Women in Leadership-Challenging the “Glass Ceiling”

For women who are striving to reach the upper echelon in the corporate world, much has been said about hitting the “glass ceiling.” Does the glass ceiling exist today and, if so, how can women break beyond it to achieve top leadership positions within their organizations?

“Tooting your own horn is just one of the many ways that you can increase the likelihood that you’ll shatter the glass ceiling and snag keys to that corner office,” said Nicole Williams, best-selling author and LinkedIn’s connection director. “If you’re uncomfortable speaking up about your accomplishments, then your best bet is to seek out a sponsor or a mentor in your office who can vouch for you.”

According to a survey of 1,000 female professionals in the U.S. conducted by LinkedIn and released in October, nearly one-fifth of professional women never had a mentor. LinkedIn found out that 52 percent of those women said that they had “never encountered someone appropriate.” Additionally, 67 percent of the respondents said that they had never been mentors because “no one ever asked.”

“Waiting in the wings for a mentor to discover you or hoping that your company will implement a mentoring program aren’t your only options,” Williams stated. She suggested taking control of your professional life. Use resources such as LinkedIn to search for professionals by title and find potential mentors in your zip code.

Corporate versus nonprofit:

Is there a difference for female professionals?

Gretchen Faro is the chief executive officer and president of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Cleveland. She has held several nonprofit management positions, including positions with MAGNET, Northern Ohio Youth Orchestras, The Herb Society of America, and the Cleveland Chapter of City Year; Prior to that, Faro worked in corporate finance and manufacturing with companies such as Ameri-Trust, Eaton Corporation and Gould, Inc.

When it comes to the idea of hitting a glass ceiling, Faro said gender has not been a huge issue in whether career opportunities came her way. “I actually benefited from women who did fight that fight long before I did. What I found in my career was that there were women ahead of me that had cleared the path in terms of capabilities and skills for the job.”

Faro said that the onus is on each individual woman to understand what she wants career-wise and make it happen. Don’t make excuses or complain that you are being overlooked for a promotion. She also highly agreed with the LinkedIn finding that women need to find a mentor. “Women coming up through the ranks may now have more of an advantage in that realm. That’s because there are more female leaders today and more women who want to serve as mentors. That wasn’t quite the case when I was first starting my career.”

She suggested that women might have an edge in leadership positions in the nonprofit industry. That’s because they have a natural ability to connect to their employer based on the mission of the organization. Additionally, women have a strong sense of collaboration and work well in teams. Women have a tendency to deflect glory, Faro said. It’s easier for them to say, “Oh it wasn’t me. It was the whole team.” It’s something that comes naturally to women and a way that we’ve learned to thrive in the world; It’s through a sense of community and family.

Alternatives to the glass ceiling:

A nationwide survey of women released in November shows that sacrificing personal life to quickly climb the corporate ladder may not be worth the journey for many of today’s professional women.  The third annual “Women and Workplace” survey, conducted by the Polling Company/Women Trend, finds that 65 percent of college-educated women, age 35 to 60, prefer to have more free time in their lives than to make more money at their jobs.

Another trend over the past 10 to 20 years is that women are starting their own businesses in record numbers. Women were frustrated with the glass ceiling and the difficulty of being able to rise to higher levels in their companies. “They realized that they didn’t have to keep banging their head against it. They could go off and do it themselves, having greater control over what they make, whom they work with, when they work, and what they do,” said Jeanne Coughlin, a certified professional behavioral analyst and principal of the Coughlin Group. She is also president of the Cleveland chapter of the Women Presidents’ Organization.

Leadership development skills and training:

In addition to finding a mentor and learning the art of self-promotion, women need to develop their leadership skills career experts advise; especially those who aspire to top-level jobs in their organization.

A good exercise a woman can do is a S.W.O.T. analysis, suggested Jeanne Coughlin of the Coughlin Group, who also participates in Leadership Lorain County. Take a look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Look at yourself as a brand.

Here are tips to increase your likelihood of landing a leadership role:

Ø  Make sure that you understand what exactly “leadership” is, and identify the skills that go into being a better leader. Those skills include communicating, listening, negotiating, problem solving, and holding effective meetings. 

Ø  Look into leadership development training in your area. Local Universities, colleges, and business seminars offer many types of programs, for instance. Most of the programs address the skill piece of leadership development.

Ø  Speak to others in positions to which you aspire. Ask them how they got to where they are in their careers and how to build leadership skills.

Ø  Volunteer in nonprofit organizations. Choose something that you are passionate about. It will help you identify new leadership opportunities. Leverage that when communicating your leadership experiences and skills when you move to another organization.

Terminated: Your last five minutes!

You are being terminated from your job this week and your boss would like you to sign papers; You prefer to not sign anything.

Do you have to sign them?

Well, it's true that the only thing they can really do to you for not signing is fire you, which they are already doing. That said, what does signing the papers mean?

There are generally three types of papers involved in a termination. The first is simply a statement that you are being terminated and it may or may not say what the reason for that termination is. The signature asked for is an acknowledgement that you have received the information. It is not (generally) an acknowledgment that you agree with their assessment of the reason for termination.

There is absolutely no reason not to sign this type of paper. It merely says, "Yes, I received and read these papers." Not signing them won't change anything about your termination. (It's not like they'll say, "Oh dear, John won't sign these papers, I guess he'll have to keep working!") If you don't sign, it's most likely that your manager and another witness will write, "John Doe received papers on 4/22/2012 and refused to sign." If your termination is because of a layoff of some sort and they would have considered you for rehire, and then you've just had your status changed to "Ineligible for re-hire."

If it is something that says you agree with their assessment and you don't, you don't have to sign. (For instance, "I acknowledge that I came in late 7 times in the past 30 days and therefore I am being terminated.") If they pressure you, you can sign it with a note that says, "Signing as to receipt only."

The second type generally details what your obligations are. This can be something like a relocation agreement or tuition reimbursement. Again, your signature is just acknowledging that you are aware of these obligations. Not signing doesn't make them go away.

The third type of termination papers is a bit more serious. These are generally legal agreements that involve you promising to do X and the company promising to do Y. They can be asking you to agree not to sue (generally such a document is known as a "General Release"), not to compete for a certain time period, or to not recruit your former coworkers. In exchange the company offers you severance, waves repayment for education or relocation, or allows your 401(k) to be fully vested even if you haven't worked the requisite number of years.

This type of document is extremely important and you should run it by a lawyer before you sign (or don't sign), unless you feel confident that you understand it. No matter what the person who hands the document tells you, what is written prevails. So if there is a non-compete clause in the document, but the HR person says, "Oh don't worry, we never enforce that," they can enforce it if they want to.

In this case you have to evaluate if you want what the company is offering more than what they want you to give up. If it's a layoff and you feel like you weren't chosen for any illegal reason (such as race, gender, pregnancy status, etc), then signing a release saying, "I won't sue you!" is no big deal. Even if you think you were terminated for an illegal reason, if the severance they are offering is more than a token amount, it's probably more than you'll see in a lawsuit and you should consider signing.

No matter what, make sure you keep a copy of any document you sign.

Generally refusing to sign documents because you're angry just burns a bridge. How you handle yourself in a termination can have a huge impact on what your manager says when someone calls him for a reference. And destroying any goodwill that you have isn't worth your temporary temper tantrum.

What is your opinion?

Innovation of the 21st Century Business

Armed with this perspective, where might management innovation go from here? I offer three short predictions for debate and discussion: 



First, Management Innovation will become more collaborative. Opening up the innovation process will not stop with accessing external ideas and sharing internal ideas. Rather, it will evolve into a more iterative, interactive process across the boundaries of companies, as communities of interested participants work together to create new innovations. Organizations like Syndicom, for example, have already established a community of spinal surgeons who meet up virtually to share effective protocols for screening patients for new therapies, and new methods and techniques to achieve better patient outcomes when utilizing those new therapies. 



Second, Business Model Innovation will become as important as technological innovation. It is generally accepted that a better business model can often beat a better technology. Yet companies that spend many millions of dollars on R&D seldom invest much money or time in exploring alternative business models to commercialize those discoveries. Not all business models are created equal, and we will learn how to design and improve business models in the coming decade. The rise of multinational companies from BRIC economies will further advance this trend. 



Third, we will need to master the art and science of innovating in Services-Led Economies. Most of what we know about managing innovation comes from the study of products and technologies. Yet the world's top advanced economies today derive most of their GDP from services rather than products or agriculture. To preserve prosperity and high wage employment in the advanced economies, we will have to learn how innovation works in services, which is likely to differ from how it works in products. If we incorporate the above two predictions as well, one can predict that the winning formula for managing innovation in the next decade will be via open services.


What are your personal thoughts?

Willful Blindness… The Rupert Murdoch Case

Was the News Corporation boss negligent, incompetent or willfully blind? There are lessons for all leaders in the hacking saga and the findings of the House of Commons committee.

The biggest threats and dangers we face are the ones we don't see – not because they're secret or invisible, but because we're willfully blind. By failing to see – or admit to our colleagues or us. – the issues and problems in plain sight, leaders can ruin private lives and bring down corporations.

Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, after its investigation into News Corporation, has concluded that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to run an international corporation. It said: "on the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications. "

Whatever your opinion of Rupert Murdoch's media outlets, this is a damning verdict on a man who has built one of the world's largest and most powerful media businesses. It leads anyone who runs a business to ask: have I, at all times, taken steps to be fully informed about what is going on in my organization? What might be getting in the way of my seeing what I most need to understand? 

 In Murdoch's case, my argument is that one of the biggest problems he suffered from was not personal, but structural: power.  Power encases its recipients in a bubble. Some of that bubble may attain a physical reality: encased in limousines, private jets, and hotel suites, very powerful individuals rarely inhabit the same world as the rest of the world. Protected from the knocks and bumps of daily life, the powerful don't encounter the unscheduled question or unexpected mishap that shows where things could be going wrong.  Academic studies have shown that those with power are more optimistic, more abstract in their thinking, and more confident that they're right. So mentally they're in a bubble, too.

Perhaps most potently in Murdoch's case, powerful people can't escape a trap. People who tell them what they want to hear surround those who hold power, hiding or minimizing what they imagine their bosses don't want to know. On one level, this is not personal; it afflicts everyone. Ambitious executives want to please their bosses, so they deliver the good news and bury the bad. It's assumed that conflict is undesirable so anything that might provoke it mysteriously disappears. Leaders themselves need do nothing to encourage this. The ambitions of those around them is enough to ensure that they are surrounded by smiling bearers of success stories.

 Murdoch isn't the first and he won't be the last to be caught in this power trap. John Browne, when he led BP, was famously ensnared in it, blind to the dangerous operations, which led to accidents and fatalities. His later memoir acknowledged as much. He wrote: "I wish someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say, 'we need to ask more disagreeable questions'. "

It takes enormous energy, fortitude, and humility to see that power isn't just a privilege, but also a problem. To solve it requires finding and protecting people whose job it is specifically to ask the hard questions, to test assumptions, and challenge received wisdom. It also requires corporate governance and directors to do likewise. Most of all, the problem of power challenges all leaders–whether of billion-dollar businesses or small companies–to appreciate that, however much they say they want to hear the truth, no-one will believe them until they see the delivery of bad news rewarded.

What is your opinion?