Natalie Runyon, Director of Global Security at Thomson Reuters, wishes she had known just how important it was to seek out leadership training and development early on in her career. Since she cannot go back in time, Runyon is doing the next best thing. She is developing female leaders through the “How to be the CEO of Your Career” program that she created and launched through the New York City Chapter of the women’s network at Thomson Reuters. Supporting the advancement of women through this program has certainly been one of the most rewarding aspects of Runyon’s career because she gets to combine her passions of leadership training and providing a resource for professional women.
Career Path
One might say that Natalie Runyon’s career path was anything but linear. Yet all of her experiences have contributed to her becoming an influential leadership strategist for women who want to change the world, in her own words. Runyon was born and raised in Louisiana, and after graduating from Louisiana State University with a degree in International Trade and Finance, she was ready to explore life outside the Pelican State. Runyon headed to Washington, D.C. to work for the CIA, an opportunity she secured the year before when working as an intern the summer before her senior year of college. Determined to find her way to Wall St. to work in the financial services industry, Runyon attended The George Washington University part-time, while working for the CIA, eventually earning her MBA.
In 2003, Runyon packed her bags for New York City to begin her career in the Global Security group at Goldman Sachs. “This was shortly after 9/11, and I had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the crisis management program,” said Runyon. She continued, “It was in this role that I discovered my love for training at all organizational and operational levels.” Runyon excelled at crisis management, but after a few years she began to feel the symptoms of burnout set in. “Crisis management is 24/7, and when you are working in global security, the work never stops,” she said.
Recognizing the signs of burnout, Runyon took advantage of a unique opportunity in 2008 to work on rebuilding the go to the Gulf Coast and help victims of Hurricane Katrina recover and begin to rebuild from the disaster that hit the area in 2005. “I had a personal stake in this cause,” said Runyon, “since my grandmother lost her home in the hurricane. Helping with the relief efforts also gave me the opportunity to connect with people outside of the office, which was so rewarding.”
During this time, Runyon received her Leadership Coaching Certification, which was a skill she would be able to apply effectively during her time helping the coastal communities of Louisiana get back on track and in her next endeavor. That same year, Runyon had the opportunity to visit Ghana to do humanitarian work with impoverished children. Speaking about her experience working in Africa, Runyon said, “For the first time, I understood on a much deeper level what it meant to be part of the non-dominant group.” She continued, “It was through these experiences that I learned how important it was to give people the confidence to speak up.”
With a renewed sense of purpose and an interest in how to pursue equality in the workplace through leadership development, Runyon returned to her position at Goldman Sachs. By 2011, Goldman Sachs had undergone major restructuring and Runyon’s position was eliminated after several rounds of layoffs. However, like all of the events in Runyon’s career, this bump in the road had a silver lining.
In 2012, Runyon accepted a job at Thomson Reuters in the security team. Following a series of events, Runyon quickly rose to become the most senior person in her region after 5 months on the job. Runyon was able to apply her experience in crisis management and leadership training and development to take charge.
Voice of Experience: Clarine Nardi Riddle, Counsel, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres, & Friedman
Voices of ExperienceFor Clarine Nardi Riddle, Counsel, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres, & Friedman, it is difficult to pick one moment in her professional career of which she is most proud. This is because since graduating from Indiana University School of Law in 1971, Riddle has accumulated numerous achievements while working in local, state, and federal governments and in the private legal sector as well.
Although Riddle has several impressive milestones in her career to talk about, like becoming the first female Attorney General of Connecticut, being the first woman Attorney General to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court and win, and assisting in the drafting of the first Title IX plan during her third year of law school at Indiana University, she feels especially proud of the progress that has been made by women in law over the last few decades.
“At Indiana University, my class in law school probably had the largest number of women ever, and that was only a little more than twelve,” said Riddle. She continued, “It was a critical mass at that point, and we were just at the beginning of having more and more women apply to law school. It was a different world back then, and I am so happy to see where we have come since then. I am so proud of it all.”
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Male Champions of Women’s Advancement are a Critical Ingredient for Equality
Mentors and Sponsors“There’s no such thing as the glass ceiling; only a thick layer of men.”
This is a quote that has been attributed to many formidable women over the years: Laura Liswood, Secretary General of the Council of Women World Leaders; Majora Carter, an environmental activist and Co-Founder & CEO of StartUpBox.SouthBronx; Kathy Matsui, Managing Director and Chief Japan Strategist at Goldman Sachs Japan; and Jane Harman, President of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Regardless of who said it first (my money’s on Liswood), it acknowledges a fundamental fact. In order to achieve gender equality in leadership, we’re going to have to deal with the men in some way or another.
Most men are not actively keeping women out of top jobs. They’re simply bystanders to the inertia of millennia-old male-dominated power structures, and many don’t see what’s in it for them to put in the work to change a system that gives them an automatic boost — that is, if they are even aware that they’re getting bonus life points simply for being male in the first place.
But this is changing as people — both men and women — develop more awareness about the value of gender diversity. One senior individual who “gets it” can make a big difference. A Columbia study, for example, showed that at Danish companies whose CEOs have daughters, the wage gap between men and women workers tends to be smaller.
There is a vast array of research detailing the benefits of gender diversity in leadership. For example, Thomson Reuters recently released a new study showing that companies with gender-diverse boards outperform those with no women. Beyond the business case, though, we live in a society that supposedly values diversity, equality, and meritocracy. The work to engage a fair share of women in leadership should be a project we are all engaged in, whatever our gender.
Men make up about half of the entry-level workforce for professional careers, and there is a greater percentage of men at every rung moving up the ladder. At the senior management level, the vast majority of people are men. In order to achieve real equality, men need to be encouraged to get involved in gender diversity. After all, a simple look at the same ladder shows that they make the lion’s share of decisions on who gets hired and who gets promoted.
Our latest research shows that, at many companies, some men are working to support women’s advancement. What’s more, the presence male champions of gender equality at a company often signifies the presence of other kinds of support for women in the same organization. When men get involved in diversity, companies do more.
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Women Aren’t Funny: Why is this Gender-Based Myth Gaining Traction?
Office PoliticsTo further understand how difficult the corporate landscape continues to be for women, one only needs to look at headlines associated with linguistic expert Judith Baxter’s most recent study: “Female bosses ‘less funny in the boardroom’” and “Women’s jokes fall flat at work, report finds.”
The professor of applied linguistics at Aston University spent 18 months conducting her research at seven large companies, examining 14 team meetings, of which half were led by senior-level men and half by senior-level women. Baxter found that women often resort to self-deprecating humor, with 70 percent of female senior professionals joking about themselves in a somewhat negative light. Needless to say, it almost always went over poorly. While it was clear the women were making self-deprecating jokes because it was the safer option (they would rather laugh at themselves than laugh at others), their humor was seen as “contrived, defensive, or just mean.”
“I looked at the wording that provoked the laugh. In almost every case, the speaker had attempted a witticism which might range from a pun, a self-deprecating remark, a jokey remark at the expense of other colleagues or their organization, or banter with colleagues. There were few fully fledged jokes. I then looked at the response to the witticism. I saw that women rarely gained a laugh, unlike men. Indeed, they often ended up laughing at their own jokes, which made the comment appear contrived and the speaker seem defensive,” Baxter said.
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Gender Quotas Attract More High Qualified Women Applicants
Managing ChangeEU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is often quoted as having said, “I don’t like quotas, but I like what they do.”
Across Europe, the prospect of introducing board quotas has produced heated debate. Following Norway’s 2004 law requiring the boards of publicly traded companies to be 40 percent women, several other countries — France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and others — have introduced similar measures, although Norway’s laws remain the strictest. When I met Arni Hole, Director General of Norway’s Royal Ministry of Children, Equality, and Social Inclusion and the architect of the quota law, a few years ago, she insisted that Norway’s program is the most comprehensive in that it is binding. A company that doesn’t comply is delisted.
At the same time, some countries have resisted implementing any flavor of quotas — the UK for example. It’s also difficult to imagine any kind of boardroom gender quota legislation taking place in the United States. Quota detractors say that affirmative action forces companies to hire less qualified candidates. Proponents say that quotas ensure qualified applicants who might normally be ignored don’t get overlooked.
In fact, Stanford University research suggests that gender quotas may actually boost the percentage of high performing women willing to apply for a position. The result is that there’s no marked decrease in quality in the person who gets hired. That is — when companies signal that they want to hire more women, more high performing women apply for jobs, and more high performing women get jobs — without companies decreasing their performance expectations.
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What’s the Real Impact of One Billion Women Entering the Workforce in the Next Decade?
Managing Change, PipelineLast fall, Booz & Company released an interesting report entitled, Empowering the Third Billion: Women and the World of Work in 2012. In this report, researchers attempt to evaluate the impact on the global economy of an estimated one billion women entering the workforce over the next ten years. By placing a value on women in the workplace, the authors of this report hope to encourage governments, business leaders, and key decision makers to invest in developing the knowledge and skills of women in order to unlock their full potential.
The authors of the Booz & Company report address one very important aspect of the problem when it comes to facilitating a career advancement path for women that leads to more leadership roles and senior level positions across all industries. They write, “Despite the admirable efforts of these women—and millions like them in rich and poor countries around the world—they need supportive systems to succeed. Governments and corporations will need to step in with smarter policies that can remove social, cultural, and professional constraints on women and foster greater economic opportunities.”
The Glass Hammer focuses on the developed world for now, so what is interesting about this research is that Booz & Company correctly identifies an issue that is rampant in the United States and Western Europe. That is, the number of women in the workforce is only the tip of the iceberg on the gender diversity issue in the workplace. The bigger question—which has been explored in research by Catalyst—is why are there so few women in executive positions in the Fortune 500?
What are the biggest issues that governments and companies must look at in order to provide meaningful support for women in the workforce? The common global challenges are as follows.
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Want More Women at the Top? It’s Time to Fix the Leaky Talent Pipeline
Breaking the Glass Ceiling, Mentors and Sponsors, PipelinePrevious research has identified that women do not get as many career-changing jobs as their male colleagues. This imbalance is one of the main reasons why the talent pipeline in many organizations is not as diverse as it should be. The question persists in the gender equality arena: why aren’t there more women in leadership positions? Yet, there is evidence that managers and key decision makers are not giving equal access to women when it comes to opportunities that can positively impact a career trajectory.
This begs the question: is the talent pipeline being managed properly with respect to gender diversity initiatives and leadership development strategies in a firm? Catalyst reports that between 2009 and 2012, the percentage of Fortune 500 female executive officers has remained at a near standstill, increasing slightly from 13.5 percent in 2009 to 14.3% in 2012. What factors are contributing to the stagnancy of women’s career advancement in traditionally male-dominated industries such as finance, technology, and professional services?
In order to get to the bottom of why talented women are not being ushered through the talent pipeline at the same rate as their male colleagues, let’s take a look at some key factors creating roadblocks in corporate gender diversity at the most senior levels of management.
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Voice of Experience: Philippa Nesbit, Chief Risk Officer, Citi Private Bank and Citi Holdings
Voices of ExperienceReflecting on her early career, Philippa Nesbit, Chief Risk Officer at Citi Private Bank and Citi Holdings, encouraged junior women to seek out broad opportunities to learn. “Really, the important thing is getting a diversity of your knowledge base. It’s easier to learn more and get a breadth of knowledge when you are junior. When you are a managing director, it’s hard to get those different experiences. I hadn’t appreciated the importance of that 20 years ago.”
She continued, “Tied to that, make sure you grasp every opportunity. Be really flexible and adapt the ways that you work. Our junior colleagues are from a generation with lots of tools and options to manage their careers – from day one, develop and build your network every day.”
“I attribute a lot of my success to being able to call many people – to get both business perspectives and career perspectives. I will always advise people to ‘push yourself’. Put yourself out of your comfort zone and into decision making roles,” she added.
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Tips for Managing Your Personal Brand at Work: Are You Doing All the Right Things?
Office PoliticsIn our conversations with top female executives, we have noticed that one of the most popular topics discussed is the importance of managing your personal brand and how this influences your career advancement. But what exactly does it mean to manage your personal brand and how can you do it effectively? Believe it or not, your personal brand consists of more than your outward appearance. Of course how you present yourself at work is very important, but when you think about your personal brand, you need to take more factors into consideration.
Your personal brand is always working. Whether or not it is working for or against you is completely in your control. Every time you enter a conference room, a networking function, or a team brainstorming session, you need to be thinking about how other people perceive you.
Take a look at the list below to see what factors are the building blocks of your personal brand. Making sure that you are always putting your best self forward can help you get noticed by the people who matter. This could lead to career changing opportunities such as getting a sponsor or being chosen for an overseas assignment.
When managing your personal brand at work, you should take the following factors into consideration:
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How to Manage a Diverse Team for Employee Engagement
Managing ChangeA new employee engagement study by Gallup underscores the importance of good management. According to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report [PDF], employee engagement is a direct result of the quality of an employee’s manager.
In his opening letter to the report, Gallup CEO Jim Clifton writes, “Here’s something they’ll probably never teach you in business school: The single biggest decision you make in your job — bigger than all of the rest — is who you name manager. When you name the wrong person manager, nothing fixes that bad decision. Not compensation, not benefits — nothing.”
The report showed that only 30 percent of the approximately one million Americans with full time jobs are engaged, and women tend to have slightly (but significantly) higher engagement than men. Supervisors hold the key to unlocking higher engagement – ultimately boosting productivity and customer relationships – by managing employees based on their individual strengths and background.
What’s more, the report suggests, the proper selection and training of managers, with particular attention paid to managing diversity, can mean the difference between a high-performing, dynamic team – and group of employees that actively sets out to dismantle progress. Here are a few of Gallup’s tips for managing for employee engagement.
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Movers and Shakers: Natalie Runyon, Director, Global Security, Thomson Reuters
Movers and ShakersCareer Path
One might say that Natalie Runyon’s career path was anything but linear. Yet all of her experiences have contributed to her becoming an influential leadership strategist for women who want to change the world, in her own words. Runyon was born and raised in Louisiana, and after graduating from Louisiana State University with a degree in International Trade and Finance, she was ready to explore life outside the Pelican State. Runyon headed to Washington, D.C. to work for the CIA, an opportunity she secured the year before when working as an intern the summer before her senior year of college. Determined to find her way to Wall St. to work in the financial services industry, Runyon attended The George Washington University part-time, while working for the CIA, eventually earning her MBA.
In 2003, Runyon packed her bags for New York City to begin her career in the Global Security group at Goldman Sachs. “This was shortly after 9/11, and I had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the crisis management program,” said Runyon. She continued, “It was in this role that I discovered my love for training at all organizational and operational levels.” Runyon excelled at crisis management, but after a few years she began to feel the symptoms of burnout set in. “Crisis management is 24/7, and when you are working in global security, the work never stops,” she said.
Recognizing the signs of burnout, Runyon took advantage of a unique opportunity in 2008 to work on rebuilding the go to the Gulf Coast and help victims of Hurricane Katrina recover and begin to rebuild from the disaster that hit the area in 2005. “I had a personal stake in this cause,” said Runyon, “since my grandmother lost her home in the hurricane. Helping with the relief efforts also gave me the opportunity to connect with people outside of the office, which was so rewarding.”
During this time, Runyon received her Leadership Coaching Certification, which was a skill she would be able to apply effectively during her time helping the coastal communities of Louisiana get back on track and in her next endeavor. That same year, Runyon had the opportunity to visit Ghana to do humanitarian work with impoverished children. Speaking about her experience working in Africa, Runyon said, “For the first time, I understood on a much deeper level what it meant to be part of the non-dominant group.” She continued, “It was through these experiences that I learned how important it was to give people the confidence to speak up.”
With a renewed sense of purpose and an interest in how to pursue equality in the workplace through leadership development, Runyon returned to her position at Goldman Sachs. By 2011, Goldman Sachs had undergone major restructuring and Runyon’s position was eliminated after several rounds of layoffs. However, like all of the events in Runyon’s career, this bump in the road had a silver lining.
In 2012, Runyon accepted a job at Thomson Reuters in the security team. Following a series of events, Runyon quickly rose to become the most senior person in her region after 5 months on the job. Runyon was able to apply her experience in crisis management and leadership training and development to take charge.
Read more