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

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

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

Gender Asbestos

As Kellye Whitney points out in her post in Diversity Executive , there has been far too much focus on the problems of developing women leaders and not nearly enough on the opportunities, the potential upside. Kellye is picking up on the big debate started by Avivah Cox in her recent response to the Harvard Business Review’s negative stream of articles on the subject. Avivah has really gotten things going here!

Filed under: Featured, Management, Workplace and Business Trends, Add new tag, Business, Education, Harvard Business Review, Harvard University

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