Get in Line: Negotiate for P&L Experience Now

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

According to McKinsey’s latest report on advancing women in US companies, “Unlocking the Full Potential of Women at Work,” one of the most impactful career moves women can make is to move into a line role. You don’t have to stay there forever, but getting profit and loss experience throughout your career helps you showcase your competence and appetite for leadership – characteristics that will propel you to the top.

Based on a review of 60 large US corporations, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of surveys, the consulting firm sought to determine the top practices by which companies can retain women and promote them to the c-suite. Much of the work that will enable women to advance in greater numbers is institutional – gender supportive leadership, managerial accountability, carefully monitored metrics at every level. But there is room for individual strategy and growth as well.

Lareina Yee, co-author of the report with Joanna Barsh, explained, “One of the things we did was to interview 200 successful individual women, and distill their shared characteristics of success. One of them was line experience.”

How successful? According to Yee, “79% of women who were very successful and reached the upper echelons had line experience as a big part of her portfolio.”

Pulling Women Into the Line

Line experience, profit-and-loss, P&L – these all refer to roles where your performance is measured by how much money you make for the company. Unlike staff roles – like legal, operations, human resources – these jobs are meant to be revenue generators.

According to the study, roughly equal numbers of women and men enter the workforce in staff roles. “Then tier by tier, role by role, as they move up to the c-suite, it’s a dramatically different picture,” Yee said. “Women are disproportionally represented in staff roles, but they’re not switching back into line roles during their career.”

McKinsey also confirmed what many reports have shown – mid-management levels are the most challenging for women, in that they often coincide with greater child-care responsibilities. “Finding ways to help women in the middle stay in the game and advance to higher levels—particularly through their child-raising years—would reshape the pipeline at these companies and go a long way toward bringing more talent to the top,” the report suggests.

Yee says the decline of women in the pipeline at middle levels plus the decline of women in line roles moving up the ladder amounts to a “double whammy,” in which even fewer women are in line for CEO.

“Women may want to take a staff role during the years they want to have kids and that’s a very logical step to take. But what women and supporters of women don’t realize is that the next step is to bring them back into the line role,” Yee explained. “That next set of opportunities that creates an experience for women isn’t happening. And this is tied to being a good sponsor for women, proactively thinking about opportunities for them, and saying, ‘This person should take a risk,’ or ‘We’ve got to put this person on the slate.’”

The other part, she said, was creating awareness of what she called “undermining mindsets,” like promoting men on potential and women on performance. “If a woman in a staff role is promoted on performance, they see her in another staff position, rather than taking a risk and promoting her to an opportunity on the line.”

Strategies for Women

According to Yee, the women who have been successful at reaching high levels in their careers have taken notable career risks that paid off. “This is related to our work on centered leadership. Successful women have an awareness of what drives leadership for them, and you need to think about that. If I think about my full potential, where would I like to go?”

And don’t be afraid to let your intentions be known, she continued. “If you are in a staff role and you have a hunger to get into a P&L role, tell your supporters about that. The executives we interviewed said they would love to know what leaders want.”

“The next step is really taking the risk. Switching across roles is hard and might require lily hopping across companies.”

Getting those opportunities also means cultivating powerful relationships with those around and above you. “Having really good sponsors around who really believe in you and your potential is important. And be persistent in asking for feedback. We found that 70% of successful women were active in asking for feedback.”

Women Sponsoring Women

The connection between sponsorship and promotion into line roles is another reason powerful individuals – male or female – should take note. “It’s about opportunity creation,” Yee explained. “You create an opportunity for someone and they give back.”

“There’s so much that women can do to open doors for other women and create the space for those opportunities and connect them to opportunities through networking and providing exposure to other individuals who create opportunities.” She continued, “Demystifying politics as something not necessarily negative can also be very helpful.”

She added that, just as junior women should seek out feedback, it can be helpful for senior women to take the time to give it. “Say, ‘here are the ways you can take your game to the next level.’ It gets harder as people move up. Early in your career, feedback is more objective. But as you move up, it’s more about notions of style and qualities – it becomes more subjective. Nuanced, stylistic, situational, focused feedback is incredibly important.”

She added, “At the c-suite level, that nuanced feedback can really make the difference.”