Rachel Short is a director at the London office of global business psychologists YSC. She supports a range of FTSE-250 clients to build individual and organisational capability. “Being an organisational psychologist is very much like being a sports psychologist,” she says. “We try to use psychological expertise and insight to boost performance, just as a coach would help a football team to improve on the pitch. We can work one-on-one, with teams of individuals, or with a whole organisation. Because we’re a relatively expensive resource, just as sports psychologists tend to work with elite athletes, we tend to work with elite individuals – but the trickledown effect in the company, the better quality of leadership, means better quality for everyone else.” Short frequently coaches senior women on progressing into leadership roles and she most recently worked on the launch and publication of Cracking the Code, research into why women succeed at work, commissioned by the 30% Club, which launched in the UK in 2010 with a goal of supporting women into 30% of FTSE-100 board positions by 2015, and produced in association with KPMG.
Business psychologist Rachel Short: "There is far too much emphasis on the effects of becoming a... [+]
So: what stops women climbing to board level? It’s not choosing to become a mother, as many people assume. And what can get them to the top?
Cracking the Code: tapping into the shifts
“My frame for the Cracking the Code report when I picked up the remit from the 30% Club was to update our knowledge. There is so much written on this subject and a lot of the really great research into women leaders was done in the 80s and 90s. I wanted to test whether some of those ideas still held good, and what we were really trying to do was tap into signs of attitudinal shift. What the report is saying is that things are moving – and here are the ways in which you need to update your ideas. I see it as a work in progress.”
Too few women at the top is about lack of demand, not lack of supply
“If I had to pick three key things I’ve taken away, first, I’d pick the way that traditional approaches, excuses, and ways of thinking about the problem are all focused on what’s considered a lack of suitably qualified, confident or ambitious women. It’s not about lack of supply, it’s about lack of demand! We found that the best way to create more demand for a gender-diverse leadership team is from a personal connection to the issue. A whole lot of business reasons have been put forward in favour of gender diversity; the Davies report [a UK government-sponsored review of women on UK boards, first published in 2011, updated in 2014] identified better performance, better governance. But it’s a visceral connection that really makes the difference in terms of numbers. If a chairman has a daughter or a wife hitting the barriers that women all hit, he becomes quite focused and is more likely to be positive about promoting women. That personal connection is something I really encourage companies to think about and to help the men in their organisations develop. The vast majority of men simply don’t think about this as an issue. They are not anti-women, they just don’t see it as an issue that affects them. You can provide the business case and that’s a great logical argument but it will only get so far: men have to connect with it personally.”
Women just don’t get promoted – but other women can help
“Second: promotion, rather than attrition, was much more of a problem than we’d anticipated. A lot of organisations talked about women not coming back to work after having their second child and rather lazily attributed the lack of senior women to this. It’s not the case. We had help from KPMG when we researched this and there is a whole swathe of women sitting one and two levels below senior who just aren’t being promoted. Some are leaving but nowhere near as many as you’d think: a lot are just not getting up through the ranks. I’m not saying there isn’t a leaking out of women but it’s not the main reason why they aren’t getting to the top. When you manage to break the cycle and get senior women at the top, you create a cycle where more women are promoted: not because those senior women are seen as role models but because they look for more women to join them. They make sure their organisations have gender-diverse shortlists and they go out there and graft at bringing more women into their organisations.”
Having a family won’t hold you back
“Third, and the most shocking thing of all, is the issue that’s created the most political waves: child-rearing. There is too much focus on child-rearing, which is deemed to account for the biggest differences between men’s and women’s career success. The conversation always comes back to the dual burden of work and child-rearing. I’m not saying it doesn’t count – I’m a mother of two – but there is far too much emphasis on the effects of becoming a parent for women. There is no significant statistical difference between women who are mothers and women who are not, in terms of career outcome. We spoke to many women who said it’s about gender, not parenthood: we all come up against the same cultural blockers. Women without children actually got the fewest number of promotions. When we spoke to women at senior level, they looked back to the time when they started their families and said that, at the time, they felt it would have a major impact but, with hindsight, realised it had had a marginal impact. As a result we encouraged organisations to connect up women with successful careers with women thinking about taking maternity leave; becoming a working mother provokes a lot of anxiety but 10 or 15 years down the track, that anxiety is dissipated. We describe it in the report as a pit stop, like in the Grand Prix: there was an interesting dynamic around career acceleration either before or after the family-starting phase and women often actually accelerate their progression either before or afterwards.”
About that long-standing argument that promotion should be on merit rather than responding to diversity shortfalls …
“Obviously most people say that meritocracy makes sense. It’s a perfectly sensible way of progressing. I absolutely get that. But to take that to its logical conclusion, there are fewer women in leadership positions in all walks of life, all around the globe. So what are we saying? That men are sitting at the top because they’re better than women? If we generally operate on meritocratic principles, are we saying women are less good than men? I’m not a fan of quotas, there is a whole host of problems associated with them, but when you put forward the proposition that promotion should always be on merit, who defines merit? Merit is defined as the way leadership looks today and leadership today looks male. The odds are stacked in favour of white, middle-class men educated in a developed country. Business psychologists have been part of that definition; we come up with leadership competence programmes, but they become a cipher. Unconscious bias and social influences affect the system. When an orchestra started auditioning musicians from behind a screen, they found they were recruiting far more women.
“A lot of organisations appoint the best individual for the role. But organisations aren’t just about collections of individuals. There is a team. If you don’t consider the context in which the individual is going to work, you may end up with imported dysfunctionality. Is this person going to complement the existing individuals? A lot of recruitment and promotion processes are set up on a one-on-one basis and don’t ask ‘How is this person going to connect with the people we already have?’ – there needs to be more attention to synergy.”
The subtle differences women bring to the boardroom
“In our research we found that women bring in broadly the same leadership skills as men. What we saw in terms of difference is that women are more values-led. They tap in much more readily to the purpose or the point of an organisation; they commit to a cause. It’s easier for women to exercise power when it comes from a very strong value set, when they’re attached to something that’s important to them. We definitely saw that values-led leadership. We also saw more energy and thought about how to manage and organise people. Women take a broader view of the wider effect of decisions across community. The differences are quite subtle, maybe over-egged. But there’s an well-known quote from Peter Drucker: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ Men seem to demonstrate more hard-nosed attitudes to the numbers but culture eating strategy for breakfast suggests that women’s leadership will become the preferred mode for the 21st century.
“There has definitely been a zeitgeist shift since the Davies report was published in the UK. In 2010 around 12% of UK board members were women; that figure is now around 22%. That’s not a great number but it’s a great shift in a relatively short time frame.”
As a female director, here’s my personal advice
“Something has really struck me the more I’ve got involved with working with women leaders, particularly interviewing young women with high potential. There’s something about the way we encourage young women to think about success. There are more women than men leaving university with good degrees so they are gearing up, but there is something about the hard-wiring that is too simplistic, too linear. We get conditioned too early to work hard, to outperform, and that sets us up to be quite compliant. Young women have a bit of a stalling point early on because that mantra only works for a time: the factors discussed above all start to have an impact. Performance, performance, performance doesn’t work as well as the savvier approach: developing relationships, finding a senior sponsor.
“My advice is two-fold. First, don’t seek permission, don’t fall into that compliant mindset. Don’t focus on all those years when you were working hard to be first in the class. Women are now being penalised if they are too hesitant as leaders, so seek forgiveness rather than permission.
“And, most importantly, find what you’re really passionate about – and that might not be what you’re really good at. Women end up in roles they’re encouraged into because they get good results, but the women CEOs I work with are really interested, passionate, and that’s what’s driven their success. Go with your motivation rather than your ability. It’s a slog for anyone, man or woman, to get into a senior position, so you need to enjoy the slog. Think about the journey. If you connect with something you’re really energised by – and it might be an obscure aspect of petroleum legislation! – then go with it if it fascinates you. And it doesn’t matter if you change your mind along the way.”
