By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
“Sponsors can be a core differentiators for proteges, particularly as they move up in the organization and competition becomes fiercer,” explained Heather Foust-Cummings, PhD, Senior Research Director at Catalyst, and lead author of the organization’s new report, “Sponsoring Women to Success,” released today.
But having a protege is a career booster for senior women as well. “Sponsorship was a trait of effective leadership” she explained.
The study, which Foust-Cummings co-authored with Sarah Dinolfo and Jennifer Kohler, explained that many people and companies are still confusing sponsorship with mentoring. The report says, “While a mentor may be a sponsor, sponsors go beyond the traditional social, emotional, and personal growth development provided by many mentors. Sponsorship is focused on advancement and predicated on power.”
And that relationship of power goes both ways. Proteges benefit from having someone pulling them into new roles and opening doors they might not have known existed. But sponsors also gain career capital when the individuals they have in pocket do well.
Foust-Cummings said, “The sponsor can gain reputational capital by sponsoring someone who does well and becomes a leader. The sponsor gains the reputation of someone who can spot good talent and advance them.” As talent management and succession planning become ever more important issues for great leaders, building an effective sponsor-protege relationship should be top of mind for those climbing to the top.
Here’s how to build your own sponsor-protege relationship that can help you and your protege get to the next level.
How Transformational Leaders Manage a Really, Really Bad Day
Ask A Career CoachThe stock market is a roller coaster. You find out you’re not going to hit the numbers for the quarter. More people you know are out of jobs. Congress can’t seem to agree on what they want for breakfast, let alone decide how to run the country. The global markets are in chaos. Your boss just gave you another impossible deadline. Plus, your kid’s on the other line asking where you are. You’re a half hour late to pick them up from soccer practice. We know this is not your life, but perhaps a friend you know? What to do?
Here are five leadership practices that transformational leaders do to manage in chaos.
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How to Sponsor Your Way to the Top
Mentors and Sponsors, News“Sponsors can be a core differentiators for proteges, particularly as they move up in the organization and competition becomes fiercer,” explained Heather Foust-Cummings, PhD, Senior Research Director at Catalyst, and lead author of the organization’s new report, “Sponsoring Women to Success,” released today.
But having a protege is a career booster for senior women as well. “Sponsorship was a trait of effective leadership” she explained.
The study, which Foust-Cummings co-authored with Sarah Dinolfo and Jennifer Kohler, explained that many people and companies are still confusing sponsorship with mentoring. The report says, “While a mentor may be a sponsor, sponsors go beyond the traditional social, emotional, and personal growth development provided by many mentors. Sponsorship is focused on advancement and predicated on power.”
And that relationship of power goes both ways. Proteges benefit from having someone pulling them into new roles and opening doors they might not have known existed. But sponsors also gain career capital when the individuals they have in pocket do well.
Foust-Cummings said, “The sponsor can gain reputational capital by sponsoring someone who does well and becomes a leader. The sponsor gains the reputation of someone who can spot good talent and advance them.” As talent management and succession planning become ever more important issues for great leaders, building an effective sponsor-protege relationship should be top of mind for those climbing to the top.
Here’s how to build your own sponsor-protege relationship that can help you and your protege get to the next level.
Read more
What Working Moms Want
Work-LifeAccording to a Baylor University study published online in the Journal of Applied Psychology, women who return to work after giving birth are more likely to stay on the job if they have greater control over their work schedules. Researchers also found that job security and the ability to make use of a variety of their job skills leads to greater retention of working moms, while the impact of work-related stress on their physical and mental health causes greater turnover.
According to 2008 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of women with children under the age of 18 were working or looking for work, and nearly 60 percent of women with young children were employed. Yet, a large number of mothers who return to work after childbirth subsequently leave the labor force.
As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. By revealing the needs of this group of women (all North Carolina residents with an average age of 31; 79 percent of them married), the Baylor study sheds light on what working mothers are looking for.
On the other hand, one has to wonder why studies like these are still being conducted. After all, is it an earth shattering revelation that a woman who just gave birth will now need more work flexibility? Is it shocking to learn that a woman who has job stability is more apt to stay at her place of employment and be productive because there’s no nagging fear of losing her job?
It shouldn’t be, and perhaps that’s the point.
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Movers and Shakers: Ellen Galinsky, Co-Founder and President, Families and Work Institute
Movers and Shakers“My biggest piece of advice,” said Ellen Galinsky, Co-Founder and President of the Families and Work Institute and a pioneer in the study of work-life issues, “is don’t think that tension will totally disappear. We will always have some work-life tension.”
Galinsky’s work has spanned decades and subjects – parents, children, men, women – and she’s gained key insight into the evolution of the problems faced by working parents.
“I think a lot of mothers worry about how their work will affect their child. But the fact is, the real impact on your children comes from the kind of relationship you have with them. Decades of studies have shown that work doesn’t have that much of an impact — you as parents do! So ask yourself, “what kind of parent do I want to be?”
Galinsky’s most recent work shows that more men are reporting work-life conflict than women. The Institute’s new report, The New Male Mystique [PDF], examines the reason behind it – and why it’s important for women.
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Women in Philanthropy: Frances Hesselbein on Leadership and Diversity
Women and PhilanthropyAt the headquarters of the Girl Scouts of the USA on Tuesday, the organization welcomed home its beloved leader Frances Hesselbein, who served as its CEO from 1976 to 1990. Upon taking the reins, she led the faltering organization to a new era of dynamic success, by implementing new delivery methods and ushering in a host of initiatives aimed at improving diversity. At the event, Hesselbein recalled the lessons she has learned throughout her life and career.
Now President and CEO of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management), Hesselbein’s model of servant leadership has inspired powerful people around the world, and in 1998, she was awarded the Presidential Model of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive in the US. She is the recipient of over 20 honorary degrees, and her work on leadership and management is respected globally. As Marshall Goldsmith, who moderated the event, explained, “In the world of leadership she is the role model.”
Hesselbein, who is deeply patriotic, said her commitment to diversity comes from her love of her country. “How can we sustain democracy if we don’t know the power of inclusion?” she asked.
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Goldman Sachs’ Returnship® Provides Opportunity to Re-adjust to the Workforce
Industry Leaders, LeadershipNow entering its fourth year, the Goldman Sachs Returnship® program is returning this fall. Originally specific to Goldman’s New York headquarters, the program has expanded to include Hong Kong, Singapore, Salt Lake City, and New Jersey – and the firm is looking toward a London program as well.
The Returnship® evolved out of research that employers were ignoring an experienced source of talent: women who had left the workforce for a few years, and were eager to get back in. Like an internship, the program lasts for a limited amount of time, and provides seasoned women with the opportunity to see if they are ready to on-ramp back into the workforce. Monica Marquez, Vice President, Office of Global Leadership & Diversity at Goldman Sachs, and director of the program, said, “The beauty about the Returnship® program is that it is a ten-week program. There is a start date. There is an end date.”
In those ten weeks, participants – or “returnees,” as Goldman calls them – work on real business challenges tailored to their skills and experience. Marquez explained, “What we really try to do is work with the hiring manager to identify really meaty projects that these individuals can come in and work on because the difference from a regular summer intern is that Returnship® individuals are very seasoned, very experienced individuals who just happen to have taken a career break and are looking to come back.”
As one returnee remarked, “The ability to play an integral role in a team in such a short period of time was a great validation of my skill-set.”
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Why are We Still Confusing Quotas with Tokenism?
Featured, Managing ChangeAs our writer Cleo Thompson pointed out in this morning’s piece on UK views on quotas, “According to a recent survey by executive recruiters Harvey Nash, 81% of women feel that bias in the appointment process has a major impact on female representation – but two-thirds (64%) do not support legal quotas.”
In a recent Computerweekly piece, Women in Technology founder Maggie Berry railed against quotas saying:
Berry believes that instituting a quota system would mean placing women at the top who don’t deserve to be there. This view, that a quota system is akin to tokenism, is just plain wrong. It implies that the dearth of women at the top has nothing to do with institutional, cultural bias, and that women aren’t in leadership roles in large numbers because they majority simply aren’t qualified for them.
In fact, there are plenty of highly qualified women just waiting to break through to the top. The point of a quota system isn’t to play a numbers game, promoting female faces to positions of leadership just for show. It’s to encourage a correction of long-standing and culturally entrenched beliefs around what a leader looks like – male – and to place those women at the top who do deserve to be there, but because of culturally entrenched bias, haven’t made it.
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Majority of UK Women and Businesses Opposed to Gender Quotas
Managing ChangeThis is the next in our series of articles which looks at how UK business is approaching the issue of women on boards.
According to a recent survey by executive recruiters Harvey Nash, 81% of women feel that bias in the appointment process has a major impact on female representation – but two-thirds (64%) do not support legal quotas.
Instead, respondents cited education and awareness as the single biggest opportunity for improving boardroom balance (44%), followed by published targets and regular reporting (40%). Eighty-four percent of women believe they personally need to do more to achieve a higher representation on the board.
It appears from the survey, conducted of 365 male and female board level and senior executives, that the majority of women in business want to be taken seriously for their expertise and not simply be viewed as having “won” a place on the board through a mandated quota, an observation with which Charlotte Sweeney, Head of Diversity & Inclusion, EMEA at Nomura PLC agreed. She said, “Women want to be appointed into roles because they are the best person for the role, not because they are a woman.”
However, a minority of women (36%) believed quotas should be put in place and this is a growing and vocal segment of women in business and politics, led by the Fawcett Society. They recently called for gender quotas, with Acting Chief Executive Anna Bird arguing that “In politics, business and public life more generally, decisions which affect us all are being made with too few women in the room. If the government is serious about increasing the number of women on boards, and so sharing these positions of great power and influence more fairly between women and men, quotas are the way to do it.”
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Risky Behavior and Your Career Growth
Office PoliticsA recent study commissioned by Barclays Wealth and Ledbury Research shows that women perform better than men in financial markets, because they are not as overconfident and don’t take as many risks.
The study seems to corroborate a 2010 New York Times article, which cites primitive biological instincts possibly at play with risk taking and aversion. Alexandra Bernasek, a professor of economics at Colorado State University, says, “Before the dawn of history, aggressive risk-taking might have given men an advantage in finding mates, while women might have become more risk-averse to protect their offspring.”
In general, men tend to participate in high levels of risk taking in the office as well. According to a recent article in Time Magazine entitled “Why Women Are Better at Everything,” a study by John Coates, research fellow at Cambridge University, tested male traders’ hormone responses to workplace decisions. He found that testosterone surges during winning streaks may drive both risk-taking and an attitude of infallibility.
Yet, while women may be better suited to keeping an even keel when it comes to trading, we’re often cited as too timid when it comes to taking chances, jumping on new opportunities, and tooting our own horns – to our own career detriment. If women participated in more risk-taking in the office, would we experience greater success?
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Voice of Experience: Liv Sandbaek, Managing Director, Technology, Accenture
Voices of ExperienceIn her 20 year career in technology, Liv Sandbaek has climbed the ranks at Accenture to become Managing Director of Technology in the company’s UK office. In fact, she’s become so well regarded that she was recently awarded by Science and Technology award at the CBI and Real Business’ 2011 First Women Awards.
According to Sandbaek, women have the skills to get ahead – but often lack the confidence to take charge. She said, “Women need to feel 100% confident to do a job before they accept, but men will volunteer for anything. We need to take a few chances here – it’s all to do with the confidence you feel inside.”
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