9 Steps To Getting CEOs Serious About Gender Balance

Most companies say they are working on gender balancing their businesses. Many managers have spent time and effort trying to address the issue. Yet progress remains slow, managerial gender fatigue high, and the pressure from movements like #MeToo, #TimesUp and the #PayGap continues to increase. What is going on? Why so much noise and so little change?

I find it’s often because the wrong people are talking about the wrong thing to the wrong audience - and framing it in a way that too often alienates the people it needs to address. Most people see "gender" as a women’s issue, and in too many companies, the topic is run by women for women and about women. Real gender balance in business requires companies adapting to a more gender-balanced century. And that takes leadership – like any other strategic change initiative.

The slide below shows the typical framing of the gender topic today, and how to shift it to create sustainable progress. The current approach is set-up-to-fail. It means well but too often builds more frustration than progress. For companies to address the array of gender hot buttons demanding attention, from pay gaps and harassment to governance and risk management, they first need to reposition the topic. Strategically, as a business issue like any other. Here are the first four steps:

1. Gender Balance Is Not A Diversity Issue – It’s A Business Imperative

How strategically CEOs focus on gender issues contributes to how everyone thinks about them. Studies show (and my experience confirms) that CEO attention and commitment is the No.1 success factor for real balancing. If companies bundle gender under broad-ranging “Diversity” efforts, it is much harder to focus minds and resources on the issue at hand. Women now represent 60% of global university graduates and make the vast majority of consumer buying decisions. Why would you consider that a diversity issue? Be clear about what you are trying to change. Companies that want change need leaders who focus specifically on gender balance and position it as a key lever to improving business performance.

Check: Our CEO and executive team specifically address gender balance and frame it as a key lever to achieving business goals. The topic is communicated along with other business priorities in key management meetings.

2. It’s Not An HR Issue – It’s A Leadership Challenge

There are two problems with letting HR be responsible for gender issues. The first, and most important: it ignores the sales and marketing opportunity that good "gender bilingual" management offers (see next point). Second, it takes accountability away from the people who actually have the power to promote balance. Managers make key hiring and promotion decisions, not HR. Companies pushing for balance need leaders skilled at building it into their teams and getting measured on their ability to do so. The tipping point comes when leaders make it clear that people who can’t build balanced teams don’t get promoted. Managing across genders is a key 21st-century leadership skill.

Check: C-suite executives are key spokespeople for gender balance, and accept accountability for balancing their own teams and business areas. They are regularly measured on clear KPIs.

3. It’s Not A Problem – It’s An Opportunity

Too much of the communication around gender issues frames it as a guilt-inducing set of accusations and intractable problems. It’s all about harassment and bias and unfair pay. But there are huge positive sides to the gender shift we are in the midst of. Especially for business, gender balance offers business significant performance-enhancing opportunities. A dozen studies show that companies with gender-balanced leadership outperform. Getting the best out of 100% of your talent pool is a feature of high performing teams, and increasingly gender balanced customer bases and financially empowered women are waiting for products and services that match their expectations and leave outdated stereotypes behind. The real question on gender balance isn’t "why?" It’s "why not?"

Check: Gender issues are enthusiastically discussed internally as opportunities for deepening customer connections, making innovations relevant to the marketplace and building high performing teams. Success stories illustrating these benefits are shared throughout the organization.

4. From "Fix The Women" To Strategic Business Priority

Companies have spent years investing in programs to "empower" women, without adapting companies themselves to a more gender-balanced century. The result is a range of initiatives aimed at women and branded "women" (women’s networks, coaching, mentoring, etc.) that leave men out of the conversation – or any accountability for balance. And a growing frustration with the lack of change in the actual balance, despite what often seems like years of well-meaning initiatives. Instead, companies need to frame gender balance as a strategic business change management priority. It needs to resemble any other major change initiative the company has undertaken – led by leaders who can clearly articulate why it is key for the business to adapt, how it will happen, and what the vision of success looks like.

Check: Women’s networks and initiatives are replaced by mainstreaming "gender bilingualism" into all management development, talent onboarding and sales and marketing approaches.

5.   From Moral Imperative – To Business Imperative

Mark, a very forceful CEO jumped on stage recently to tell a roomful of volunteer diversity champions that if “anyone in the company still needed convincing that gender balance was the morally right thing to do, they probably shouldn’t be here. And, in addition, more gender balanced firms deliver a 34% increase on profitability.” He went on to illustrate with an analogy about football teams winning with the right mix of people. The impact probably wasn’t what he wanted, and at the break, people were muttering about his alpha male delivery.

The moral imperative argument on gender is tricky, especially in global companies. Around the world, there is still a vast spectrum of attitudes to gender, and studies suggest that preaching morality at people is not always the best way to win their buy in. Especially as business leaders aren’t in their roles to be moral guides, but to deliver business results. My suggestion is to stick to business arguments. You risk alienating fewer people and stay in your legitimate role.

CHECK: Does your company have a credible, data-driven argument for why gender balance would benefit the business? 

6.   From Compliance to Conviction

Most companies and corporate leaders have learned to speak with some degree of care about gender issues and to cite some elements of a business case. They often say the right words, but the tone and vocabulary of the message undermines its authenticity and impact. Leaders uninterested and unskilled in gender issues aren’t hard to spot. They are trying to comply to expectations, but they are - often unwittingly - demonstrating that they aren’t all that convinced. They use their default leadership and communication styles, honed over years of corporate rising, to address more gender-balanced times.

Their behavior reveals that they aren’t really convinced enough about balance to adapt their own behaviors to building it. They often radiate alpha male energy, forcefully communicating goals and targets. They pepper their messages with unintentionally masculine metaphors, usually of a sports or military nature. They demand quick action from their teams, giving them stretch targets on gender balance, and asking them, as this CEO did, to drop ‘fuzzy talk’ and deliver hard results. They are unlikely to achieve them. Leaders convinced that gender balance is worth building, intentionally adapt their own leadership styles to role model more inclusive ways of being and speaking. In contrast, another CEO publicly announced that he was taking parental leave, a first in his 100-year old company, and role modeling to other men that they too could ‘lean in’ at home.

CHECK: Do your leaders speak in a ‘gender bilingual’ way that connects sensitively and authentically with all employees and customers? 

7.   Led by Out-Group to Led by In-Group

David, another CEO, was addressing a group of diversity champions who had volunteered to work on the company’s gender issues. Most of them were women, and many were in HR and other staff roles. He opened the day-long meeting with a stirring invocation to ‘fix the balance.’ Then he and his executive team, left the room to let the ‘champions’ get on with it.

This is not unusual. Many companies are still tasking ‘passionate’ volunteers to be change agents on gender balance. Especially women. Asking women to lead the charge misunderstands who you are asking to change – your dominant majority. And if you want any group to change, it’s usually more effective to get one of them to suggest it. Companies appoint women to lead gender initiatives when they think women are the cause of the gender imbalances in their business. In 2018, this assumption is getting old.

David wanted results and progress. You could feel his impatience. Yet the likelihood of any kind of real progress disappeared when his team did. When accountability for gender balance is given to people without the power to actually promote it, there is no progress. When leadership teams accept and ‘own’ the responsibility for balancing their own parts of the business and are willing to spend time and energy driving it, change happens.

CHECK: Is your company’s gender balancing led by a man or a woman? Who do you think needs to change and who do you think would be most credible spokesperson to that group?

 8.   Actions aimed at Out-Group to Action Aimed at In-Group

Mark was asking for action on gender balance. He wasn’t expecting suggesting that his team might need some awareness building or a way of addressing leadership competency gaps on gender. He was expecting programs and workshops and initiatives aimed at women. Companies have now spent dollars and decades on programs aimed at women, when there is a real gender skills shortage among leaders on how to lead in a more gender-balanced era. Forget fixing women, start building management skills on how to work across genders. This doesn’t mean rolling out unconscious bias training for middle management, something we are constantly being asked to do. It means leaders strategically framing gender as an opportunity for the business and ensuring that managers have the skill and understanding to deliver on it.

CHECK: Does your company mainstream strategic gender skill-building into key management and leadership development programs?  

9.   Forget Feel-Good Initiatives, Measure Results

The anecdotes I describe above typically lead to initiatives that seem relevant and exciting to people who are passionate and convinced about the importance of gender balance. These suggestions are usually approved by leaders who think they reflect some kind of democratic process. But they are not necessarily representative of where the organization as a whole, and the majority of its people, actually stand. They are usually not particularly impactful on those skeptical or unconvinced about the goal, the means and actual buy-in of their leaders. If that is the majority of your talent, you are unlikely to deliver change with such actions. Instead of actions, you need a change of mindset, and the ability to get those who don’t get the urgency of your change agenda to buy into it. That requires leaders skilled at ‘selling it.’ You need leaders skilled in gender issues, accountable for the change, and regularly measured on their success in delivering it. Another client introduced a simple scorecard that allows each manager to see the gender balance of all the people they are responsible for, by level, at the touch of a computer mouse. They have clear targets for expected shifts in the ratios. Like every other business issue they are working on.

CHECK: Has your company set clear targets to individuals for the gender balance of their teams and do they get measured on it on a regular basis? 

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None of the above steps are particularly complicated. Nor do they require big budgets, lots of initiatives and complex explorations of human bias. They require the same methodical, intentional business roll out good leaders excel at delivering. And the will and skill to execute it.

This article was originally published by FORBES.