written about whether the rewards of work also reflect male values. When we realized this, we got excited!

What if—just supposing— women brought a different set of values with them to work? Not all women, of course, but enough to make it an issue. And what if—further drilling down on the “it’s not worth it” issue–– these values shaped women’s perception of satisfaction?

Could this be one of the reasons that organizations were still struggling to attract and above all to retain talented women? Was there some fundamental mismatch between what the market offered in terms of senior positions in the workplace and what women (again, not all women, but some really terrific ones) valued in their work?

The more we explored this idea with women—Julie’s clients, female leaders I met at leadership conferences where I was speaking, friends and colleagues from around the world–– the more we realized we were onto something quite big.

We started informally interviewing women and men on the subject. We ran a couple of focus groups. And we explored academic research from fields ranging from brain science the economics of happiness.

But we soon realized that we needed hard data if we were to really explore how women’s values and perception of what constituted satisfaction in the workplace might differ from that which shaped organizations as we know them. So Julie and I set to work developing a survey ( we call it the Satisfaction Profile Assessment ) that would enable us to identify the primary sources of sources of satisfaction that motivate people at work, so we could compare results for women and men.

We received guidance in designing the survey from Dr. Mark Fischman, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University, and from the wonderful people at American Psychological Testing. We secured some corporate support, which enabled us to have Harris Interactive run our survey out among a sample of over 800 men and women at mid and senior levels of management in corporations, associations, and government positions all over the US. And we made sure the survey enabled us to break down the data not just by gender, but also by age, industry, years of employment, and ethnic background.

What’s interesting is how many of the results of that original project’s data still apply at present. It has been extraordinary to see ideas we first batted around in conversation turned into verifiable data points. Analyzing our results has given us many, many insights about how organizations could be more skillful in their efforts to attract, retain, develop and inspire talented women by taking into consideration what women really value in their work.

This finding has big potential implications for organizations of every kind: for leaders, researchers, career development specialists, search firms, educators and trainers– the list is long.

I will be sharing this rich material with you over the next year, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Filed under: Featured, Julie Johnson, Sally Helgesen, Satisfaction Project, Women in the Workplace, Carnegie Mellon University, Corporation, Employment, Harris Interactive, Research, Women