Women in Leadership: Panel Part 1

Companies with more women in top positions tend to perform better than other companies, yet women are still under-represented in corporate leadership. What can leaders at all levels do to open the way for women in leadership? Why does this matter?

Senia Maymin moderated a discussion with three executive coaches, Kathryn Britton, Brian Branagan, and Karen Warner, all of whom had leadership roles in large corporations before they became coaches.

To view the whole conversation, click here, or play the embedded video below.

Senia: Why does this topic interest you?

Karen: In my corporate career, which was about 25 years ago, long before I became an executive coach, I made every mistake there probably was to make coming up as a woman in an organization. I want to use that acquired knowledge to turbocharge women in the workplace. Honestly, I want to turbocharge everybody in the workplace. There's so much opportunity for diversity, but also a real understanding of how people can work together to create something great.

Kathryn: I worked for IBM for 26 years. From early on, I was involved in various efforts to increase the percentage of women in leadership positions. While we were organizing a local women-in-technology conference, it occurred to me that all efforts to increase the representation of women in leadership seemed to be aimed at changing women, making them more confident, more assertive, more thick-skinned. I wondered whether this really was the way to make the change. My interest shifted to what needs to change in the environment so that women can lead in ways that come naturally. How do people and culture need to change so that women’s natural leadership styles are welcomed, appreciated, and used.

Andrew Brady has a book coming out early 2021, For the EVOLution of Business (link to his podcast about it). He shows that innovation goes up when you have diversity in a group. What company doesn’t want innovation? At the same time, people tend to stick with people who are like them. People making promotion decisions tend to recognize leadership that is like their own. Their failure to recognize other forms of leadership could be detrimental to their companies. These two tendencies, diversity benefits innovation, and people tend to stick with those most like them, are in conflict. We need to recognize and work around that contrast. 

Brian: I've benefited from having great women leaders and colleagues at Adobe, Getty Image, RealNetworks, and F5 Networks. I’ve realized that leadership isn't a role. It's taking action on behalf of what you care about and want to see happen. It's really important that women understand that they can make change without being in an executive role.

Kathryn: It would still be nice to see more women in executive roles. Let us just put this out there: It would probably be to the benefit of a lot of companies to have more women in the conversations about what the future is going to be like. If they had a greater representation of women and minorities, they would see a bigger picture of the world.

Stories of Growing Women's Leadership

Senia: How can everybody, all leaders, male or female, help nurture women's leadership? I'd like first to start with stories. Tell a story about something that worked really well. If you can’t, that may be a problem for all of us.

Kathryn: I've got one quick personal example. I got promoted to Senior Programmer at IBM and I thought, “I have reached my ceiling.” Two years later, my boss said to me, "I think we need to start work on your Senior Technical Staff Member promotion package. That conversation opened my eyes to the possibility that I actually could move up to that next level. Thank you, Iva Anderson!

Karen: I have been working with a director who kept being asked to interview for more senior roles. She would interview and not get the job. When I was assigned to coach her, she was ranting and raving about the organization passing her over. We did a 360, and she learned she needed to test her perceptions about herself in the organization. This was a company that did not have many women as role models. To Kathryn's point, given that nearly 50% of the workforce is women, it would be good to have more women at the top that we can look at and say, "I want to be like her. How has she done it?"

My client identified a person in her organization as a sounding board. She asked, “Tell me everything. Is it how I dress? Is it how I speak? What are my gaps?" What she learned was, "You're so focused on your gaps that you're not looking for ways to get your strengths across. When you focus on getting your strengths across, your gaps take care of themselves.” She realized that she was really agile with customers. For her to take a promotion that didn’t need that ability wouldn’t make sense. They hadn’t told her that they were thinking, "Let's save her for a more outward-facing role." Once she got those blinders off, she got promoted to a position in which she's highly regarded. All her years of experience are being used every single day. She's happy. The organization's happy.

Brian: My story is a colleague I had who was a director in a product development organization. She was absolutely fearless in what I call managing the white space in an org chart, not being limited by the solid or dotted lines. When there were issues, she initiated conversations. She was very clear about the agreements coming out of the conversations and really good at follow-up. She also knew how to talk to people's managers if she wasn't getting cooperation.

Recommendations for All Leaders

Senia:  What would you recommend to all leaders, male or female concerning nurturing women's leadership at their company, and why does this matter?

Karen: I recommend a version of the Golden Rule, “Lead others the way you would want to be led.” Everyone wants the same things in the workplace. They want control and autonomy, especially in working from home right now. People want support for the home office situation where they can no longer separate work and family, especially women.

Even high potential people want development. They want to be asked, "What are the training opportunities that would help your future?” Sometimes it helps to put yourself in the person’s place and think, “Yes, I want that too." There is an unfortunate tendency to think that high performance individuals don’t need any more development.

I'm working with someone right now. Whenever a challenge comes up, people in her organization will say, “We'll give it to her. She'll get it done. She gets everything done.” She does it over and over, but they forget to reward her. There's a resentment bubble that's going to burst someday. If her management could just see that texting that you like her after she finishes a big project is not what she wants. They could take the time to understand what will be of value to her and to communicate that they see her value in the organization.

Kathryn: All leaders, male and female, could broaden their notion of what leadership really is and what contribution really is. Some organizations have Lone Ranger heroes, a single person that gets promoted and rewarded when a big project gets done. That may not be conducive to increasing women's leadership in the organization. Many women are very involved in making the people around them more productive. I'm not saying this is a universal characteristic of women, nor that it belongs only to women. But it does tend to be under appreciated.

Jane Dutton, a business professor, makes the point that an organization needs to recognize and encourage the behavior of people who make other people more effective. Often that's what women are doing. But when they're asked later on, "Well, what did you actually accomplish?" it can be really hard to describe it. They find themselves having trouble saying “I did this.” How do you explain, “My presence made it possible for a whole group of people to come together and collaborate effectively?” 

I’d recommend that leaders expand their notions of leadership and spend less time looking for the Lone Ranger heroes. Instead, be curious about all the different behaviors it takes to make a project successful. Where are they coming from? How do I appreciate people who make other people more effective?

Brian: My mentor, Robert Dunham at the Institute for Generative Leadership, says that power is the ability to deliver a significantly greater incremental value. Let's look for the ways that women in organizations are already delivering value that may be under-appreciated. That's a power that could be recognized and nurtured and expanded.

The next thing Dunham talks about is organizational politics. His definition of politics is “Who gets to say what about what?” In traditional organizations, executives get to say what products get developed. Middle management gets to figure out what and who is needed to get it done, and staff gets to deliver it. Perhaps it would be beneficial to find ways to provide a platform for women to say more about what gets delivered. They have valuable insights about customers.

Kathryn: Maybe one exercise that managers can try in order to get a clear idea of the value a person brings the company is to imagine what the organization would be like if that person weren't there.

Karen: When you’re trying to sell these ideas, remember the bottom line. I just read a study that said that companies with more female executives and those with a female CEO outperform other companies. Likewise, the companies that have more women on their sales force are generating more sales. Business units that have more women have higher revenue performance. It's important to us individually. It's important to the culture we're trying to create, but it is also true that when you invest in your employees, especially looking at diversity, you drive more revenue.

Return tomorrow for the rest of the story.

Photo Credit: wuestenigel from Flickr via Compfight with Creative Commons license

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