The Three Revolutionary Traits of Today’s Leaders

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iStock_000016760701XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

This year, the Council of Urban Professionals (CUP) is seeking to recognize change agents who have flown under the radar in the past. With the first ever CUP Catalysts: Change Agents 2012 awards, CUP will honor women and people of color who hold significant leadership positions in their organizations, and have given back to their communities in a big way as well.

Chloe Drew, Executive Director of CUP, explained, “We are committed every day to bringing more diversity to the business table. Considering the shifting demographics of the United States, we’re in the business of preparing the succession plan for the next generation of leaders.”

The award will recognize people between the ages of 35 and 50, who have met with “extraordinary professional success” and demonstrated a “commitment to community leadership.” Three individuals in financial services, law, and media & entertainment will be recognized.

Drew believes the character of leadership is changing. Here are her “big three” traits embodied by today’s leading change agents.

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Voice of Experience: Deb Wheelock, Partner, Global Leader of Talent Management & Diversity Center of Excellence, Mercer

This week The Glass Hammer is publishing a series of profiles on top leaders in corporate diversity. Check back all week long to learn about the women making a difference.

debwheelockBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“At Mercer, our primary focus is helping our clients maximize the potential of their human capital,” began Deb Wheelock, Partner and Global Talent Management & Diversity Leader at Mercer. “Unlike other companies, we don’t produce widgets. We market the professional knowledge of our people. They need to be our competitive edge.”

“Thinking back to my tech days, another way I put it is ‘our people are our next killer app,’” explained the former e-learning specialist. “Diversity is becoming an imperative because we have people of different backgrounds with diverse approaches and innovative solutions to bring to our clients.”

She added, “You just don’t get that level of innovation from a homogenous workforce, no matter how bright they might be.”

Wheelock believes diversity is undergoing a generational shift. “We’re seeing a change in what our colleagues are bringing to work in terms of their outlook as well as their biases. That pushes us toward inclusion – from tolerating differences, to appreciating and leveraging those differences.”

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Voice of Experience: Lisa Jacobs, Partner, Capital Markets Practice, Shearman & Sterling

This week The Glass Hammer is publishing a series of profiles on top leaders in corporate diversity. Check back all week long to learn about the women making a difference.

LisaJacobsBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

After working as a part-time lawyer for the majority of her career, today Lisa Jacobs is a high-profile lawyer at Shearman & Sterling, a prominent member of the firm’s Diversity Committee and a staunch supporter of women in law. She wants women to know: you can build the life and career you want.

“I’m not a subscriber to the Sheryl Sandberg ‘ambition gap’ idea,” said Jacobs, a partner in Shearman & Sterling’s Capital Markets Practice in New York. “Success is how you define it.”

“I’m not a woman partner who will tell you, ‘this is what success is,’” she added. “Success is what you want it to be and what you take it to be. I wanted a family and to be a truly participatory mom – and I wanted to be a deal lawyer. Fortunately, I found a way to do both.”

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Voice of Experience: Joanne Rodgers, Chief Diversity Officer, New York Life

This week The Glass Hammer is publishing a series of profiles on top leaders in corporate diversity. Check back all week long to learn about the women making a difference.

JoanneRodgersBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Joanne Rodgers, now Chief Diversity Officer at New York Life, began her career at the National Association of Securities Dealers (now FINRA) before moving to New York Life’s Compliance Department. Eighteen years later, Rodgers has held a variety of roles in the company, moving from compliance to marketing and, most recently, corporate strategy. “I also had the opportunity to head up the company’s women’s leadership program and that definitely helped with my new role as Chief Diversity Officer,” she said. Rodgers says she is looking forward to promoting diversity on a broader scale.

Having just moved into the CDO role this year, she is now charting the future diversity strategy for the company. “I’m currently working with all of the business units to analyze and develop our diversity strategies so that we remain an employer of choice. My experience in the corporate strategy group has been a real asset, since much of my work involved working with the business units, being engaged with critical strategic goals and understanding the environmental landscape that affects us. My directive is to make sure New York Life has strong diversity and inclusion practices and I am pleased that my colleagues at New York Life take this very seriously.”

She continued, “If you simply look at the changing demographics in this country, the business case for diversity becomes more apparent based on the makeup of our customers and of the workforce today and in the future.”

“We want to really consider how those changing demographics affect us as an organization and how our increasingly diverse workforce can make us a better company.”

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Using Failure as Fuel: The Anti-Bio

iStock_000016909333XSmallBy Robin Madell (San Francisco)

The failed start-up. The lost job. The botched client pitch. The college rejection letter. Most missteps along our career path make us cringe and want to put the experience out of sight and out of mind as quickly as possible. In our efforts to move on and put our best foot forward, we may omit setbacks from our professional stories that we tell others, and even from what we tell ourselves.

Yet there may be more value in owning our failures than running from them. “Failure is an inescapable part of life as an executive,” says corporate psychologist Patricia Thompson, PhD. “While some people are more likely to make errors of commission, in which they jump in and make a mistake, others may be more likely to make errors of omission, in which they are not aggressive enough and miss out on opportunities.”

Thompson suggests that the best leaders are those who are able to maintain perspective: when you recognize that making mistakes is inevitable, you can use them as growth opportunities rather than trying to pretend that the mistake never happened.

This sounds good, but how can you really flip failures into your favor? One way is to consider constructing an “anti-bio.”

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Voice of Experience: Laura Friedrich, Partner, Global Asset Management Group, Shearman & Sterling

Laura FriedrichBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

In her position as a leading private equity funds lawyer and as a former hiring partner at global law firm Shearman & Sterling in New York, Laura Friedrich has learned a few things about work/life balance.

“I have two children spread ten and a half years apart,” she said. “I had my first when I was a fifth-year associate, then I had another last year. It’s interesting to see how different it feels this time – easier in some ways and harder in others.”

Friedrich is adamant in her recommendation that junior women commit to their careers for the longer term, despite periodic work/life challenges. “Too many women are looking to have everything exactly how they want it throughout their whole career,” she said. “But you’ve got to take the ups and downs as they come. I think women drop off the fast-track too soon. Anticipating that it’s going to be difficult, they don’t even try.”

“I love my career and I love my family,” she continued. “Sometimes I do feel stretched thin, but I wouldn’t give up any of it.”

In fact, when she first began her career, she herself didn’t anticipate the level she would reach in the profession. “But the momentum kept me going,” Friedrich said, “and I stayed, and I love what I do now.”

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Leadership Practices for Work Life Sanity

Contributed by CEO Coach Henna Inam

Want to take the 24 out of 24/7? I was at lunch the other day with a friend who is a senior leader at her company.  She was talking about how many junior women “opt out” as they think about having families. This, despite all the work her company, a leader in work-life flexibility options, has done to improve the situation for working families.  In fact, a McKinsey study [PDF] reports that C-suite executives believe the top two barriers to the advancement of women are women’s “double-burden” (work and family responsibilities) and our 24/7 “always on” work environments.

The recent debate about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” has thrown fuel into the fire. The article is written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former state department official who gave up her position to spend time with her family. On one side of the debate are those who feel we’ve made tremendous sacrifices to pave the way for others, and want the next generation to believe that women can have it all. On the other side of the debate are those who want to acknowledge that there is still a lot of work to be done in society, our workplaces, cultural expectations that prevent women from having it all. They don’t want to set women up for disappointment and self-blame if they discover that they cannot have it all.

I’m not sure what the right answer is. But I do wonder if we’re asking the right questions. Asking the questions, even if I don’t have all the answers, creates a new perspective on the debate.

  • What do I (emphasis being on I) want in my work and in my life?
  • What is my definition of “having it all” and how is it different from “having enough”?
  • What are the trade-offs I am willing to make that are right for me?
  • What are my standards of success? Do they prevent me in attaining happiness and fulfillment?

We tend to blame society, our workplaces, our bosses for putting us on the 24/7 treadmill and preventing us from “having it all.” And yes, I am a strong proponent of the many changes still to be made in our work cultures that demand us being “on” 24/7. However, my challenge to myself and others is to look inside first and see what needs to be changed within ourselves. How can I claim my own power to make the choices that are right for me?

Here are seven leadership practices that help me and I’d like to share with you.

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Women in the Boardroom: Moving Critical Mass Forward

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Business People Applauding In a MeetingBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

The first time I heard the phrase “critical mass,” it had nothing to do with boardroom gender equality. I was a student at the College of William and Mary, and Critical Mass was an event where cyclists would attempt to clog the streets of my tiny college town to kindly encourage automobile drivers to share the road. While I generally supported my two-wheeled classmates, I wasn’t altogether clear on their event’s apparent link to nuclear physics. I later learned they were inspired by much larger demonstrations in San Francisco, which, in turn, were inspired by a 1992 documentary on bicycle transportation around the world.

In an interview in the film, American bicycle designer George Bliss describes his observations of traffic in China, where cyclists had an unspoken method of crossing busy intersections, which often had no traffic signals. More and more cyclists would collect along one side of the intersection, until their group reached a certain understood size (“critical mass”) when it was safe to cross the road together, as automobile traffic would have to stop and wait for the cyclists to pass.

We can draw inspiration from the critical mass metaphor for gender diversity as well. As the number of women in boardrooms and on executive committees increases, there reaches a point where women feel safe to speak up, get enthusiastic, take risks, and make waves – without being seen as a threat to the status quo, as overemotional, as a risky hire, or as a token place holder. Critical mass is the notion of safety in numbers.

And “safety in numbers” means better business. Recent research by Catalyst suggests that companies with three or more women directors outperform those with all-male boards. “When you reach a certain critical mass, the board starts to behave differently,” said Joe Keefe, President and CEO of PAX World Mutual Funds and a founder of the Thirty Percent Coalition. “Conversations are richer, decisions improve, women bring different perspectives to the table, and performance improves.”

Indeed, a new Credit Suisse study of almost 2,400 companies suggests that boardroom diversity improves corporate performance. In fact, companies with more than one woman on their board performed 26% better over the past 6 years than those with no female directors.

Imagine the impact on gender diversity if the conversation around critical mass were one that appealed to both women and companies? The Thirty Percent Coalition intends to do just that.

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Executive and Pregnant: Multitasking and Making It Work

Pregnant woman in the officeBy Robin Madell (San Francisco)

When it comes to pregnancy and running a company, multitasking may be an understatement. But according to corporate CEO Michelle Patterson, executive director of the California Women’s Conference, women have always had an inherent ability to multitask, in even the most demanding situations.

“Women alike, whether single mothers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, teachers, and/or athletes, are not shocked or taken aback by the fact that an executive is capable of running a corporation while she is expecting,” says Patterson.

That may be because many of them have already done just that. An informal poll by The Glass Hammer found a large number of executives who cited their experience managing pregnancy, maternity leave, and jobs—either with a slight pause or not.

“Whether a woman chooses to work through her maternity leave is a personal choice and shouldn’t set a precedent for other professionals,” adds Debby Carreau, CEO of Inspired HR. “If you choose to return emails in the delivery room that is your prerogative, as is taking time away from work and getting away from it all.”

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Voice of Experience: Jennifer McLaughlin, Senior Executive, CMT Operating Group, North America, Accenture

JenniferMcLaughlinBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Jennifer McLaughlin has spent a two-decade career at Accenture, all of it working with clients in the communications area. It should be no surprise, then, that one of McLaughlin’s key lessons is the importance of clear communication.

“One of the things I’ve learned in my career is how openly you should communicate. When I was younger, I would second guess and form opinions about how people would receive what I had to say – instead of just openly communicating.”

That went for client work and her own professional needs – like flex work, she explained. “But I’ve learned that when you’re direct, you just get a better result. There’s more transparency about where you stand with others and that’s important.”

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