(or: Why Women At The Top Are Good for Everyone )
You've heard it all before and perhaps you're getting somewhat
sick of it: the 'war for talent' There are experts who warn us of
the increasing doom and gloom for companies trying to find talented
employees, especially in knowledge based industries. Then there's
the media, running stories on the 'brain drain' of skilled New
Zealanders who have set their sights on working on faraway shores
where they can use their excellent New Zealand education to earn
lots more money. And let's not forget the employers who try to
understand what motivates 'Gen Y' so that they can entice them to
become employees and to stay for longer than five minutes.
What's this all about? Intellectuals and researchers, mainly in
the US, note that the one-dimensional view of a career as a process
of joining a company and climbing up its ranks is no longer what
employees seek. Increasingly, middle, and even senior, managers are
reluctant to take the next step up in their careers. The corporate
ladder is simply not as appealing as it used to be and the price it
demands is seen as being too high. People are now setting their own
career paths based on what they value and how they themselves
define success.
Changing expectations among the highest achievers
The Families and Work Institute (FWI), a New York based
non-profit research organisation, recently conducted a study with
the world's top 10 multinational companies such as Citicorp and
IBM. They described what they found as "troubling" for corporate
America. Fully a third of the top 100 women and a quarter of the
top 100 men interviewed in these multinationals have reduced their
career aspirations. The most common reason given by these
respondents was not a fear they couldn't perform in a more senior
role, but that they expected the sacrifices they would have to make
in their personal lives would be too great.
Here at Professionelle, we believe these trends have significant
implications for employers. This research and our own, together
with anecdotal observations, suggest to us that, from the
employee's perspective, securing a 'good' job with a commercially
successful company is no longer the goal for many highly educated
and talented job seekers. In an economic environment where the lack
of talent is having an adverse impact on growth, this is surely
something employers who are serious about their growth and future
success must take heed of.
The most desirable employees are increasingly seeking to work
for companies who have more to offer to society and the individual.
They want to work for firms whose values they relate to, values
that align with their own. And equally as relevant, they want to
feel respected and valued for who they are, and what they
contribute.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Being respected at your workplace is integral to a healthy
working life.
Wharton University Management Professor Sigal Barsade, found in
a recent study of workers in long term healthcare facilities that
employees experience the highest levels of burnout when they don't
feel respected or valued by the organisation they work for. Barsade
concluded that it is often not the demands of job per se, nor even
the individual's personality, that burns employees out, but the
organisation and its culture.
The researchers also found that the impact of organisational
respect on burnout is felt most strongly when job autonomy is low.
People are most likely to burn out when working in high pressure
environments, with little control over how they structure their
work. The effect is exacerbated when the company they work for
doesn't respect them as individuals. Sound familiar? And so, highly
talented employees are voting with their feet.
They can do this because they've gained the experience and
developed their own personal brands - which is what most corporates
and professional services firms expect them to do.
Are employers responding?
Employers are beginning to recognise and acknowledge that if
they want to attract the best talent, they need to offer something
'more'. Increasingly, they're presenting job candidates with
beautifully-bound corporate values statements. They point to their
'employee support' policies, that might involve an assigned
internal mentor to guide new hires through the complexities of the
organisation. Perhaps they note their 'family friendly' policies,
which may include the possibility of working 'flexi-time'.
Unfortunately, there is a big gap in most organisations between
the formal aspects of the culture (the policy book, the values
statement etc) and the real culture. A company's culture
can be described as the unwritten norms and values which determine
how employees are treated as individuals. And the best indicator of
a culture is to see what behaviours are reinforced in the
workplace.
So, short of knowing someone who works for a potential employer,
and who is willing to 'spill the beans', how can you, the
prospective employee, know that what is being sold to you is for
real?
Bellewethers
To find out where the herd was headed, shepherds used to hang a
bell around a wether's neck. Where this male sheep led, bell
clanging, the flock would be sure to follow. He was a guide to the
location of the flock, and a predictor of where it would head
next.
Why this diversion into animal husbandry? Because, at
Professionelle, we believe that an excellent indicator of the real
culture of an organisation is the number of senior women at the
executive level of the organisation. If you can see a group of
these bellewethers - not just one token female who is
rolled out at any occasion where the organisation feels it needs to
show its 'feminine side' - but 30% plus of senior executives who
are women, then we predict you are onto a promising
organisation.
What leads us to make this claim?
Three reasons actually -
- Women have more socially acceptable choices than men.
- Men will put up with a lot more than women will.
- Women are more likely to shy away from a highly competitive
environment even if they can win. And they are more likely to
prosper in environments that encourage and endorse feminine
leadership styles.
We believe that taken together, these points suggest that if an
organisation has the bellewether factor of a significant portion of
senior women, then this is a sign that it has to be
offering something different to your average company.
1. Women's choices
We argue that in today's world, women have more socially
acceptable choices than men. This is to us one of the most
important legacies of the feminist revolution. Women can choose to
have children and stay home, they can choose to have children and
work full or part time, or they can choose not to have children at
all. They can start their own businesses or become contractors. And
every one of those choices, at least in New Zealand, is seen as
valid and acceptable by society.
Faced with all those options, some highly talented and capable
women choose to stay in companies and advance to senior
positions. And in today's tight labour market they can also decide
where they'll do it. They are more likely to choose companies that
align best with their own personal values and that can help them
meet the demands their life choices place on them.
2. Putting up with rubbish
Lets face it, men, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years have
been socialised to take on roles and jobs that can be lethal. From
soldiers, to coal miners, to deep sea oil exploration to name but a
few.
Women, on the other hand, have been socialised to care for the
new generation and thus actively discouraged from taking on roles
that may jeopardize that nurturing role.
Of course, there are exceptions that show how some women do
thrive at taking risks that may even involve placing their lives in
jeopardy. But the point is that until very recently this was not an
option open to women in most societies.
We believe that one consequence of these societal patterns is
that men in the modern corporate workplace are more willing (and
perhaps able) to tolerate the rubbish that goes on. We're talking
about the long working hours, the highly competitive environment,
the political game playing and subtle put-downs that readers who
have spent some time in corporates and/or big professional services
firms will recognise.
Take law, for example. We've chosen it because of the long hours
required to 'make it' and the heavy proportion of men in senior
positions in most large private practice firms.
The results of a recent study conducted with 2400 New Zealand
lawyers by professional services consultancy Team
Factors in association with the Corporate Lawyers Association,
publisher Thomson-Brookers and recruitment firm Law Staff,
demonstrate this point beautifully. Of the lawyers who worked in
private practice, approaching one in three of the women surveyed
rated the effectiveness of their organisation's practices in
looking after staff as 'very poor' or 'poor'. This compared with
agreement from just under one in five of their male
counterparts.
These women are also far more likely to be exercising their
choices. Just over half of the women lawyers surveyed in private
practice were either open to the possibility of a new job or
actively seeking one! This compared to only over a third of their
male colleagues.
3. Competition and feminine leadership styles
Many corporate environments and large professional services
firms are highly competitive. Arguably, it is that competitive
drive that has successfully delivered good bottom line results.
Unfortunately, most women, including the most talented ones,
don't flourish in these environments.
Muriel Niederie, a Stanford University economist, found in her
research on gender attitudes towards competition, that even when
women perform as well as men on a task, they are more likely to
underrate their performance compared with poorly-achieving men.
These high-performing women are also less likely to select a
competitive setting next time than the poor performing men.
To us, this means that men favour a competitive setting even if
their ability is low, while women avoid a competitive setting even
if their ability is high!
Muriel and her colleagues concluded that, "Women may shy away
from competition simply because they dislike being in an
environment where they have to compete. That is, even though they
may be very good at something, they might still not want to compete
on it."
Women are also more likely to have a "feminine" leadership style
which is described as more relationship-oriented and "democratic".
By comparison, the traditional "masculine" leadership style tends
towards assertive and task-based behaviours.
Anne Cummings, a professor of business administration at the
University of Minnesota, found that the culture of an organisation
or even that of a division, can determine the degree to which a
woman's own leadership style fits. She argues that,
If your leadership style is more feminine and you
are in a masculine culture, you have more role incongruity - the
expectation that a person will act a certain way based on his or
her gender. When someone does not meet that expectation, perception
of leadership ability can wane, regardless of the leader's actual
effectiveness. You may not be that effective because the people
around you will perceive you as not fitting.
The catch is that even if a woman has a more "masculine"
leadership style and is working in a masculine environment, she's
still likely to be rated as less effective than men, because she's
acting in away that is incongruent with her gender role! Damned if
you are, in other words, and damned if you're not.
Taking this research together with our own experience suggests
that women are much more likely to flourish in environments that
are not aggressively competitive, where their leadership styles are
valued and where they can behave in ways that are true to who they
are. And in today's economy, the highly educated, talented and
successful women are in a position to choose these
environments.
Why women at the top are good for everyone
At a time when there are more jobs for highly experienced people
than ever before and where women have real choices, it is
noteworthy that they choose to stay and progress in some
organisation rather than others.
Job seekers could ask themselves what is it about those
organisations that makes them different from others in the same
industry or profession that have few women at the top. They may or
may not find those differences attractive, but this highly visible
outward sign of an organisation's culture is worth serious
consideration by the savvy job/career seeker.
Companies should also examine this highly visibly sign of their
culture and ask themselves what this says about them and their
prospects to attract and retain the best talent in the long run. A
lack of bellewethers could well prove be a leading indicator of
future difficulties to hire and retain the best and brightest.
© Professionelle Ltd 2007