by Liz O’Donnell (Boston) and Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
At The Glass Hammer we’ve reported extensively on the comparatively low number of women in executive positions in the Fortune 1000. Gender bias and sex discrimination are two oft-cited reasons for this. More training, better work/life programs, and access to mentoring are suggested as some of the ways in which to ensure the retention and advancement of women. However, if women look exclusively to other women as mentors, a lack of women at the top means women may not be able to find suitable mentors who can help them develop and move up the corporate ladder. Luckily, having a female mentor isn’t necessary all of the time.
The best mentors are problem or stage-specific meaning they can help you at certain stages of your career. It makes sense. After all, the same CEO who successfully launches a company may not be the best choice for CEO to lead an acquisition. Just as different stages of a company require different types of leadership, so do different stages of a career require different types of guidance and coaching.
Certainly, if you are a woman returning to work after a maternity leave looking for advice on continuing to nurse while working, or you seek advice on handling sexual discrimination on the job, a female mentor is your best, and probably only, option. But if your needs are specific to landing the next promotion, negotiating a deal or working overseas, gender doesn’t matter as much. You should seek out a mentor who can provide the best coaching and connections for the specific issue.
And often, the best woman for the job, is a man. “In engineering,[when I was coming up] it is only 20% women so it was mostly men and at that point there were not as many women leaders as we have today. So really most of my mentors/leaders who helped me navigate were men,” said Grace Leiblein, President de GM Mexico in a recent interview with The Glass Hammer.
Linda Swindling, JD, CSP and Chair at Vistage, a Dallas-based organization that provides executive coaching, has been mentored by men her entire career. She started her mentoring as a law student and recipient of several scholarships, and then continued as partner in her own firm. She chose different mentors along the way, depending on what her career challenges were at the time. When she began serving on boards and then writing books, she sought out male mentors who could help her with those roles too.
“There is little way that I could have figured it out on my own,” says Swindling. “Most women I knew at the time hadn’t achieved the level of success these men had.”
Swindling says the men who coached her had several things in common. “First, they spoke frankly and gave feedback. Second, you always felt like they were in your corner, whether taking the time to sit down and explain things or promoting you to people who could help you. Third, never once have I been questioned about my wanting to be a mom and wife as well as a professional. Fourth, many of them had working wives or daughters who they could envision facing the same challenges.”
Fathers of daughters, says Swindling, are some of the best mentors when it comes to dealing with work life balance and being a working woman. “These men are laying the groundwork for their daughters,” she says. Their advice would often come from real life experience. “My daughter and I have been thinking about this, they would tell me.”
No matter what stage of your career you are in, or what your current workplace challenge is, Swindling says the best way to work with a mentor is to ask specific questions. “Don’t call them and ask, ‘Can I be your mentor’,” Swindling says. “That makes it seem like you’re Velcro and it scares them.” Instead she says ask things like how can I run my group better, what products would you focus on right now, and what questions should I be thinking about in this deal?
Lilly Chung, Partner at Deloitte LLC in San Francisco agrees. Over the course of her 25-year career, Chung says that she never had anything but male mentors. She attributes this to the time she was coming up the ladder as well as the industries in which she worked. “When I graduated in the early 80’s, there weren’t that many women in [in the industry]. And then after business school, the whole consulting space was all male… What I have found is that the reason I could become a partner in all of that is because I have white male mentors who absolutely believe in me. But I found the first thing is that you can’t ask for [them to be mentors]. I always put my head down and prove myself – do the job better than it has ever been done before and always surprise them.”
Mentors, says Swindling, don’t want to take responsibility for your life. But they’ll be happy to help you close a deal. “People are surprisingly willing to help you.”
Building Leadership Capacity
Expert Answersby Liz O’Donnell (Boston)
Annie McKee believes we are witnessing one of the greatest changes in human history. The rapid growth of new forms of communication — Facebook, Twitter, texting — all offer an incredible opportunity for women to make a powerful impact on the world.
“We have to admit that things have gone fundamentally wrong,” says McKee. “We can pretend this is a blip or we can craft a new change.”
McKee knows something about creating change. She has taught leadership at Wharton and helped the University of Pennsylvania’s senior team bring about a large scale organizational change at the school. She is also the founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute, an international consulting firm. Clients include Merrill Lynch, Reuters, UniCredit Group, United Nations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Unilever, and Schering-Plough.
Read more
Ask-A-Recruiter: How to Show Employers That You Fit the Job
Ask A RecruiterIf flexibility, versatility and cross-training are all the rage these days, why do recruiters seem to hold so firmly to the belief that a candidate must “fit the profile” exactly?
The above question is valid, and it demonstrates why boilerplate qualities with no substance or tangible metrics attached are meaningless.In the above example, flexibility, versatility and cross-training are the boilerplate qualities. Many job descriptions ask for these. Therefore, these are not going to be the deciding factors; they’re a given. Instead you need to find what makes that job unique, how that will be measured and appeal specifically to that. When you do that, you fit the profile, and that’s what employers and recruiters want.
How does the position contribute to the bottom line?
Focus on that responsibility and give specific examples of when you did just that. If these examples are in a different industry or functional context, explain explicitly how you would handle this in the industry/ function for which you are interviewing.
What are the management and reporting requirements of the position?
If you need to manage direct reports, give examples of when you managed direct reports. If you need to report into different areas, give examples of when you worked cross-functionally.
What is the success culture of this company?
Do your homework to identify what personality traits are specifically valued for this company. Then showcase how you have these traits, not the traits that every company says they want (work ethic, team spirit, flexibility, versatility, blah, blah, blah).
Many jobseekers position themselves so generically that they seem to be saying, “I fit any job.” You want to demonstrate that you fit a specific job. Specificity is the key to a successful job search.
Caroline Ceniza-Levine is co-founder of SixFigureStart, a career coaching firm comprised exclusively of former Fortune 500 recruiters. Prior to launching SixFigureStart, Caroline recruited for Accenture, Booz Allen, Citigroup, Disney ABC, Oliver Wyman, Time Inc, TV Guide and others. Email her at caroline@sixfigurestart.com and ask how you can attend a free SixFigureStart group coaching teleclass.
Tone It Down
Office PoliticsIt has been ten years since Fortune Magazine ran its harsh feature story on Silicon Valley CEO Kim Polese. The article, titled “The Beauty of Hype: A Cautionary Tale of Silicon Valley,” criticized Polese for creating and capitalizing on a “glamour queen” image. When the story came out, women in Silicon Valley cried double standard. After all, nobody was scrutinizing Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs’ looks. Fast forward to 2009. A lot can happen in ten years. But has anything changed?
Just last month the Wall Street Journal ran a story titled “Cracking the Hedge-Fund Dress Code for Women.” In the article Wall Street women discuss how tricky it can be to dress for work. Try too hard and you’re inappropriately sexy; not hard enough and you’ll never get ahead. It should come as no surprise that women are judged not only by what they do but also by how they look. After all our female leaders in Washington are examined as much, if not more, for how they look than how they lead. We’ve all heard about Condi’s boots, Hillary’s cleavage and Michelle’s arms.
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Corporate Diversity & Inclusion Conference Addresses Work Life Balance
Pipeline, What's OnBy Jessica Titlebaum (Chicago)
The Exelon Corporation ’s chief executive officer, John Rowe, ruffled some feathers at the Corporate Diversity & Inclusion Conference in Chicago last week when he said in his keynote speech, “If you want work-life balance, you don’t belong on an executive board.” Just before saying that, he had explained that Exelon values diversity and that he has employees of a large variety of cultures and creeds. “It is hard to teach diversity when everyone looks like you,” he said. Which is why his prior statement came as such a surprise. When asked to clarify, he said that senior level jobs take a totality of time and that balance becomes impossible in certain professions.
Baraz Samiian, a diversity consultant in the Diversity Strategy and Development department at BlueCross BlueShield of Florida said that Rowe may not have been aware of the implications of what he said. She took from his speech that if you have younger children, parents who need to be taken care of or other personal and ethnic commitments, you need not apply.
“He is preaching about being open to change but he said that unless you assimilate to the old style corporate culture, there is no room for you on the executive board,” said Samiian.
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Voice of Experience: Lilly Chung, Partner, Deloitte LLC
Voices of ExperienceLilly Chung, a Partner in Deloitte LLC’s San Jose office, loves a challenge. When she and her family emigrated from Taiwan to the United States when she was in her early teens, she barely spoke English. Yet, as the oldest of three girls in her family, she became the de facto representative of her family. “We came here when I was 14 and I had to be the spokesperson for the family. (My parents didn’t really speak English that well. They never really became part of society, never had a formal English education.) I did the family tax returns and all other documentation [among other things]. I also always worked while I studied; even in high school I had a job to support the family. It taught me not only to really appreciate what I have today but also that even when you have a hard life you can still be happy, feel very loved and have a lot of hope for the future.”
Shy and unsure of herself and her place in US society during her high school years, she focused her attention on excelling at school, which efforts resulted full scholarships to USC/UCLA for her in electrical engineering. “From a personal perspective, I was very shy and lacked confidence [in high school] because I lacked a social network that comes when you grow up together with classmates in the US – I never fit in. But that’s why the way for me to excel was to study very hard and be a good student.” Read more
In Case You Missed It: News Round-up
NewsIn case you were too busy to have kept up with all the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:
Mergers and Acquisitions
Details were released of the bid by a consortium of 11 banks and inter-dealer broker Icap for LCH.Clearnet. The cash offer is at €11 per share, valuing the clearing house at €830m.
EDF announced the sale of a 20% stake in British Energy to Centrica. The deal will see Centrica pay around £2.3bn for the stake, half in cash and half by handing over its 51% stake in SPE, Belgium’s second largest power producer. The stake is being sold to Centrica at a 6% discount to the £12.5bn value of British Energy by EDF when it acquired it just a few months ago. The discount was explained by EDF’s chief executive as simply ‘symbolic’ of the minority position being acquired, and would not lead to any writedowns on the value of British Energy in EDF’s accounts. EDF was advised by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Centrica was advised by Goldman Sachs.
Abraaj Capital, the Middle Eastern buyout firm, is in talks to acquire a minority stake in DP World, the world’s fourth largest ports operator. The stake is thought to be around 15%, which would be valued at approximately $1bn at current prices.
Read more
Change 1 Child
Women and PhilanthropyAs founder and Executive Director of Change1Child, Simone Adjei takes great pride in her organization because she is able to witness the changes that take place the lives of children, one child at a time. Founded in 2008, Change1Child is a not-for-profit organization that reaches out to failing schools in New York City and takes action against literacy. “Change1Child works alongside communities with underprivileged children and provides them with a reading program,” Adjei said.
Adjei works full time as a derivative specialist on Wall Street. But after working in finance for nine years, Adjei decided to pursue her dream of helping children as well. “I was happy with my career in finance, but I was intrigued by education and became apart of the Board of Education community,” said Adjei.
She came across an article in the paper that detailed the scheduled closings of the failing schools in the New York City area. Adjei ’s immediate thought was, where are the kids who need extra help going to go? “By sending them to better schools, without receiving more attention, I felt as though most kids would fall behind and I wanted to do something about it,” said Adjei. Read more
Passions: Ultimate Frisbee
PassionsAmanda Zompetti can wear jeans to work every day if she chooses, but comfortable clothing doesn’t ensure that an office won’t get stuffy after being sat in for eight hours a day, five days a week. The twenty-four-year old works at the successful trial law firm Quinn Emanuel and, despite enjoying her job in New York City, she knows that sometimes a girl’s got to run wild and work up a sweat playing Ultimate- frisbee, that is.
Zompetti has always flirted with athletics. The Massachusetts native discovered her competitive streak early on as a five-year-old child equestrian. Twelve long years of horse riding led to forays into cross country running, softball, and volleyball as a high school and college student.
Admittedly, Zompetti did not come from an athletic family. “I don’t know where my love of sports came from,” Zompetti said. “My dad was outdoorsy, but definitely not athletic. As a matter of fact, I think he’d get winded just chasing after a ball.” It wasn’t until attending college as a history major at Dartmouth that Zompetti would discover a game that encompassed some of the best qualities from her favorite sports: the endurance necessary in soccer, the teamwork in volleyball, and a setup similar to football.
Read more
The Art of Possibility: Women in European Business – Deutsche Bank Conference 2009
Pipeline, What's Onby Jane Carruthers (London)
On Tuesday, May 12th, the Deutsche Bank Women in European Business Conference 2009 was held at the Barbican in the City of London. 2,000 women had succeeded in getting onto the guest list for the conference; it was oversubscribed to a point where even the waiting list had a waiting list. The center was packed with smart, sassy, serious achiever females of every professional persuasion and a decent sprinkling of menfolk.
When Deutsche Bank puts on a show, it doesn’t hold back: as hundreds of women converged on the center for pre-conference refreshments the reception area was adorned with the artist Tess Barnes’s portraits of 50 prominent ‘Women of Substance’. These included such luminaries as Baroness Patricia Scotland, the UK’s Attorney General; June Sarpong, TV presenter and journalist and Dame Julie Mellor, Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and previously chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission.
A specially-bound book of the portraits and accompanying biographies was given to all attending, proceeds of which go to support The Haven Breast Cancer charity. So we’re lucky enough to hear interesting people, be given a fascinating freebie – AND a charity benefits. Ticks all my boxes. No wonder the event was nearly 200% oversubscribed.
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Male Mentors Helping Women
Mentors and Sponsorsby Liz O’Donnell (Boston) and Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
At The Glass Hammer we’ve reported extensively on the comparatively low number of women in executive positions in the Fortune 1000. Gender bias and sex discrimination are two oft-cited reasons for this. More training, better work/life programs, and access to mentoring are suggested as some of the ways in which to ensure the retention and advancement of women. However, if women look exclusively to other women as mentors, a lack of women at the top means women may not be able to find suitable mentors who can help them develop and move up the corporate ladder. Luckily, having a female mentor isn’t necessary all of the time.
The best mentors are problem or stage-specific meaning they can help you at certain stages of your career. It makes sense. After all, the same CEO who successfully launches a company may not be the best choice for CEO to lead an acquisition. Just as different stages of a company require different types of leadership, so do different stages of a career require different types of guidance and coaching.
Certainly, if you are a woman returning to work after a maternity leave looking for advice on continuing to nurse while working, or you seek advice on handling sexual discrimination on the job, a female mentor is your best, and probably only, option. But if your needs are specific to landing the next promotion, negotiating a deal or working overseas, gender doesn’t matter as much. You should seek out a mentor who can provide the best coaching and connections for the specific issue.
And often, the best woman for the job, is a man. “In engineering,[when I was coming up] it is only 20% women so it was mostly men and at that point there were not as many women leaders as we have today. So really most of my mentors/leaders who helped me navigate were men,” said Grace Leiblein, President de GM Mexico in a recent interview with The Glass Hammer.
Linda Swindling, JD, CSP and Chair at Vistage, a Dallas-based organization that provides executive coaching, has been mentored by men her entire career. She started her mentoring as a law student and recipient of several scholarships, and then continued as partner in her own firm. She chose different mentors along the way, depending on what her career challenges were at the time. When she began serving on boards and then writing books, she sought out male mentors who could help her with those roles too.
“There is little way that I could have figured it out on my own,” says Swindling. “Most women I knew at the time hadn’t achieved the level of success these men had.”
Swindling says the men who coached her had several things in common. “First, they spoke frankly and gave feedback. Second, you always felt like they were in your corner, whether taking the time to sit down and explain things or promoting you to people who could help you. Third, never once have I been questioned about my wanting to be a mom and wife as well as a professional. Fourth, many of them had working wives or daughters who they could envision facing the same challenges.”
Fathers of daughters, says Swindling, are some of the best mentors when it comes to dealing with work life balance and being a working woman. “These men are laying the groundwork for their daughters,” she says. Their advice would often come from real life experience. “My daughter and I have been thinking about this, they would tell me.”
No matter what stage of your career you are in, or what your current workplace challenge is, Swindling says the best way to work with a mentor is to ask specific questions. “Don’t call them and ask, ‘Can I be your mentor’,” Swindling says. “That makes it seem like you’re Velcro and it scares them.” Instead she says ask things like how can I run my group better, what products would you focus on right now, and what questions should I be thinking about in this deal?
Lilly Chung, Partner at Deloitte LLC in San Francisco agrees. Over the course of her 25-year career, Chung says that she never had anything but male mentors. She attributes this to the time she was coming up the ladder as well as the industries in which she worked. “When I graduated in the early 80’s, there weren’t that many women in [in the industry]. And then after business school, the whole consulting space was all male… What I have found is that the reason I could become a partner in all of that is because I have white male mentors who absolutely believe in me. But I found the first thing is that you can’t ask for [them to be mentors]. I always put my head down and prove myself – do the job better than it has ever been done before and always surprise them.”
Mentors, says Swindling, don’t want to take responsibility for your life. But they’ll be happy to help you close a deal. “People are surprisingly willing to help you.”