By Stephanie Wilcox (Middlefield, CT)
“Women are the original prototype of a network,” said Susan RoAne, an influential networking and business communication expert and author of The Secrets of Savvy Networking. “They helped each other through famine and harsh times. They got together on the farm or in quilting groups, which were the first examples of historic networking groups, and they would quietly quilt and talk.”
Whether it’s over a quilt, lunch or the telephone, women still need their networks, including personal advisory boards and small strategic networking groups, and RoAne shares why they are so beneficial and how to build them.
“There is no question, you have to have personal networks,” said RoAne. “It’s necessary to have people whose feedback and opinions you respect and trust, and the feedback and opinions have to be entirely based on a person’s complete commitment to you, your success, happiness and joy.”
You need a group of three, four or five real friends who will form your personal advisory board to help with advice, career decisions and family/personal matters. Ideally, to have a diverse network, these people will be a mix of ages and will be smart, savvy, informed and experienced. Of course, these relationships will need to be built, but it won’t happen overnight. According to RoAne, it’s best to include people in your personal advisory board who you think have a good head on their shoulders. And do not include people who you don’t think are smart. “There are different kinds of smart,” she said. “Someone with a good grasp on the subject at hand or even someone with a good BS detector. That’s what smart CEOs do when building a team; they find people who balance them out.”
Are Lawsuits the Right Way to Achieve Gender Equality in the Workplace?
Featured, Office PoliticsTheglasshammer.com is in Norway this week reporting on gender parity and how Norway is working to achieve critical mass for women in leadership positions. Legislation resulting in quotas has furthered progress there, read us next week to see the full findings. Back on home turf, we have media speculation that a gender discrimination lawsuit against Goldman Sachs may become a class action suit stating that Goldman Sachs promotes all men over all women categorically.
I would like to point out that Goldman Sachs was the first company to back the launch of The Glass Hammer and was also the first large financial firm to create internal women’s advancement programs – including the Returnship and annual events like Brokering Change – Multicultural Women on Wall Street. Let’s not pick one bank to crucify, when it is the industry that needs to re-evaluate its appeal to female talent. Instead, let’s make sure that we give credit to companies who are making progress towards critical mass and fair systems to keep women in the game at a time when we are dwindling in numbers.
I believe that very little can be gained from litigation in the workplace and class action suits were surely invented for a different purpose (think Erin Brockovich). Does it actually change the treatment of women in the workplace? Does it advance the mission of creating a meritocracy? In my opinion, no, it achieves neither of these objectives.
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Fastest Way To Gender-Balanced Leadership – Appoint A Woman CEO
Breaking the Glass CeilingCorporations are now, in many ways, as powerful, or sometimes more powerful, than governments. It therefore matters a lot who sits on their boards and executive teams. These are the people who set strategy and make decisions that affect all of our lives.
Some of these companies are smart enough to understand the importance and the competitive advantage of gender-balanced leadership. Men and women working together, using complimentary thinking and behaviors to innovate, understand customers, prevent group-think and limit risk. Achieving gender balance also doubles the talent pool from which to draw our most talented leaders.
But many organizations, even those that set the strategic imperative to appoint more women leaders, struggle to make it happen.
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Voice of Experience: Marcy Engel, COO and General Counsel, Eton Park Capital Management
Voices of Experience“When I was fourteen, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t know what that meant – I didn’t know any lawyers,” Marcy Engel, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel of Eton Park Capital Management, said with a laugh. Engel went on to attend the University of Michigan and then studied law at the University of Pennsylvania. “During law school, many of my friends were finding jobs with Wall Street law firms. It sounded good to me so I took a position with Sullivan & Cromwell,” she said.
Engel began working in the litigation department, and after three and a half years, she decided it was time to try something new. She explained, “Litigation meant dealing with people’s fights that were three, four, five, six years old. It was very backward looking. I wanted to advise people. I wanted to be forward looking.”
She began a job at Salomon Brothers advising the equity sales and trading groups. “At the time, this was a new area. I had to learn things from the ground up – I didn’t know what a short sale was!” she laughed.
Engel continued, “It was a time of increased regulation, and in terms of derivatives and futures – this was a time when it was really growing.”
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Dodd-Frank and Diversity – Will It be a Game Changer?
NewsWould greater diversity in financial institutions strengthen or, as some have charged, destroy them? Next year, we may find out.
The recent financial reform legislation is making new waves recently due to a provision buried 454 pages in that requires 30 federal agencies to create an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion, in order to “take affirmative steps to seek diversity in its workforce at all levels of the agency consistent with the demographic diversity of the United States and the Federal Government.
Each office is required to appoint a Director, who must be at senior staff level and report regularly to the agency administrator, ensuring that this new office cannot be tucked safely away into some basement corner and ignored. The Director holds the power to cancel contracts with companies that do not show a good faith effort to actively promote diversity. The bill calls out the agencies in question, including the FDIC, Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve banks, and the SEC.
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In Case You Missed It: Business News Round-Up
NewsTough rules to clamp down on the use of privately-traded derivatives and speculation in shares by short-selling were unveiled by European Commission in bid to tame the “wild west” of financial markets. The central bank in Japan intervened to force the yen lower. Mixed economic data in the US and talk on a further quantitative easing pushed gold prices to record highs.
Economic Backdrop
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Are Quotas the Answer in the EU and UK?
NewsThree years ago, Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School used the phrase the “leaking pipeline,” when she declared:
As the global economy slowly emerges into a brave new post-credit crunch world, statistics from Catalyst, McKinsey, the University of Cranfield and others indicate that the last three years have seen little change for women in business, and there is certainly still no evidence that the leaking pipeline will fix itself – so has the time now come for more direct action?
Time for Quotas in the EU?
Viviane Reading, who heads up equality and equal rights in her role as the European Union’s Fundamental Rights’ Commissioner, seems to think so. She has warned that, unless more board room seats are filled by women by the end of 2011, she will use new powers under the Lisbon Treaty to impose gender quotas at the European level, meaning that privately owned British companies (and others from countries which fall under EU legislation) would be required to more than double women’s representation from the current 1 in 10 number of seats now occupied by female board members.
Quoted in the Daily Telegraph, the Commissioner hopes that her ultimatum will change both the European business culture and the gender mix and has suggested that she does not “… rule out the possibility of legislation in this area.”
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When is an ERG not an ERG?
NetworkingCorporate America has seen the rise of ERGs – Employee Resource Groups – to help advance women and minorities in the workplace. Though this is a good trend, an employee resource group will do no good if there is not a definitive, concentrated effort toward getting women into clout title positions i.e. CEO, CFO, COO, Boards of Directors. An ERG group simply for the purpose of having one only increases the perception of how progressive the company seems to be rather than actually advancing women through the barriers keeping them from corner offices. A female colleague sent me an email the other day about an ERG in her company that seems to the former rather than the latter.
The Fortune 500 company – who I’ll refer to as Company X to protect my colleague who works there – has created an Employee Resource Group called “Women Our Way.” The stated mission of Women Our Way is to “fulfill our vision by encouraging inclusion in the workplace. We will provide a voice to our leadership regarding barriers and opportunities. We will encourage women to maximize their potential and advancement through education, leadership, networking, and mentoring.” The question this mission statement does not address is: “To what end?” The company says they will provide a voice to their leadership regarding barriers and opportunities… but through what barriers and to what opportunities? Advancement to where? Middle management? Senior management? As mission statements go this one is vague and creates more questions than it answers. Mission statements as a whole have been a pet peeve of mine for years because they usually contain a lot of warm, fuzzy phrases that are more slogan than substance. We only need look to Patrick Henry for the best mission statement ever – “Give me liberty or give me death!” No ambiguity there. A lot of companies could learn from Mr. Henry’s example.
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The Female Mastermind: Developing a Professional Women’s Network
NetworkingAchieving a successful career depends just as much on your network as it does on your skills, knowledge, and experience. Though any professional connection you make is important, nothing impacts your career or has as much influence on your success as a group of likeminded women vested in each other’s success. Referred to as a “mastermind group,” these women work together to help each other identify strengths and weaknesses, sets goals and hold each other accountable to them, and share resources and valuable personal experiences.
There are many reasons why it’s important to align yourself with other professional women. First of all, professional women share a common and unique perspective on what success looks like and how to achieve it. They understand the challenges specific to professional women—especially for those who are also mothers—and can share advice on how to balance family and work without sacrificing your ambitions. Also, by holding each other accountable, the group increases the likelihood of each individual achieving her goals and finding success.
I asked one of my clients, author and organization consultant Lorie Marrero, a few questions about the benefits of a mastermind group. She said, “I get to be in a supportive but challenging group of peers of my choosing and am accountable to them for my goals and results.” In fact, the group helped her write her first book by making her accountable for regularly producing material. Because of her success, she recently made a commitment to the group to write a second book.
When I asked her what the key to a successful mastermind group was, Marrero responded with a few important considerations: Start by “identifying the right people to join you.” Potential members should think similarly to you, “but not so similarly that they won’t have a valuable perspective to share.” She also recommended selecting people who are willing to put into the group as much as they take out of it and emphasized the importance of making sure that potential members are honestly and wholeheartedly committed to the group.
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Building Your Strategic Personal Network
Networking“Women are the original prototype of a network,” said Susan RoAne, an influential networking and business communication expert and author of The Secrets of Savvy Networking. “They helped each other through famine and harsh times. They got together on the farm or in quilting groups, which were the first examples of historic networking groups, and they would quietly quilt and talk.”
Whether it’s over a quilt, lunch or the telephone, women still need their networks, including personal advisory boards and small strategic networking groups, and RoAne shares why they are so beneficial and how to build them.
“There is no question, you have to have personal networks,” said RoAne. “It’s necessary to have people whose feedback and opinions you respect and trust, and the feedback and opinions have to be entirely based on a person’s complete commitment to you, your success, happiness and joy.”
You need a group of three, four or five real friends who will form your personal advisory board to help with advice, career decisions and family/personal matters. Ideally, to have a diverse network, these people will be a mix of ages and will be smart, savvy, informed and experienced. Of course, these relationships will need to be built, but it won’t happen overnight. According to RoAne, it’s best to include people in your personal advisory board who you think have a good head on their shoulders. And do not include people who you don’t think are smart. “There are different kinds of smart,” she said. “Someone with a good grasp on the subject at hand or even someone with a good BS detector. That’s what smart CEOs do when building a team; they find people who balance them out.”
Read more
5 Ways to Leverage the Power of Employee Resource Groups for Leadership Development
Expert AnswersPicture the most efficient, productive, and innovative organization you can imagine. What does it look like? Chances are that it resembles a highly-advanced form of an Employee Resource Group (ERG), also known as Affinity Groups or Business Resource Groups — a multi-disciplinary, globally dispersed, diverse yet inclusive organization — in which ideas flow up and down the hierarchy and across silos.
ERGs should be considered the best resource and opportunity for the next generation of women leaders, and other diverse talent, and here’s why. Today (or in the near future), ERGs enable women to:
1. gain exposure and visibility within broader networks
2. learn a broader set of skills by collaborating on ERG projects and initiatives
3. seize leadership opportunities within ERGs that they may not otherwise realize in their day jobs, and
4. contribute to their company’s “cultural competency” through participation in sales, market, and product development.
ERGs provide a win-win opportunity for employers and female employees because they will realize the value and bottom line impact of women who are empowered and connected like never before. JBC has developed the following insights to help women think most strategically about where they can gain leverage. We encourage women to take advantage of and leverage the existence of these networks, to not only grow their careers but also demonstrate the value of female talent, and markets, to organizations everywhere.
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