Are women still sitting waiting to be asked to dance? Mairi Eastwood reports on research on how to help organisations get more women into the executive group
Now that the proportion of women non-executives is moving upwards, attention is focusing, rightly, on the pipeline of senior women in the executive group. Most chief executives we speak to now understand the issues, yet they’re still asking: “But what more do we do? We are trying most things. It’s not working.”
Praesta Partners coaches 450 leaders a year, 50 per cent of whom are at board or executive level, and a further 30 per cent at one level below the executive. While all our coaching is, of course, confidential, we believed that we had some unique data. So we analysed our work with both senior men and women to see if it would throw further light on CEO questions such as this.
Aspiring to lead
There is more explicit support through coaching for senior men aspiring to be on the executive board, than there is for women, according to our data. Fewer than one in ten female clients either put themselves forward or were supported for this reason, compared to 41 per cent of men.
Six out of ten of the senior women we coached lacked confidence in their talents, even though they had proved them by reaching board level or just below. This was also where coaching sponsors most underestimated the client’s need to develop.
What does this tell us about what is happening at lower levels? Are women’s aspirations being ignored or are women not pushing as hard? And if these successful women are lacking confidence, what about the rest?
Both men and women senior leaders are looking for help in establishing their own individual leadership style that feels authentic to them, particularly when it is not the same as the style that prevails in their organisation.
When we looked just at the data on women, 46 per cent of whom wanted to work on it, we put
this focus down to a lack of appropriate role models.
To our surprise, it was men’s top issue, raised by 58 per cent. Of course, the leaders who come to us are not a random sample of all leaders. It is likely that those who are the most confident, and who fit most with the organisation’s style, do not come for coaching. Nevertheless, we believe this is a very interesting finding. Some 70 per cent of men and women in the sample were aged under 50.
In separate research, we have found that successful younger male leaders are adopting a different style of leadership from the previous generation’s approach.
With an identity derived from multiple, equally valued roles – leader, active co-parent, spouse – they want to have a style that feels consistent across these identities and that matches their values. Generally speaking, this is also a consensual style – one that many women already feel is more natural to them.
Challenging stereotypes
Our findings suggest that neither gender may have a wealth of role models they feel comfortable with in the current generation of more senior leaders.
Are women struggling to fight a battle on behalf of both generations? Will younger male leaders joining a common cause in a different leadership style be the factor that tips the balance of significant change?
We also noted that a significant percentage of women (27 per cent) are still being labelled ‘over-aggressive’. In many of these cases, coaches’ conversations with the organisations revealed that
‘over-aggressive’ was a label that reflected a challenge to a male stereotype of feminine behaviour. In other cases, the behaviour came from women trying too hard to emulate what they perceived as a successful ’masculine style’, because they didn’t see their own natural style as a route to success and weren’t confident enough to persist with it.
It was very noticeable how much impact identifying and focusing on the individual’s strengths had, – in many cases it created transformational change.
This won’t be a surprise to most coaches. But it begs the question as to why organisations and CEOs don’t do more of this internally.
Some CEOs would undoubtedly see it as ‘mothering’ that shouldn’t be necessary in the workplace. Or as the role of the HR department.
It may be that large organisations, in particular, have become too critical, too internally competitive and their senior leaders too ‘busy’ to stop and give personal encouragement.
Case study: too much testosterone
A very capable general counsel on a FTSE board composed otherwise entirely of men, came for coaching. She said that, despite the fact she had been accustomed throughout her career to working in male-dominated industries and was used to being part of otherwise all-male teams, this particular one was really getting to her.
“Too much testosterone, even for me”, she said. “I can’t get my points across. I need some help to deal with this. No-one listens to me.”
I set about enquiring and helping her analyse what was going on. We both expected that it would all be about how she spoke, how she behaved in the meeting. When we looked at what she was very good at – making clear business cases for actions; using influencing skills to pre position proposals she wanted adopted – we discovered that she knew exactly what to do; she had been thrown by the culture into not doing what she could clearly do very well.
At the end of the first three sessions, I said: “Let’s review what we’ve been doing against the objectives you set for coaching. How are we doing? We don’t seem to have really worked on how to help you with the predominating male culture.”
“I have realised”, she said, “that I can cope well. I have all the skills; I was just letting it deflect me.”
Recommendations for CEOs and HRDs
Ensure your processes for talent identification and succession planning are not overlooking talented people who are not strong self-promoters
Recognise that it is important to younger leaders to find a personal style of leadership that feels right for them. Ask yourselves whether you and your colleagues are genuinely letting the new generation lead in their way. Getting it right for women will help to get it right for men in the future, too
Ensure you understand what is behind a woman being labelled ‘over-aggressive’
As CEO, take more time out to provide encouragement and use of strengths. Don’t let busy directors and helpful HRDs unconsciously collude for this not to happen in the line
Praesta’s report, ‘Why are there so few women in senior executive roles?’ is available free from Joanne Gavin at Praesta on 020 7907 2450
Coaching at Work, volume 8, issue 2