This post is the second in a series called "Getting CEOs Serious About Gender Balance." For part one, click here.
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.” He went on to illustrate his point with an analogy about football teams winning with the right mix of people. He thought he was giving a powerful push for balance, but the impact wasn’t what he intended, and at the break, people were muttering about his alpha male metaphors and delivery.
Here’s a quick analysis of how CEOs can audit their gender communications to guarantee their impact, building on last week’s steps:
From Moral Imperative – To Business Imperative
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?
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 undermine its authenticity and impact. Leaders uninterested and unskilled in gender issues aren’t hard to spot. They are trying to comply with 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 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?
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 the most credible spokesperson for that group?
Actions aimed at Out-Group to Action Aimed at In-Group
Mark was asking for action on gender balance. He wasn’t thinking his own 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 such women-focused programs 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?
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?
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.
