Women matter 3: women leaders, a competitive edge in and after the crisis

Organizations that successfully navigate crises have leaders who provide direction and inspire action. Those that survive and flourish after a crisis have leaders who also create an environment for innovation.

An organization’s capacity to lead through and beyond a crisis can be nurtured and enhanced. Increasing gender diversity in the organizations’ leadership team can help. Diversity gives a greater variety of leadership styles. And that variety, especially in a crisis, will contribute to survival.

To find out what happens to gender diversity work in times of crisis, McKinsey & Co. surveyed 800 companies and published the results in Women matter 3: women leaders, a competitive edge in and after the crisis (WM3). They refer to the recession that began in 2008, but the conclusions apply in any crisis.

Part of the results are encouraging. 60% of the top leadership in the surveyed companies are convinced that gender diversity has a positive impact on company performance.

But implementation is slow: only one-third of the companies have enhanced gender diversity as a priority.

Perhaps implementation is slow because companies don’t know what works or even what to do. Most of the companies that do anything at all, do just one thing: they introduce an option for flexible working conditions. More than flexibility alone, however, is necessary to make progress on gender diversity.

What works? WM3 offers insights on additional measures and it demonstrates the role of leadership priorities in making these happen.

Companies that put the enhancement of gender diversity among their top ten goals widely use four measures beyond flexibility.

1. They actively gather information about their current situation.
2. They facilitate networking and mentoring relationships for women.
3. They include gender diversity indicators in the performance reviews of middle management.
4. And the CEO visibly monitors progress.

If a company includes enhanced gender diversity among its top three goals, they often implement more steps.

1. They neutralize the effects of leaves-of-absence in performance evaluations.
2. They have skill-building programs aimed specifically at women.
3. Finally, these organizations often use gender-specific hiring goals, e.g. requiring that every pool of candidates considered for promotion includes women.

All of these ‘best practices’ contribute to improvement only when increased gender diversity is a highly prioritized goal. And as the goal becomes more highly prioritized, more actions are deployed.

Why should gender diversity be a goal? Its value to an organization is made clear in WM1 (Gender diversity: a corporate performance driver) and WM2 (Female leadership: a competitive edge for the future).

Once a decision is made to engage in gender diversity work, there are three basic procedures that encompass all of the best practices. First, companies must know where they’re at; they must use indicators to identify the areas to be improved.

Second, they must develop systems for promotion and hiring that avoid punishing or rewarding situations predominately found in one gender or the other. For example, career breaks are more common among women than men, so promotion procedures should not punish employees simply because they’ve had a break.

And third, they should take steps to modify attitudes. This can include coaching, mentoring and building awareness of stereotypes — for everyone.

Perhaps top down processes are more common in the private sector than at universities. Professors are independent and they resist leadership. Those traits give universities breadth and lead to breakthroughs.

But universities are also organizations, and in some areas they should show leadership for the societies they want to influence. I believe gender diversity is one such area. If you want to affect gender balance work at your university, the only place to start is at the top.