Sharing Best Practices to Boost Senior Female Leadership

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Last week Catalyst presented its annual awards for companies going the extra mile to advance and retain women. While the winning companies – Kaiser Permanente, Time Warner, and McDonald’s – boasted strong results for promoting women across the board, they each took an interesting approach to getting more women into senior roles.

Each of the winning companies recognized the business value of employing more women. After all, women traditionally make the majority of healthcare and nutrition related decisions within the family. And women are also a huge market for news and entertainment. It makes sense that these companies would benefit by improving the gender balance of their workforce in general, as well as key leadership and decision making roles.

As Julie S. Nugent, Senior Director, Research, and Chair, Catalyst Award Evaluation Committee, remarked, “diversity and inclusion is an important business imperative that deserves our attention, and it’s not just a nice thing to have.”

The conference enabled business leaders to learn from the winning companies’ best practices, and hopefully implement the gender diversity strategies at their own companies. Here are a few of the key takeaways that the conference participants shared.

Being Deliberate

Kaiser Permanente has managed to increase the number of women on its board from 21% to 36% between 2001 and 2009 – and it has increased the number of ethnically diverse women on its board from 7% to 24% in the same time span.

Diane Gage Lofgren, Senior Vice President, Brand Strategy, Communications and Public Relations at Kaiser Permanente, said the company’s success boils down to “being deliberate.”

She was careful to note that the company had not implemented a quota system, but it did make increasing board diversity a priority. Lofgren explained that while the company’s workforce was in fact already quite diverse, it wanted to make sure the board better reflected the makeup of its employees.

“It’s about balance,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to work for a company that was only women either.”

Engaging Senior Leaders

During the keynote discussion, Catalyst CEO Ilene Lang interviewed Irene Rosenfeld, CEO of Kraft. It’s hard to find a better example than Rosenfeld on the subject of senior support for diversity. “I think it’s a critical enabler of profit growth,” she explained. In fact, she said, that’s why improving diversity is included in the criteria for bonuses at Kraft.

“It’s enabled us to make great progress far quicker than we would have otherwise.” Still she said, the progress wasn’t happening fast enough.

Rosenfeld also said she has worked to make small changes that would make promotion easy for women at Kraft, like providing learning and development for women reentering the workforce after a career break, and coordinating regional transfers with school year calendars.

Pam Harris, McDonald’s Chief Diversity Officer, also emphasized the importance of engaging senior leaders in diversity initiatives. She said, “Top management must be fully committed to the value of gender diversity and diversity in general for the initiative to succeed.” She said one of the keys to McDonald’s success in boosting gender diversity was ensuring that senior management was visible and vocal in their support for the program.

The company’s gender diversity initiative has been extremely successful across the globe. Since it was implemented, the number of female regional managers and has risen from zero to 36% in the Asia Pacific/Middle East/Africa region, from 10% to 14% in Europe, and from 13% to 38% in the US.

Encouraging Networking

A little over a decade ago (following its merger with AOL), Time Warner felt it needed to rebuild its social fabric. According to Dori Rubin, Director of People Development for the company, Time Warner undertook a lengthy survey assessment of its workforce. One of the startling facts the study recovered was how many women were unhappy with their chances for promotion.

Rubin explained that women felt they had to prove themselves to be promoted, while feeling that men only had to show potential. “They felt men were given the benefit of the doubt,” she explained. Because women were not “known” within the networks of power that are behind career advancement, the company undertook several initiatives to improve networking internally.

And the program has been extremely successful. In 2004, only 59% of women were likely to say they were planning to stay with the company. By 2010, the statistic had risen to 72%.

By ensuring that employees were able to network with one another, Time Warner created an environment in which women felt they could get ahead, and therefore were more likely to say they’d stay with the company.

Additionally, Rudin said, the number of female vice presidents has risen from 37% to 42% and the number of women in top management has risen from 18% to 23%. While these numbers perhaps do not represent what you might consider parity, the company is showing progress. According to Time Warner, women who participate in its Breakthrough Leadership learning and development networking program are more than twice as likely to be promoted.

Harris agreed. She said that training and education must be a key factor in all and that employee business networking had been invaluable. Female restaurant managers are invited to participate in the company’s Women Leadership Network meetings, and men are also encouraged to attend the company’s gender diversity programs.