Why Reaching Critical Mass Is Critical
IT WAS DURING ONE OF the regular Twitter SWAT team conference calls that one of the members said she had noticed that too few females were speaking up at Tea Time. We discussed why this might be the case, and what we could do about it and, in the end, we decided that perhaps more women would feel encouraged to speak up if other women did. And so we decided to encourage selected women to break the ice and step forward with questions. It had an amazing result. More women did start speaking up, either inspired by hearing the voices of other women or deciding they needed to follow their example. Either way, women regularly now step up to the microphone at Tea Time.
Why go to such an effort? It’s not just about pushing females forward. It’s about doing what’s truly good for everyone. Getting input from diverse voices, people of different ages, cultures and experience, has always been valuable. But in the information age, it’s urgent and critical. There’s just so much data flying around, no one leader, or narrow management team, can possibly keep abreast of it, let alone analyze and exploit it to a company’s advantage. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, for example, suggests that one of the reasons one-time telecom giant Nokia failed was the homogeneity of its executive team. One hundred percent Finnish and together for more than a decade, the team completely underestimated the threat of the smartphone from Silicon Valley. The Center for Talent Innovation, based on survey responses from 1,800 men and women in white-collar professions and dozens of interviews with Fortune 500 executives and staff, found that the failure to innovate is often a reflection of senior management’s homogeneity (53 percent of respondents said leadership at their firms was almost entirely white, or almost entirely male). Homogeneity as a liability is a message now making a major impression in the business world, and the trick for the modern leader is how to create this new kind of eclectic, speak-up culture.
The point is that increasing the diversity of voices in the workplace can mean the difference between success and failure. Homogeneity is a creativity killer. And several studies, from various countries, suggest that having more women in leadership roles, whether it is in management, the C-suite or on corporate boards, the more successful companies tend to be. Part of the difficulty in making this case is that there are far too few women at the very top of anything to make a statistically powerful argument. But the research is all telling us the same thing. The McKinsey & Co. Women Matter report, for example, finds that companies with the highest level of gender diversity in top management roles outperform their sector in terms of return on equity, operations and stock price. What’s more, when the global consulting firm assessed the organizational excellence of companies on nine criteria, which included things like leadership, direction, innovation, coordination, capability and values, it found that firms with three or more women in senior management scored more highly on every measure. And organizational excellence, no surprise, is a key indicator of financial success. But what’s really worth noting is that these companies—101 of them around the world along with survey answers from more than 58,000 respondents—only saw this effect when they had three women or more at the top. Yet further proof that numbers matter, and that there’s a darn good business reason to do more than nudge them up by a token one or two.
In 2004, Catalyst, the international non-profit group that aims to advance women’s opportunities in business, also found that firms with the highest representation of women on their top management teams performed better financially than those companies with the lowest female representation across each of five industries studied. Catalyst based its research on two key financial measures: return on equity, which was 35 percent higher in companies with more women in senior posts, and total returns to shareholders, which was 34 percent higher. Then, just a few years later, in 2011, Catalyst released a study showing that companies with high numbers of female board directors outperformed those with lower numbers by 16 percent, based on return on sales. That number jumped to 26 percent when comparing companies with the highest representation of female board directors to those firms with the fewest.
The financial benefits of female leadership are also gaining global recognition. Researchers from Milan’s Bocconi University and the University of Barcelona produced a groundbreaking study in 2014 that found that medium to large family businesses in Italy were more successful when they had more women at the helm. (The researchers said they focused on family firms because they represented the most common ownership form worldwide, even among large publicly traded US companies. According to their data, families hold large equity stakes in about a third of S&P 500 firms, and half of the two thousand largest industrial firms.) The study found that replacing a family firm’s male CEO with a female increased profitability. But the increase was most dramatic when that change was also coupled with an increase in the number of female board members, jumping by about 18 percent and making female-led firms more profitable than those with all-male boards. The combination of female leadership and governance, the researchers said, encouraged a kind of cooperation and rich information exchange that improved the quality of the board’s advice and the performance of the CEO.
It’s an observation that lends hefty support to the importance of female input at the highest levels but also of cooperation in modern enterprise. The time has come for companies to revamp the way they operate and move away from top-down-driven leadership. When companies are smaller, and team members multi-task, and there’s a daily feast of data to be digested, collaboration and consensus is simply the smart way forward. And years of research show that women have an edge in forming collaborative relationships. In the scenarios where consensus is the goal, females also seem to naturally find their voice. The study from Brigham and Princeton, for instance, which found that women speak less than men in group problem-solving situations, discovered that the disparity vanished when the group was asked to come to a unanimous decision. In other words, when a group was required to build consensus instead of allowing the majority to rule, women felt empowered to speak up even if they were outnumbered by men.
Given that collaboration is proving so essential to modern leadership, businesses need to create environments that foster broad input and brainstorming. They have to move away from hierarchies toward a culture of openness where everyone has a voice. And for men and women who tend to excel in these kinds of environments, the time is ripe for women to play to those strengths in the boardroom and beyond. The trick for the modern leader is how to create this new kind of culture.
The Power of the Outsider
BEFORE I LANDED AT THE CBC, I lived through a variety of management styles. There were places, such as Paragon under Isme Bennie, where initiative was encouraged and rewarded. And I knew, from my own meteoric rise there, that the business as a whole benefits when the leader gains a broad perspective from the team, and that leaders are only as effective as the team they build.
The trouble was the CBC was facing many of the same structural issues as any seventy-year-old company. It was a model of big bureaucracy, with many departments and many divisions with more separation between them than I had ever seen—real silos in which the leaders were deeply entrenched and distrustful of others. It was like a collection of tiny empires rather than any kind of cohesive unit. Not that they were at war with one another, but they certainly didn’t cooperate much. When I ran television we had nothing to do with radio, the radio team had nothing to do with digital, and so on.
The experience of the CBC’s digital group was a good example of what was going on in the culture. Launched when digital was seen as a niche inhabited only by the tech savvy, the digital group occupied its own separate division, a place for “special projects.” The digital landscape was swiftly evolving and reaching into all departments even as the division itself was growing up separately, struggling steadily with the broadcaster’s competing priorities. As a result, digital had created its own shadow departments, digital people who worked speci
fically in each of these areas—duplicating efforts, hampering good communication and stunting innovation. People outside digital were confused by its mandate. If they were asked to produce web content, they’d reply: “That’s digital’s job—I’m here to put on a TV show.” Digital’s structure also left it at risk of being cut. Being a “special project” at a time of cutbacks left it isolated and vulnerable.
By the time I moved from head of TV to the head of the entire organization, digital had matured. It made no sense to have digital operations as a separate division. People across all departments had to work in the new reality the digital world was creating. And so the first big structural change I made was making “digital” part of everyone’s job.
Instead of having a separate silo, I integrated the members from the digital team into all departments. The digital sports expert went to the sports department, the news person in digital went to news, and so on. The content creators and producers would benefit from the expertise and skills the digital members brought and everyone would become cross-trained. No one could think of content being created for only one medium any longer. We were ushering in the age of “360 development” where multiple platforms became the natural way to go. It sounds so 101 now, but it was a hard sell. Some lamented the “disbanding of digital” when our goal was to reinforce the idea that digital wasn’t one department’s job, it was everyone’s.
Any time you knock down a silo, people can see it as a loss for one, not a gain for the whole. Silos breed internal competition, and not usually the healthy kind, because the big picture can get lost in the territorial jockeying. And more often than not, the winner is the one who has the boss’s ear. It was a typical hub-and-spoke scenario. In the situation I inherited at the CBC, I became the hub.
Each of the spokes represented a division overseen by a senior manager who was used to reporting back to the leader. This meant the leader risked making decisions based on the isolated information stream from one spoke. It also could mean that decisions had less to do with surfacing the best data, but rather with which senior manager had the most influence with the boss. This happens in many traditional businesses. The most powerful silo was the one run by the manager with the most influence, the one who got in to see the boss last, the one with the loudest voice, or maybe even the one who golfed with the boss. I could see in an instant where valuable information could be lost and the quality of decisions threatened. And so, in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics, I decided it was prime time to try something completely different.
Silo-busting Is Woman’s Work
WINNING BACK THE RIGHTS to broadcast the 2014 Olympics, after competitors had aired the two previous games, was a coup, and one of my proudest moments at the CBC. Much had changed in the broadcast universe since the CBC had shared the Beijing games with Canadians in 2008. Viewers didn’t want to watch one sport on one channel at a particular time, with the broadcaster making all their viewing choices for them. They needed, and wanted, a multi-directional offering across television, radio, and the Internet, including mobile apps. Putting on a great show of multiple sports, on multiple platforms, from a distant time zone, would demand greater collaboration between departments than there had ever been before at the CBC.
Luckily, by then, digital expertise was well integrated across the network. Everyone who had a role to play in producing Olympic coverage—sports, news, scheduling, revenue—now knew how to execute digitally. Yet the departments themselves were still a long way from integration. If I was going to pull off an event this big, on time and on a very limited budget, I needed the best of the best from experienced leaders and teams across the company. And I needed them to work together.
In my career I have always tried to focus on creating the best overall user experience. Now, we had to figure out how viewers across Canada could watch what they wanted, when and where they wanted, and still stay within our budget as we maximized revenue. Being efficient internally wouldn’t be enough. I knew from the outset we’d need outside broadcast partners, because the public wanted more than the bandwidth the CBC could deliver on its own. The silos, inside and outside, had to come down.
More than a year before the games began, I pulled all the senior managers into a room together: experts in sports production, news, marketing, broadcast operations, revenue generation and more. I told them that they were all now a part of the team that would be planning the CBC’s Olympic coverage, with the head of sports rights, Jeffrey Orridge, taking the lead as my delegate—the chef de mission. Because, I said, the coverage would only be as strong as their ability to cooperate. Our success would be measured by the enjoyment of Canadians watching their Olympic team compete. We were going to show Canadians the best Olympic experience they’d ever had: that was the vision. The goal was delivering that best experience on time and on budget, using all the technology and partnership benefits we could muster. Then I left them to it.
Jeffrey checked back in regularly, keeping me up to date on progress, on important staffing or technology decisions, asking my advice if the team had come to an impasse. To me, that’s how we need to lead today: being there at the top to clearly express the aims, set goals and expectations, ensure people have what they need to work, and then get out of the way so they can get the job done.
In this case, the work had a lot to do with conversation. Brought into a room to find common ground, they had to talk; the more they talked, they more they learned from each other. Everyone soon started to see the big picture. It’s no wonder that a recent study from the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT found the intelligence score of a group rises when everyone gets equal airtime. When the production team, who wanted to present the highest and best quality coverage of the Games, found itself with production costs piling up and threatening the budget, it turned to the research and revenue team to find out how to prioritize its spending by sporting event. Which events connected to the most audience, and would feed the most revenue back to the plan? Sometimes the answers were surprising—not at all what anyone had assumed. Each team gained a new appreciation for the challenges facing the other. Scheduling faces the issue of building a smart lineup while balancing the volume of sports, the need for live coverage and the time difference in Russia. When that challenge is clearly explained, suddenly everyone understands the importance of sublicensing our broadcast rights to other broadcasters in order to get the programming out on as many signals and platforms as possible, which is what we did by sublicensing to Rogers and Bell. Not to mention the advantage of getting our brand and our talent exposed on those big private broadcasters.
Before long, the questions, the answers, and the sharing make everyone not just aware of, but truly appreciative of, the situation of others. Yes, they still championed their own expertise, but now they were all on the same team. And that created a profound connectedness on a human level. On that basis, trust and respect build. People recognize they cannot be expert in everything, but now they know who to call when they need help. That transparency results in efficiencies and helps to realize millions in savings that goes back into a budget for the whole team to share. When one wins we all win.
Collaboration, trust and communicating with co-workers: these areas should be considered part of any performance review. I soon added these soft skills as key performance indicators in executive senior staff reviews, stipulating that no one could overachieve and reap a bonus unless they passed that test. (Everyone plays differently when they have some skin in the game.) Where objective and key results describe company and individual goals in terms of numbers, pulling in a million viewers or a million dollars, those aren’t the only important measures of success. How you contribute to the overall success of the team is equally important, lest the lone wolf who does anything to hit the target number leaves a path of destruction while trying to get to that goal. It’s how you act as a whole person that should matter at work. Individual contributors need to see the value in helping along the rest of the team.
It’s not always the easiest process to manage. Salespeople in particular hate this approach and who can blame them? They made their careers hitting targets. But in my experience they soon see the value in the exercise because hitting those numbers is a lot easier when you have a whole team of people to help do it. I left the CBC before Sochi went to air. But I knew it was in great shape and in the hands of a well-functioning team. CBC’s remarkable, innovative coverage of the Sochi Olympics set a new standard in broadcasting the Games. True to the original vision, it marked the first time that despite limited resources, multiple sports were available across multiple platforms for Canadians to enjoy as they pleased: more than 1,500 record-breaking hours of it. Because we partnered with Rogers and Bell, which broadcast CBC’s coverage on their many sports channels, we had the added benefit of selling commercial airtime on those platforms to fund our business model. And with steady live streaming, curated primetime content and a specialized mobile app, the coverage also attracted audiences and rave reviews from Europe and the US. It was an incredible achievement for the CBC at a time when another round of cuts had taken a huge toll on morale. And while I may have kicked off the effort by defining a vision for what Sochi could mean to CBC and its audience, it’s the team who deserves total credit for implementing it. By the time Sochi was on the air, I was building another team—from scratch and silo-free—at Twitter.
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