How Empowering Women Improved Our Agency

Here was our situation three years ago: women made up two thirds of our employee base, but only one third of our executive ranks.

This problem was not unique to us. In today’s business world there remain serious structural and societal obstacles and individual mindsets impeding women’s advancement. According to the most recent reports from Catalyst, women currently hold 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions and 5.3 percent of Fortune 1000 CEO positions. In the PR industry, women make up two-thirds of the workforce. Yet of the top 13 largest PR firms globally, only four have a female CEO.

At Edelman, our pipeline of senior women with global credentials, experience in multiple business areas and management experience was much too thin. We had senior women who were doing fantastic jobs of managing large clients, running offices or practice areas such as health. But we also had senior women whose growth had stagnated or had departed the firm.

We asked Gail Becker, one of our most senior executives, to take on the problem. She understood that we needed to establish operating principles. First, we needed to take this on as a business priority, not a feel good exercise. Second, we had to establish a baseline and then measure our progress in a transparent manner. Third, we had to move beyond mentorship to sponsorship, whereby women are pushed forward through the active intervention of top executives who help to create a path to the top. Unlike mentorship that happens through direct interaction, we continue to promote a culture of sponsorship, encouraging leadership to advocate on an employee’s behalf. As such, we established a bold goal: to have 50 percent of our senior leadership be women by 2016.

Our Global Women's Executive Network (GWEN), which I detailed in my keynote address to the 2014 International Women in Business Summit last Friday at my alma mater, Harvard University, is a formal program to enable women to rise to senior leadership positions at the firm.

Edelman now has global conference calls every quarter featuring a senior female executive from outside the firm, including clients and thought leaders. We have local events, such as a recent one in Toronto, where we invited senior staff and their clients to each bring a mentee for an evening exchange of ideas and best practices. On International Women’s Day, we’ve established a global minute-mentoring program, which is like speed-dating for junior staff to meet with and learn from top female (and male) executives at Edelman.

There are now 850 members of the GWEN network (including a few men who are joining me as major proponents of the initiative). We have improved our statistics steadily: women now make up 41 percent of senior leadership, up from 33 percent at the program’s beginning. Our biggest lines of business - technology, consumer marketing and health - are all run by women. Our program to manage our largest clients is run by a woman. Our biggest office, New York, is now run by a woman, as is the Western Region of the U.S. A woman runs our global strategic partnerships program. And seven of our largest accounts are led by women. We have a global fellows program that takes promising young talent into exchange assignments between developed and developing markets; 60 percent of the fellows are women, preparing them for future leadership opportunities.

And, perhaps most importantly, we have put succession plans into place by developing women through opportunities and experiences in geographies, global practices and global client management. For example, when the CEO of Edelman Germany said she wanted to try something new, after having tripled the business in Germany, we gave her an audacious challenge: move to Mumbai, India, as the vice chairman of Edelman Asia Pacific, and develop the region’s consumer business. And just a few weeks ago, we announced that the new head of our global Consumer Marketing practice, the firm’s largest, is a woman who has spent the majority of her career in Australia, where she tripled our business. We are moving her to London as part of her development.

I am turning the ownership of the agency over to my three daughters as they become mature, capable executives. I am determined that they will be supported by the best possible top executive team, many of whom will be women. As our pro-bono client Malala Yousafzai, winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, said, “I raise up my voice, not so I can shout but so that those without a voice can be heard… we cannot succeed when half of us are held back.”

[Pictured above: A Global Women's Executive Network event in our Abu Dhabi office]

Richard Edelman is president and CEO, Edelman.