Special Issue on Women in Leadership

This is a special issue of the People Empowered Newsletter on Women and Leadership inspired by International Women's Day on March 8 last week.

According to a census of men and women in leadership positions in Australia’s leading 200 companies, only 12% of executive management positions in 2006 were held by women, up from 11.4% in 2004. Only 6 women hold the position of chief executive in the S&P/ASX 200 companies. 39.5% of the largest listed companies do still not employ female executive managers. Only 8.7% of board positions in those top 200 companies are held by women. This is not an Australian phenomenon but is characteristic of what is happening for women in other major countries like the USA and UK.

So what is this about? Women and men graduate from universities and enter the workforce in equal numbers yet women progress at much slower rates into management and leadership positions. There is however some evidence that there are differences in the way women approach management and leadership opportunities in their twenties and prior to having children, and the way they then view them in their thirties as they begin to establish families.  Fiona Krautil, former director of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency, and now the new head of advancement of diversity and women at ANZ Bank, says that while gender inequality operates differently in the 21st century, gender is still an issue in career success and that women do not advance at the same pace and in the same way as their male counterparts. Women’s desire to balance work and family seems to be a decisive factor in whether they choose to climb the management and leadership ladder, how they choose to climb it, how far they climb and if they get to the top, whether they stay.

There is another set of figures that is also important. Gillian Franklin, CEO of The Heat Group and a member of the Committee for Economic Development Australia, was involved with research that revealed that 20% of women want to stay at home and not work, 20% want to work and not have children and 60% of women want to work and have children. So making sure women can exercise those choices is also important.

Another thing that is vitally important to us as women aspiring to leadership is integrity. Whatever we do on our journey to leadership and management positions we need to always act with integrity. Knowing what is right and doing it has to be our criteria for success. If we don't act with integrity we will be judged harshly, far more harshly than men on the same journey.

So in this issue we explore this with two leading articles and some resources:

• The Challenges for Women Aspiring to Leadership.
• Achieving Success as Women in Leadership - Knowing the Rules of the Game. 
• Resources for Aspiring Women Leaders.

The “how” of all this forms the basis for leadership development training for women. In the meantime, not only will the strategies discussed here help women reach leadership and management positions but they will also help the 60% women who want to work and have families balance their lives by negotiating their careers with their companies to meet their mutual needs.

Maree Harris

The Challenges for Women Aspiring to Leadership.

If there was an easy or obvious answer to the question of why women are not more strongly represented in management and leadership positions, the situation would have rapidly been reversed long ago. In recent years there has been a growing realisation by companies that they are losing enormous expertise, knowledge, experience, skills and insight as women decline management and leadership positions, opt out once they arrive or don’t return to their leadership position after maternity leave. More disconcerting for some of these companies is the fact that, in spite of their concerted efforts, making changes in their organisations that they believe will retain their women managers and leaders, they are not successful.

Is this the glass ceiling? Some women will want to debate whether there is a glass ceiling that prevents women from attaining positions of senior leadership. These are the women who have made it. They are also the women who we want to openly and honestly share their experience of how they did it because many women are not making it. The question is, however, whether it is a glass ceiling presenting an impermeable boundary to women as they climb the leadership ladder that stops them going further, or whether as women get to the top of the ladder – or even near it – they do not like what they see and experience and choose not to stay, or even go there.

This article looks at some of the challenges women experience as they aspire to leadership and management positions in companies and organisations.

• Some corporate cultures are foreign territory for women. They operate in ways that conflict with their value systems and challenge their sense of who they are and want to be. It becomes difficult therefore for women to find places to grow and develop in these cultures.

• Women managers and leaders are not included in the informal networks that male managers and leaders frequent, that are significant in advancing their careers.
  

• Women lack significant general manager or line management experience. They can’t or don’t get into the pipeline. This can be due to the fact that women don’t plan their careers to deliberately include this experience, as Professor Leonie Still found in her study. It may also be due to women’s careers being interrupted by having children and their managerial and leadership pathways being fragmented as a result. Men  learn the importance of this in their informal networks. They then proactively (often  very determinedly) go after it.
  

• There are insufficient women leaders at the top to act as mentors for others aspiring to be where they are. As well it has been suggested that many women who have been successful do not want to acknowledge, let alone talk about, their struggle because it may reflect negatively on their achievement and any future opportunities that may present for them. They also don’t want to be critical of their male executive colleagues, having joined them. While this would be career suicide as well as being inappropriate, we do need these successful women to find a way to help us learn how to do “it”. Male managers and leaders rarely if ever talk about their struggles either, possibly for the same reason. Successful women business owners, however, are prepared to talk about the challenges they faced in getting to the top.
  

• Women have different management and leadership styles to many male leaders.  They resist following this male management and leadership style because their management style emerges from them putting emphasis on different values. They want to do leadership differently, but without mentoring, they often however have difficulty fine-tuning their style to produce the types of outcomes senior management requires for the company. Instead of their way of operating being seen as adding value to the company, it is seen as holding it back. Their advancement therefore is  retarded.

• Senior women leaders’ views are often not heard by male management teams and their capabilities and potential are therefore not recognised. It is a common experience of senior women managers that they have to wait for their ideas to be expressed by one of their male colleagues before it is heard and acknowledged as valuable. Very often it is the male colleague who has the value of the insight attributed to him, and the woman manager’s contribution remains invisible and not acknowledged along with her managerial and leadership potential.

• When women are placed into senior leadership roles, they will often be placed in a “soft” area like Human Resources, Public Relations or Marketing. They can be pigeon-holed there in what can be seen to be a role that requires the stereotyped “feminine”. Their capacity for a management or leadership role in the “hard” areas is not even considered, nor are they appraised, mentored or coached for such a role.
  

• Women can also be placed in a senior leadership role when a company is in trouble or where there is significant employee conflict. This results in women leaders facing the “glass cliff”. They are set up for failure in an extremely difficult situation, and fall off the cliff. Their reputation then is tainted for future leadership and management roles. Fortunately women are becoming much more astute in their decision-making about these roles, not allowing ego to cloud their intuitive judgment about accepting those positions. In not choosing those positions they may delay advancement, but their credibility remains intact.

• The most significant challenge for women, however, is work/life balance and the lack of flexibility at the level of senior leadership and management levels. It is not just having children but also about balancing time for other significant relationships and protecting themselves from burn-out. Another way of putting this is to say that women don’t have a wife, someone who keeps all the balls in the air, that brilliant multi-tasker who ensures that everything is remembered and taken care of. Some significant research has been done by Swedish researcher, Bodil Bergman, on stress levels of men and women in the workplace. What she found was that when men go to work their stress levels increase enormously and that when they come home from work, they drop just as significantly. For women, however the situation is reversed. When women go to work their stress levels drop markedly, and when they come home, and enter the second shift, their stress levels rise significantly. Women are very conscious of this when the opportunity for management and leadership positions are offered. Professor Leonie Still’s research has also shown that women are much more relational than men, and make their career choices taking into account other people besides themselves – family, children, partner, for example. Their desire for balance however, if they dare to talk about it to senior management, is often interpreted as them being less ambitious, less serious about their career development than their male counterparts, and therefore a management and leadership risk.

I want to, however, finish on a positive note with two final points. More and more women are achieving senior leadership roles and making significant differences that are actually changing the fabric of society. There is a regional city in Victoria where four women manage and lead four of the key prominent companies and organisations in the city. These leadership positions had traditionally been held by men,as were all other leadership positions. Major decision-making about the future of the city took place therefore in the male-only club. The city leaders therefore did not have access to the expertise and vision of CEOs of four of the city's leading organisations. The rules of the club had to change. The more this happens, the more quickly things will change.

Secondly, there are companies that are employers of choice for women, that offer opportunities for growth and development, for leadership and management. They have managed to discover what women want and need if they are to retain their talent in their company. They have been able to then make flexible adjustments in their company structures and in their job designs to accommodate those needs and wants. Last week the Australian Government Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency announced the employers of choice for women for 2007. We need some study and analysis of what those companies are doing to grow, develop and retain their women managers and leaders so that others can follow in their foot-steps.

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Achieving Success as Women in Leadership
- Knowing the Rules of the Game.

I know from talking with many women over many years that much of what I am going to say here is very difficult for them. Some would even see it as a game, but as someone else has said, we have to play the game to change the game. Karen Mitchell from Kalmor Consulting, who consults to women about career success, says that many of us as women make the wrong assumption in believing that if we work really hard we will be successful.  Rather, she said, the key to success for the corporate woman is knowing the rules of the game. She said that we may not like it, and we don’t have to agree with it, but we need to work out how to play the game without losing our souls. Here are some ideas I’ve put together – not a comprehensive or inclusive list, but rather some ideas and strategies that I, and other women, have found helpful. Wherever you are on the ladder of success, there is something here for you.

1. Women need to do some conscious “planning” of their careers. We all know that the best laid plans can go astray, but knowing what we want and working on a plan to achieve it is important. It can be a “living” plan that is flexible and can move and change when opportunities emerge that we never dreamed of. We need to go for both breadth and depth,  setting out to accrue experience and build on it with every new opportunity that presents itself. We don’t stay with the same company, no matter how “nice” it is, unless we  are growing and developing in the direction of our plan. We need to work out what we want from our work and career, rather than trying to fit in with what is being offered, and then confidently endeavour to make it happen.

2. A mentor from either inside or outside the company can help women develop their careers, ideally someone who has been where we want to go. A mentor not only guides and supports but is also able to help us understand the dynamics and processes that move us towards management and leadership. A mentor can also help us work with the inevitable confrontations to our sense of professional self (and to our “woman-self”) that bring with them self-doubt, fear, anxiety and stress. A mentor can help us believe in ourselves, trust our judgment – and intuition, and develop qualities essential to leadership like big picture vision, resilience and that ability to bounce back from whatever happens, influence, proactively managing change, for example.

3. Women need to work out what motivates them and moves them to action. Is it other inspiring women, or opposition and obstacles, or praise, or achieving a goal, or having a supportive mentor or……? When we know that, we need to make those motivators part of our daily lives. We need to develop those traits, or find those situations or surround ourselves with those people because that’s what will shape our success.

4. Women need to make a commitment to networking. This is a major way that men achieve success and climb the ladder, but women are not good at it. As we mentioned in the first article women managers are often left out of their male colleague’s informal networks, or find they are inappropriate and foreign to their experience. Joining organisations and attending functions where we, as women, can meet people who can offer us shared insight and experience, people who can offer us introductions to people who can support our career, is very important. If we have planned our careers, if we know what we want, if we have worked out what motivates us, then we can seek out the networking opportunities that will help us grow and learn. Networking doesn’t end as we walk out of the event either. Following up after a networking event is essential. We want people to remember us because if they do they will send opportunities our way when they hear about them. Not only that, we can build networks of people who inspire, motivate and empower us. It is very common for women to go to networking events and sit at a table with the people they work with every day or arrange to meet there people they know and mix with regularly. It is also important to build meaningful networks with the people within the company who matter to our future.

5. Women can get together with other women in the company and assess, evaluate and analyse the culture of their organisation and work out a proposal for how it can support women in management and leadership. This will have more validity if it is a shared venture. We can seek ways to align the values of the company with those of the women aspiring to leadership and management. If there is no alignment, then the company is not an employer of choice for women and it’s time to look for another job.

6. We need to take ourselves and our careers seriously. Professor Amanda Sinclair has made the comment that when she was working part-time at the university while having her children, she wasn’t taken seriously. She says that it is hard to take yourself seriously when other people aren’t. This is why it is so important for women to believe in “Doing Leadership Differently”, the title of her book. So women need to take the planning of their careers just as seriously at those times when they are not climbing the ladder - when they are working part time, or flexible hours or working from home so that they can accommodate their families - as they do when they are in a senior executive full-time position managing an entire department. 

7. Women’s communication and presentation style often belies their expertise and competence. Professor Leonie Still found in her study of The Woman Executive that women ”deflect attention from themselves – refuse to claim a central, purposeful  place in their own stories, eagerly shifting the credit elsewhere and shunning recognition” to avoid being called “unfeminine”. This also fits with many surveys that have been done asking women what they believe has been the greatest obstacle to their advancement in their career or business. In a survey of women engaged in a current Women in Leadership program in Ballarat, 37% of the women said they lacked assertion and saw it as their greatest weakness as a leader. In 2002 and again in 2004, Candy Tymson from Sydney, in association with the Australian Businesswomen’s Network, asked women what the most significant barrier was that held them back. Inability to promote themselves was top both years – 37.76% in 2002  and 40.08% in 2004. Having children came second.

8. Women therefore need to promote themselves, and speak about their achievements with one another and with their staff. We find this very difficult, but we need to learn to do this so that our achievements are recognised and acknowledged. It is possible to learn ways to do this that are not driven by ego-centrism and arrogance, but rather by passion, excitement and commitment to having made a difference.

9. Aligned with the above is the need to make sure what we do is visible. Just as women’s ideas are often not heard in meetings, until repeated by a male colleague who often claims them as his own, so also women’s work is often not acknowledged as hers either, a manager to whom she is reporting presenting it either as his/her own or as a shared venture when it was the exclusive work of the woman manager. The woman misses the credit due to her and the recognition of her potential. Women need to ensure when they are working on a project that more than one person knows what they are doing so that their work, along with its demonstration of their competence, cannot be “stolen”. This can usually be done quite easily in a very non-confrontational way, by cc-ing emails to a trusted other/s, or asking a trusted someone to read it and give some feed-back, and then assertively and confidently telling the manager that you have asked others for feed-back which you believe will make for the best report. This gives the best insurance that our competence and ability will be recognised and acknowledged. 

10. One way to get a male manager to take our leadership potential seriously is to get him involved in what we are doing in the leadership area outside of work. This is especially important if our company is slow in appointing women to positions of management and leadership. If you are the President of a Rotary club, for  example, you could invite him to come to a meeting where he can see you demonstrate leadership and management, see your influence and how you are respected. Better still if you can organise for him to be a guest speaker. He could also be invited to a conference where you are giving a paper. This is an opportunity for you to introduce him to people who matter. He sees you as a woman of power – or a woman empowered – but certainly very differently to how he saw you before.

11. We need to become clear about what our value is to the company for which we work and quantify it if possible. We can be conscious all the time of adding value. If we are clear about our value we will be in a much better position to negotiate to have our needs met
- around wanting more challenging opportunities,
- around looking after children when they are sick,
- around part time work, or job-sharing or job-splitting,
- around maternity leave,
- about working from home some days each week,
and so on.

12. Women need to learn more direct communication styles. Women often tend to use phrases such as “Let’s do…..” or “Why don’t we….”, instead of being more decisive. We use consultative processes and consensus decision-making. This is often seen as a weakness by those observing. Our capacity for strong decision-making and clear and precise leadership of people is questioned.

13. Women also need to stop apologising for their existence. We constantly say things like: “I’m sorry to interrupt you but….”, instead of knocking on the door and saying confidently “I have completed that report you wanted done today.” Instead of “I know you are very busy but would you have time to speak with me”, we could say, again confidently, “I need to speak with you about that report. Is now convenient or would you prefer me to come back later?” Dr. Lois Frankel wrote a book called “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” subtitled “Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers”. It is full of examples of these types of things.

14. Women need to confidently analyse their leadership styles and weave a rationale for it. The “soft stuff”, so often associated with women’s leadership styles, when used by people with highly developed emotional intelligence, is not weak but powerful and essential to any business or leadership strategy.  This is being recognised and the importance in recent times that many companies are placing on developing emotional intelligence in their people as a way to enhance their effectiveness is demonstration of that.

In summary, if women are going to be taken seriously and achieve the success they want, they need to heighten their organisational profile. Diana Ryall, the Managing Director of career counselling firm Xplore, has made the point that the overall affect of what I am talking about above – women’s indirect communication styles, their inability to promote themselves,  their perceived expertise with “soft” skills rather than “hard” skills, their lack of meaningful networks, for example – is that they have a lower organisational profile and are therefore not on the radar screen when consideration is being given to recruiting people for new projects or roles. What has been done above is provide women with a whole range of strategies for increasing their organisational profiles.

There are successful corporate women out there who have done that very successfully. They have also learnt to play the game with integrity and style. They are excellent role models who have produced enviable results. It’s just that there are not enough of them.


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Resources for Women Leaders and Managers

2007 Executive Women’s Leadership Symposiums - Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Melbourne. Leading women speakers such as Diana Williams, Christine Nixon, Prue Goward, Patricia Faulkner, Anna McPhee, Leonie Still, Julie Bishop and many other leading politicians. Bookings now open . See www.womensforum.com.au

Australian Institute of Management Outstanding Women’s Series 2007
- Julia Ross, Anna McPhee, Lois Frankel, Christine Nixon, Karen Matthews- one speaker every two months. These are all breakfasts. More information: www.aimvic.com.au

Find out about us on the PEOPLE EMPOWERED WEBSITE at www.peopleempowered.com.au

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