Diversity Executive - September 2008 - (Page 63)

REBALANCING GENDER continued from page 54 The gender mix brings added depth to the debate but is not essential to reach the key objective: to get today’s leaders to understand the gender issue and to deﬁne how signiﬁcant a priority it is for their businesses. These sessions have three major objectives: Objective No. 1: Find out who cares. In most companies, the CEO reaching out for help achieving gender balance is personally convinced of the need to move forward and create impact at the top. The CEO usually is convinced his executive committee team is aligned behind him. But the gender issue often is either mired in political correctness or seen as a minor HR issue, so the real pros and cons of rebalancing gender rarely have been debated at this level. Dissent has never been aired, and alignment among the leadership team often is simply assumed. Alignment is rarely evident. Wanting to believe everyone agrees on gender balance is a signiﬁcant barrier to actually implementing the required changes. So the ﬁrst exercise is to conduct a quick, conﬁdential vote. Ask each executive committee member to write on a Post-It the priority level they would give to the gender issue as a business issue for their company in the next ﬁve years on a scale of one to 10. The numbers usually range across the board. Within two minutes of starting, diversity leaders can establish the key reason a company has made little progress on this issue: Its leaders don’t agree that it should. Objective No. 2: Look at the data. Review the statistics. Do the external ones ﬁrst: the reality of a shifting talent pool, customer proﬁles, demographic pressures and differentiated academic achievements. Then do internal ones: Contrast the signiﬁcant, sometimes revolutionary, external evolutions with a company’s internal statistics and progress over time. Data will tell its own story. The tale is not that of the oftcited glass ceiling, with its assumption that women make it up through the ranks until a sudden blockage at a senior level. The reality in today’s corporate world is the percentage of women drops off at almost every grade level. The glass ceiling metaphor has blinded diversity leaders to a more pervasive problem — what we call “gender asbestos.” Behind the metaphors, the reality is companies have not yet adapted their cultures, career paths, processes and promotions to the reality of 21st-century talent and markets. They still are not identifying, retaining and promoting female talent, despite decades spent trying. Most of the members of the executive committee likely have never looked at this data in detail or been asked whether it would impact their business. So ask them. A simple SWOT exercise is enough. Ask the team to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of their company in rebalancing gender in leadership. They are likely all familiar with the process. They’ve just never applied it to gender. And when they do, the experiential part of the learning comes into play. The learning comes not only from the debate among themselves about the data’s signiﬁcance and whether they should care about it. The real learning comes when the mostly male members of the team hear their colleagues’ positions on the topic. In a half-hour exercise, it becomes intensely clear and unavoidably visible what each individual thinks of gender, how comfortable they are discussing the issue — let alone leading on it — and which of three typical segments they fall into: progressive, patient or plodding. Nothing is more impactful for the progressives in the room than to hear a group of plodding colleagues use arguments they thought had disappeared a generation ago. It usually is a strong wake up call for the CEO and goes a long way to explain lack of progress and the reality of the challenge that lies ahead. Women represent not just a significant percentage of available talent — in North America, they make 80 percent of consumer goods purchasing decisions. Objective No. 3: Make a plan. The day usually concludes with some form of action planning. The usual reaction is to hand gender-balance initiatives over to the company’s most senior woman to lead. But in organizations in which the leadership is dominated by men, it is more effective to appoint a male leader to this topic. After all, the issue moving forward along this approach is to convince men they are part of the change-management process in rebalancing gender. Once the executive committee has been through this kind of workshop, it likely will agree it needs to be rolled out to executives and managers. The feedback — a combination of awareness building, strategic planning and pragmatic proposals for action — is a potent case for progress. Rebalancing gender in leadership does not require a decades-long investment in training and coaching women to adopt behaviors more acceptable to the dominant norm. Instead, it invites the dominant norm to better understand why its interests lie in optimizing the talents and opportunities of women and how to manage more “bilingually” across genders. That’s when real progress can begin. « Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, a European gender consultancy and co-author of Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution. She can be reached at editor@diversity-executive.com. September/October 2008 | www.diversity-executive.com | Diversity Executive 63 http://www.diversity-executive.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Diversity Executive - September 2008

Diversity Executive - September 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Leadership Connections Guest Editorial Diversity Executive Online 2042: A New Business Era Begins The Rules of Attraction Where to Look for Diverse Talent Like Minds Think Great Culture Teams Target Business Opportunities at Luxottica Retail Special Section Rebalancing Gender At ING Americas, the Color of Diversity Is Orange Profile Business Intelligence Case Study Strategies Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources

Diversity Executive - September 2008

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