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

Peggy and Don, Part 1

Last week’s episode of Mad Men—episode 7, “The Suitcase”–– was the most brilliant of all, in my view, because of how it depicts the evolving relationship between Peggy and Don. As the hour unfolds, we get to watch Peggy come into her own power as a professional woman. We can actually see her improvising that role before our eyes.
Until this episode, Peggy has been the talented young creative willing to work like a dog in order to move up the ladder, sucking up endless humiliations and insults because the men around her have no clue how to deal with her as a colleague and because she has female cohorts to provide support. Yes, she’s able comes up with some innovative solutions to her situation, such as suggesting that she and a fellow copywriter who is harassing her work naked, which of course throws him off guard. But for the most part she responds to what happens to her rather than taking initiative on behalf of herself. She has absolutely no model; she is making it up as she goes along, and even she can’t be sure where it’s all heading.
But in The Suitcase, we get to watch her sense of herself develop over the course of one extraordinary and difficult night. Peggy is able to see Don’s vulnerability and remain open to that, she but does not make the mistake of offering to be his mother. By maintaining her professional distance while still feeling compassion for the mess he’s making of his life, she turns herself into an ally and a strategic protégé.
The whole turn is masterful, and the fact that it happens on the night of the Liston-Clay fight emphasizes how pivotal the change in what she is experiencing will be. Just as whites were confronted with a triumphant yet defiant “great black hope” on that night, so also is Don Draper—the epitome of sexist entitlement, though always somehow redeemable—confronted in the hours following the fight with the knowledge that a woman has the potential and the right to be his creative equal. That’s why he takes her hand toward the close of the episode: it’s not a sexual overture (for once), but a way of acknowledging that they will be allies in the future.

Filed under: Gender Communications, mad men, Women in the Workplace

Women and Happiness, Part 1

I was inspired this morning by a terrific article by Naomi Wolf in More Magazine, who writes about women and happiness. In part she was responding to Marcus Buckingham’s recent book which posited that women are becoming less happy.

Wolf put this “women are miserable” meme in exactly the right context, pointing out that every few years, we hear a lot of angst about women’s progress, especially in the workplace. We worried if it was bad for men (I heard this a lot in the 70s), we worried if it was bad for children (we all heard plenty of this in the 80s and 90s) and now we worry if it’s  bad for women themselves!

Some of this is good old backlash (though I don’t think that was Buckingham’s motivation), and some of it is just our American tendency to constantly question ourselves. And some of it is of course a consequence of the over-heated 24/7 workplace that demands so much of people right now.

But my own work leads me to believe that if women dissatisfied with work, it is  because the traditional workplace is not designed to support women’s happiness. It never was. The differences in how men and women perceive, define, and pursue satisfaction were simply not calibrated into how work was set up. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be exploring this.

What do you think?

Filed under: Women in the Workplace, Womens Leadership, Workplace and Business Trends, Marcus Buckingham, More Magazine, Naomi Wolf

Are Women Good at Supporting Other Women?

This morning I got a tweet from Kathy Caprino, who is attending @85broads event. She noted that the topic for the day was that old warhorse “Why aren’t women better at supporting other women?

I would like to share with everyone what I wrote on this subject in 2005, because clearly it is still relevant.

Here follows:

Are Women Bad at Supporting Other Women?

Sally Helgesen

Chatham, NY, May 16, 2005.

I just returned from a trip to New Orleans, where I had a blast addressing 900 members of the Junior League, mostly officers and incoming or outgoing presidents.  It was a great group, and I am convinced of the truth of the League’s self-description–– that it is indeed a leadership training organization for women.

In addition to giving a keynote, I met with the board one afternoon for one of those pick-your-brain session at which I learn as much as the people I’m there to help.  One of the questions that most often kept coming up was one that I’m frequently asked in many contexts:  Why aren’t women better at supporting one another?

This led to a lively discussion that allowed me to articulate my views on this subject better than I have been able to in the past.  What I have to say goes against the grain for many, but I want to share it with you.

First, I think women are often terrific at supporting one another.  Not always, and not all women, but in general this seems to be one of our great strengths.  Much (though not all) of the real help I’ve had in my work has come from women, who tend to be very responsible about following through on their promises and generous in sharing their resources.  And almost all of the real help I’ve had in my personal life has come from women, who listen, ask questions, think seriously, and are openhearted with their wisdom.

Yes, I’ve been burned a few times, put my trust in a few women who did not earn it.  And I’ve certainly heard horror stories from women in the workplace who have been undermined or blindsided by other women.  But is it really only women who have undermined them or failed to give them support?  Or is it that they notice it more when women don’t come through?  Perhaps we expect women to support us in ways that we don’t expect men to do, and then feel betrayed when these hopes are disappointed.

I believe this is what happens in many cases.  And I’m starting to think that this whole women-don’t-support-other-women conversation is just another way for women to bash themselves.  I’ve seen men who are terrible at supporting other men, who stab supposed friends in the back and gossip cruelly about co-workers, but I have never gone to a conference or other gathering and listened to men agonizing about why men aren’t better at supporting other men!  The notion is almost ludicrous.

I don’t think this is because men are better at being supportive, but rather because it’s not an issue for them–– they don’t expect it, and so don’t focus their concern on other men they don’t find supportive.  They just think, “he’s a jerk,” and move on.  They certainly don’t use it as an occasion to question the goodness of men in general.

But then, men aren’t usually that interested in talking about what is wrong with men, whereas women often have a strong appetite for this kind of negative self evaluation.  As I often mention in my keynotes, there’s a big market for books on what is wrong with women–– women who love too much, love the wrong people at the wrong time–– whatever.  You can find a whole wall of such books in most bookstores because women provide a market for them.  By contrast, you won’t find even a shelf of books about what is wrong with men­­ because men have no interest in the topic.

I’ve spent most of my career trying to help women focus on what they have to contribute rather than how they need to change.  I think this is the answer to the conversation now taking place about women and support.  Women need to stop accepting the cliché that they are uniquely bad about supporting one another.  It might be more helpful if we instead recognized that the underlying problem may be expecting too much from other women, requiring them to be perfect human beings and then feeling disappointed when they don’t prove to be so.

What do you think?

Filed under: Gender Communications, Uncategorized, Women in the Workplace, Womens Leadership

Culture of Risk is Still at It!

I’m often asked whether having more women in positions of power in the big financial services companies implicated might have prevented the risky and grandiose wagers that led us to disaster. After all, a Cambridge University study famously linked high risk trading behavior to surges in testosterone. In addition, the trading units and hedge funds most implicated in the continuing meltdown are precisely those units where women are most underrepresented.
But I think this equation is too simplistic. Instead, the under-representation of women in senior positions in the companies most implicated was both a consequence and a symptom of a leadership culture that had grown wildly unbalanced.
I couldn’t help but think of this when I read the NY Times’ piece today on derivatives traders (last week!!) “relaxing” at an over the top strip club during a big conference in San Francisco.  How comfortable is a woman really going to feel in a culture where this sort of thing is routine? Most women flee such an environment, and the all-male culture left behind tends to tolerate the kind of behavior that exposed all of us to a world of woe.

Filed under: Employee Engagement and Retention, Gender Communications, Women in the Workplace