Introduction: Taking Your Place at the Leadership Table: It s Still a Test


The ideas for this book began germinating as we coached senior women to negotiate their places at the leadership table. Right from the start we were struck by the recurring challenges they faced ”first in securing leadership positions and then in overcoming resistance to their leadership. It was not supposed to be that way. The environment had changed markedly, or so we thought.

The new models of leadership ”called post-heroic by many ”abandon command-and-control hierarchies where solutions were imposed from above in favor of integrated organizational structures that function through collaboration and learning. [1] Many commentators assumed these new models would be a boon for women. In the post-heroic era, the " female advantage" seemed admirably suited to meet the global challenges of the new economy. [2] A Catalyst study gave added credence to this contention . The female advantage produced results. Catalyst tracked 353 companies, dividing them into quartiles based on the representation of women in senior management positions. The top quartile outdistanced the lowest quartile in Return on Equity by 35 percent and in Total Return to Shareholders by 34 percent. [3] What was good for women turned out to be good for company performance.

The business press was quick to jump on the bandwagon, picking up on the experts' prescription for success: "After years of analyzing what makes leaders most effective and figuring out who's got the Right Stuff, management gurus know how to boost the odds of getting a great executive: Hire a female." [4] Tom Peters, for example, offered up a list of eight advantages that women enjoy as leaders: improv skills, relationship-centric, less rank conscious, self-determined, trust sensitive, intuitive, natural empowerment freaks, oriented toward intrinsic motivation. [5]

If opinion has undergone such a sea change, why are women still finding the road to leadership so rocky ? With their numbers exceeding 50 percent, women are well represented in the middle ranks of management and the professions . Yet today they hold less than 1 percent of the top leadership positions in the country. [6] A litany of familiar explanations is available to explain the uneven representation. Corporate executives usually point to the pipeline as the culprit. Over 60 percent of CEOs think women have not been in the pipeline long enough. [7] The statistics on women in middle management positions, however, belie this claim.

More recently, it has been common to look to women, and the choices they make, for the reasons. Women put their families first to seek balance in their lives. [8] They do not step up and ask for key line positions, and prized assignments go to those who lobby for them. [9] Women get passed over because they are not competitive enough and hesitate to promote their accomplishments. [10] And, finally, women do not really want power. [11]

All these explanations do hold a grain of truth. [12] People do make choices. Negotiation skills can help structure better choices. But explanations that blame women for their lack of representation in top leadership ranks overlook a fundamental obstacle that women face. Research has shown consistently that a woman lacks the presumption of credibility and competence when she takes on a leadership role. [13] Hewlett-Packard's CEO and chairman Carly Fiorina likens the situation to being on probation. [14]

For a woman to establish herself at the leadership table, she must negotiate her way through a number of tests that her male colleagues often bypass. Of course, all new leaders are tested to some degree. People do not automatically throw their support to a new leader; they are more likely to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. But the testing that women leaders undergo has its roots in still prevalent assumptions about women and their suitability for leadership. We have identified four tests that a woman leader can encounter. Before she can get on with the business of leading, she has to be prepared to meet them.

THE TOKEN TEST

The token test is rooted in the suspicion that a woman has not really earned the appointment. Some people are always ready to assume that she has landed a prized job because she is a woman, because she works hard, or because she is just lucky. [15] Ever ready to attribute a man's professional achievement to ability and effort, they can question a woman's comparable accomplishments and expertise.

At the apex of organizations, women are a rarity, and it is not surprising that highly visible appointments would foreground gender issues. But the reasons for the stubborn and persistent questioning of a woman's aptitude for leadership are more diffuse. In many organizations today, diversity and women's initiatives have gained currency. [16] Although these initiatives aim to increase diversity in the short term and strengthen the leadership pool over the long run, they can easily be equated with quotas. As women succeed in moving into leadership roles in these organizations, their promotions can be attributed to their sex and not to their competence.

Ann Moore provides a notable example of the token test. When she was tapped for the top job at Time, Inc., she became the first woman to lead the world's biggest magazine division. In her twenty-five years with the company, she was known as an innovator, responsible for such magazines as Sports Illustrated for Kids, InStyle, Teen People, and Real Simple. Under her leadership, profits doubled at People. [17] Despite this well-documented track record, her appointment triggered skepticism. "She was born on third base but thinks she hit a triple." [18] Entitlement, not merit, must have been the reason behind the promotion.

The assumption that gender has something to do with a woman's appointment to high office always sits in the background. At a professional development conference for women in the financial services industry, half of the participants volunteered that members of their organizations believed they had been promoted because they were female. That presumption explains, in part, the care with which the Princeton University search committee, members of the Board of Trustees, and outgoing president Harold Schapiro introduced the appointment of Shirley Tilghman as the next president of the university. Their efforts dispelled any notions that the selection was a token gesture. In press releases and interviews, influential members of the Princeton and scientific communities lauded Tilghman's academic distinction as an expert in gene expression, her dedication to teaching, and her avowed support of women.

The token test is not passed once initial perceptions are publicly countered. Tokens, as we know, carry expectations of the group they represent. [19] Thus women look to women in prominent leadership positions to promote their interests, whether that project fits the leader's agenda or not. As Bob Knowling, the only African American on the Hewlett-Packard board, said of Carly Fiorina: "It's lonely at the top. It's even lonelier for some of us, as the minority. She's carrying a banner for a lot of people." [20] And in an interesting Catch-22, women are damned if they do and damned if they don't. When Sharon Allen became chairman of Deloitte & Touche, she wanted to focus on governance issues. Some partners griped that she was not doing enough to promote women. By contrast, when President Tilghman appointed a number of women to senior positions, she was accused of turning Nassau Hall, seat of Princeton's administrative offices, into "a girls ' club." The Tory listed Tilghman's "sexist administrative appointments" as one of only eleven reasons not to donate to Princeton's Annual Giving campaign. [21]

To pass the token test, you need to be clear on why you were selected for the role and what you bring to the table. Only then are you positioned to negotiate your way around these negative attributions. Ann Moore, for example, fended off suggestions that her predecessor's shoes might prove too big to fill with a pointed observation. As executive vice president, she had been directly responsible for producing the lion's share of results that led to her former boss's success.

[1] Joseph Badaracco, "We Don't Need Another Hero."

[2] The "female advantage" was underscored by Sally Helgesen, The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership , and Judith Rosener, "Ways Women Lead." A decade and a half later, it has migrated to the mainstream business press.

[3] Catalyst, The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity .

[4] Rochelle Sharpe, "As Leaders, Women Rule."

[5] Tom Peters, "Women Roar: The New Economy's Hidden Imperative."

[6] Sheila Wellington, Marcia Brumit Krofp, and Paulette Gerovich, "What's Holding Women Back?"

[7] Wellington, Krofp, and Gerovich, "What's Holding Women Back?"

[8] Executives in America spend more time on the job than in any other country, including Japan and Germany. Yet American males clock 15 percent more hours than their female colleagues with 46.1 hours versus 40.4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey , 2002. See also Lisa Belkin, "The Opt-Out Generation."

[9] Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don't Ask .

[10] Laura D'Andrea Tyson, "Glass Ceiling: What Holds Women Back."

[11] Patricia Sellers, "Power: Do Women Really Want It?"

[12] Any explanation is bound to find plausible grounds when half the population is lumped together as a single category. When differences between men and women are highlighted, those among women tend to disappear. Researchers Shoya Zichy and Bonnie Kellen discovered , rather than uniformity , four distinct patterns in leadership style exhibited by women. See Women and the Leadership Q .

[13] Deborah Rhode, "The Difference 'Difference' Makes." Despite the progress and the greater numbers of women among the executive ranks, Americans ”male and female ”still prefer to have a male boss. W. W. Simmons, "When It Comes to Choosing a Boss, Americans Still Prefer Men."

[14] George Anders, Perfect Enough .

[15] Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? and Linda Tischler, "Where Are the Women?"

[16] Douglas McCracken, "Winning the Talent War for Women."

[17] Jeffrey Seglin, "Her Hopes, Her Dreams."

[18] Jeffrey Seglin, "Why the Rush to Find Fault in Women?"

[19] Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation .

[20] Anders, Perfect Enough , p. 178.

[21] Katherine Reilly, Daily Princetonian .




Her Place at the Table. A Woman's Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success
Her Place at the Table: A Womans Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success
ISBN: 0470633751
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 64

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