LEADING THOUGHTS

When it comes to being effective negotiators, women have it tough. Either they’re reluctant to push their interests or, if they do, are tagged with being pushy for asking too much. What to do? One, the female negotiator should get smart by learning what others in the organization are doing to advance themselves. Two, she should practise negotiating with shopkeepers or family memebrs. Third, she should “pay more attention to the style and impression that she is creating so she makes sure she doesn’t come off as being too aggressive.” Easier said than done. Read the article

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A new box is being pencilled into org charts: chief operating officer for HR. The motivation: to coax more performance improvements from the talent pool. Business leaders may not be getting the HR services they want, but shouldn’t the existing HR leadership be able to solve this problem? The debate continues. Read the article

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By rights, solid knowledge management techniques should help work teams avoid reinventing the wheel. In fact, new reseach shows that when project teams have access to stored organizational knowledge, they complete tasks more quickly, but the quality of their work doesn’t necessarily improve. Teams that are most likely to show increases in both efficiency and quality are those dealing with constantly changing projects. Read the article

Over the past decade, neuroscientists have come a long way in figuring out how ideas form in the human mind. As it turns out, their findings contradict how most companies understand and organize innovation. The new model of the brain is based on “intelligent memory,” combining analysis and intuition and requiring a different form of brainstorming.

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Women are entering higher education on par with their male counterparts but few are making it into the executive suites and boardrooms during their subsequent careers. For all the gains women are making, there remain two significant gaps: pay and leadership.

Read the article

Women are also:

• Cooperative!
• Patient!

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.

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

Although working women are piling up educational credentials and experience, in far too many organizations they are still butting up against a glass ceiling. These invisible barriers to upward mobility can come in various forms: lack of mentoring of women, gender stereotyping, and views that men make more effective leaders. In the U.S., women holding the titles of chairman, CEO, COO, and executive vice president remain at about 7 percent of the population of executives.

While many possible causes of the glass ceiling have been studied, one overlooked area is managers’ perceptions of women’s work and family demands. Researchers Jenny M. Hoobler, Sandy J. Wayne, and Grace Lemmon (U of Illinois at Chicago) designed a study to test two ideas: whether managers view women as having more difficulty than men executing their work roles due to family responsibilities; and whether women, based on this perception, are viewed as less suitable for promotion. The study was based on a sample of 126 female subordinates and 52 male and female managers from one midwestern-U.S. division of a Fortune 100 transportation firm.

The result was conclusive: “Even though female employees actually reported slightly less family-work conflict than their male counterparts,” the researchers write in the Academy of Management Journal, “their managers still perceived them as having greater family-work conflict, a perception that had significant implications for women’s organizational advancement.” (These biases held for both male and female managers.) Because of these perceptions, managers rated women lower on job and organizational fit and performance.

“We have uncovered a critical dimension of the social role expectations that play a key role in the upward progress of female workers,” the researchers write. “Furthermore, we feel that such stereotyping is quite significant, with strong ramifications for people and organizations, given that these perceptions affect important managerial decisions.”

If these results are a true reflection of what is going on in organizations, there are a couple of practical implications.

One, to reduce or eliminate the impact of gender on managers’ perceptions of family-work conflict, managers must be made aware of their potential to stereotype. This is not simply a male-female issue. As the investigators note, “Male managers have been said to be gatekeepers of the upper echelons of management, yet we found that female managers held family-work conflict stereotypes about female subordinates as well.”

Two, women who participate in company-sponsored programs that assist employees with managing family-work conflict may be signaling to their managers that they need help balancing home and work domains. Given prevailing stereotypes, this would likely kill their opportunities to be promoted.

Bosses’ perceptions of family-work conflict and women’s promotability: Glass ceiling effects,” by Jenny M Hoobler, Sandy J. Wayne, and Grace Lemmon; Academy of Management Journal (2009, Vol. 52, No. 5, 939–957)

photo credit: Sal Petruzelli Marino

In this video clip, INSEAD Professor Herminia Ibarra discusses perceptions of women being relatively weak at “envisioning,” essentially the ability to articulate a vision of the future and translating it into a strategic direction.

Ibara’s study is based on 360-degree evaluations of some 2,000 male and female managers. Prevailing wisdom is that there is a bias against female managers, who are generally rated less favourably than their male counterparts. Not so fast: Ibarra found that women score higher than men on many measures (such as communication, emotional intelligence, feedback) except for one: envisioning.

Yes, this is perception and not reality, but “when it comes to senior management,” she points out, “perception is reality.” (3:15 mark)

At the 4:00 mark, Ibarra says it is possible the way in which women arrive at a new vision is simply different than the process used by men (consensus versus going to the mountaintop), and that this organic process is not as evident.

At 6:10, she wonders if some women prefer to stick to the facts rather than striking out with a bold vision because they are often in a more vulnerable position in organizations.

And at 8:50, she talks about the “identity trap” in which men and women often find themselves: being pigeon-holed as an expert in one area. One way to escape this trap is to get out of the office to enlarge your perspectives with your network and do some “pattern recognition” in other areas. (11:24).

Does having a diverse workforce make good business sense? One body of research suggests that a max-mix of genders and races actually has a negative impact on group dynamics and communication. Now comes a study that says diversity means higher sales and customer numbers and greater profitability.

In the April issue of the American Sociological Review, sociologist Cedric Herring from the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs found that companies reporting the highest levels of racial diversity brought in nearly 15 times more sales revenue on average than those with the lowest levels of racial diversity. Gender diversity accounted for a difference of $599.1 million in average sales revenue.

Herring found racial diversity to be a better determinant of sales revenue and customer numbers than company size, the company’s age, and the number of employees at any given work location.

Other findings:

• Companies with the highest levels of gender diversity reported an average of 15,000 more customers than organizations with the lowest levels of gender diversity.
• Racial diversity is among the most important predictors of a company’s competitive positioning relative to other firms in its industry. As racial and gender diversity levels increased in a company’s workforce, its profits relative to those of its competitors also increased.

Herring analyzed data from the National Organizations Survey, reviewing a subset of 506 United States-based for-profit businesses that provided information about workforce diversity, sales revenue, customer numbers, market share and profitability between 1996 and 1997.

Here is a 10-minute clip from a Harvard Business Press interview with executive coach Gill Corkindale. Corkindale talks about how to identify and deal with alpha personalities. Of particular interest: the unique traits of alpha females (at 2:15), how to manage alpha leaders (at 6:30), and how to lead alpha subordinates (at 8:30). Watch your back!