Women are also:
It’s not just me making such bold claims. Check out these pages from a booklet (circa 1940) that was intended to assist male bosses in supervising their new female employees at RCA plants. The images come from the collection of the U.S. National Archives Southeast Region.
One piece of advice: Avoid horseplay or “kidding”; she may resent it.
The March/April 2010 issue of Communication World includes an article on how to communicate a changed employee value proposition to a skeptical audience. I was less interested in that storyline than in a set of statistics cited from the Towers Watson’s 2009/2010 Communication ROI Study. Here’s the noteworthy finding.
Phase at which communication function became involved in the change process:
Frankly, I’m surprised that almost one-third of the organizations surveyed involve their comm people only when they are planning how their change project will be implemented. I would have figured that communications is more embedded in change management than that. Could that be why so many change projects rot on the vine?
The Towers Watson survey involved 328 companies and 5 million employees.
In industrialized countries, the burden of unemployment rests most heavily on the shoulders of low-skilled workers. Consider: In 2006, the unemployment rate in the OECD was 10 percent for workers with only basic education compared to five percent for workers with upper secondary education and four percent with tertiary education. What explains this gap?
Daniel Oesch (U Geneva) looked at data from 21 affluent countries over the period of 1991 and 2006. He tested out four possible explanations to explain why unemployment disproportionately affects low-skilled workers:
Oesch found no evidence that low-skilled unemployment is fostered by high minimum wages, strict employment protection, high wage inequality, or lower exposure to international trade. In short, there is simply no need to deregulate the labour market. This finding “throws serious doubt on the frequently echoed expectation that post-industrial economies can only achieve full employment if they open their wage structure downwards in order to create low-paid service jobs,” Oesch writes in the European Journal of Industrial Relations.
What did work? A combination of efficient job-placement services, adequate training programs, and strict job-search controls with a monetary policy that allows the economy to “exploit its growth potential” seems to lead to lower unemployment of the low-skilled.
“What explains high unemployment among low-skilled workers? Evidence from 21 OECD countries,” by Daniel Oesch; European Journal of Industrial Relations (16 (1) 39-55)
Alas the “glass ceiling” is one of those sad facts of modern organizational life that knows no national boundaries. Doesn’t matter the country: despite rising female labour participation rates, women can’t seem to crack senior management ranks.
There are the usual reasons: the lack of transparency around promotion policies; work-family conflict; the old boys’ network; and the lack of visibly successful female role models. In her study of female managers in Ireland, Christine Cross (U Limerick) found similar dynamics at play but also what she calls an under-appreciated phenomenon: that “visibility” or being known to the senior management team is a crucial “career progression strategy.”
It is a strategy for which women of a certain age are ill-equipped, Cross says. “The age during which women are most often taking time out of their career for childbirth coincides with the time they are most active in seeking promotion,” she writes in the Leadership & Organization Development Journal. “As a consequence of taking maternity leave, a woman’s absence from the organisation directly impacts her visibility in organisational life. This study highlights that where women are away from the office for these extended periods, they believe, because of their absence, they are ‘forgotten about’ by the senior management team.”
Cross’s conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with 30 female managers from across a wide range of industry sectors in Ireland. The women in the study also observed that men in their organizations overtly engaged in self-generated visibility, a strategy the female respondents did not want to employ.
Hmm. . . do you buy that?
I have seen the way some men network and it’s not a pretty sight. Everyone knows they are doing it, just to get in with the ‘in crowd’. People talk about them behind their backs about how they are always smoozing up to the most senior people, and there is this one guy who is really junior, but wants to hang out with the ‘big boys’. But it’s working for him, even though we are all saying he shouldn’t be doing it because he’s making a laughing stock of himself.
—Retail store manager quoted by Cross
“Barriers to the executive suite: evidence from Ireland”, by Christine Cross; Leadership & Organization Development Journal (Vol. 31 No. 2, 2010, pp. 104-119)
photo credit: Let Ideas Compete
You’re flush with excitement because you’ve just hired an industry high flier. How can you make sure that your new star employee isn’t a flash in the pan?
Top-notch talents do not automatically perform at high levels, say Groysberg (Harvard Business School), Lee (RiskMetrics Group), and Abrahams (Harvard Business School). Writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review, they offer advice on how to get the best out of the best.
Their main point is that “star” hires perform at their peak when surrounded by colleagues of similar talent. As proof, they point to a study they performed among equity analysts who benefited (as did their customers) by working with sharp portfolio strategists and salespeople.
Why is this so? It turns out that high-quality colleagues act as sources of information, provide insightful feedback, serve as valuable interfaces between knowledge workers and clients, and enhance the reputation of their star colleagues.
This management strategy also leads to higher retention of the top performers, the authors state. “The goal here is the so-called Matthew effect: The more stars a company has, the easier it is to develop and retain such high-caliber individuals.”
Three other pieces of advice:
:: Avoid lavishing high salaries on your new star hire; doing so risks demoralizing co-workers. In fact, the authors write, high achievers may be willing to accept a pay cut for the opportunity to work with similarly talented employees.
:: Stars may not have the instinct to play well with others, especially when managerial time and resources are scarce and the urge to compete is greatest. Managers should therefore create a culture of collaboration by encouraging face-to-face contact and building a compensation package that rewards appropriate behaviour.
:: Don’t neglect home-grown talent. By developing high potentials from within and building bench strength, you will be rewarded with greater loyalty and less disruption when a key person leaves.
“What it Takes to Make ‘Star’ Hires Pay Off”, by Boris Groysberg, Linda-Eling Lee, and Robin Abrahams; MIT Sloan Management Review (Vol. 51, No. 2, Winter 2010, pp. 57-61)
photo credit: Noel Feans
