Our Turn

by Stewart, Kirstine;

  A Harvard Business Review study from 2013, involving 1,800 professionals, found that employees of firms with true diversity were 45 percent more likely to report a growth in market share over the previous year, and 70 percent more likely to report the capture of a new market. A diverse company simply has a better shot at connecting with global markets that are only becoming ever more diverse. In Canada today we have four generations working together for the first time in history (the Silent Generation, Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y), and a visible-minority population growing five times faster than the increase for the population as a whole, according to the 2006 Canadian census. In the US, the Census Bureau predicts minorities will be the majority by 2042. And when it comes to gender diversity, companies have every reason to include more women in their teams, not just because women drive about, oh, 80 percent of all purchasing decisions, make up half the population and, morally, it’s just the right thing to do. But because it’s the smart thing to do. There’s a growing body of compelling research that shows including women makes groups smarter.

  Psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College recently completed a fascinating series of studies to examine whether some groups, like some individuals, are reliably smarter than others. They assembled 697 volunteers, grouped them into teams of two to five, and gave each team a series of tasks designed to reflect real-world problems, tasks that involved brainstorming, logical analysis, and others that focused on coordination and moral reasoning. They found groups that did well on one task did well on others too. When they tried to figure out what made these teams “smarter” they were surprised by what they found. The successful teams weren’t filled with high-IQ members or packed with extroverts or keeners who raised the level of collective intelligence. Rather, the smart teams were those where members contributed to the group discussions equally, as opposed to having one or two dominate. Members of the smart teams scored higher on a visual test designed to measure how well the volunteers could read the emotions of others just by looking at facial images in which only the eyes were visible (a test called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes”). The teams with more women outperformed teams with more men—and the more women a team had, the better they performed. This, the researchers concluded, had a lot to do with the fact women outscored men on the emotional intelligence “mind-reading” test.

  But what was just as surprising—and incredibly relevant given the way our tech world works—is that the researchers discovered in a follow-up study that this result held true even when the teams worked exclusively online. As they wrote earlier this year in a much-discussed piece in the New York Times, “Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face.” And once again the upshot was the same: women were consistently better at reading between the lines to interpret other people’s emotions, which, in turn, was a key factor in how well the team performed.

  As this kind of evidence mounts, so does the urgency to recruit more women at all levels in the corporate world. And for women, who can often be hesitant to step up and speak out, there’s never been a better time to be heard.

  I’m the Boss of Me

  AS MUCH AS RECRUITING the right team is essential to success, holding on to that talent is crucial for survival. If leaders don’t create an environment that fosters employee engagement and empowerment, their people will up and leave them for the competition. The race for good people, and women especially, is fierce and global.

  I think one major frustration that can make employees bolt from a job is feeling irrelevant. Just as leadership characteristics are changing, so is employee culture. When bosses ruled by decree, employees were accustomed to following the rules, ready to receive and deliver on their marching orders, keeping their opinions to themselves if they hoped to keep their jobs. It wasn’t long ago that dictatorial memos from the boss were met with resigned silence. Today that sort of top-down, one-way relationship seems as ludicrous as Mr. Burns. Now, when I send a note to the team, an excited chain of responses greets it, ranging from “Agree +1” to “Is this what we really want to do as a company?” As a leader you not only have to be ready to deal with those responses, you should encourage them. Nothing puts a wedge between leader and team more than the thought that one doesn’t care about the other. Nothing is more demoralizing than to think your opinion doesn’t matter. Creating an environment where differences are respected is one of the most important things a leader can foster to ensure success.

  What matters to modern employees is to feel that they’re making a meaningful contribution, that they have purpose and a stake in the work they do, and a certain amount of autonomy in how it gets done. The importance of meaningful work is bound to increase as younger generations make their way through the workforce. People in their twenties and thirties right now have been raised to speak their minds, to have and share opinions, and to be listened to and accommodated when they do. And technology, along with this generational rise, is driving this cultural shift too.

  After all, if technology has brought us anything, it is the freedom and flexibility to manage ourselves, our tasks and our time. When neither time nor place is an impediment to communicating, it makes you the boss of you—able to wear many hats at once, engage in several conversations simultaneously, resolve scheduling conflicts between work and home, and work where and when we can.

  From a logistical standpoint this has been a boon, especially for women, making the eternal work–life juggle just that much easier to handle. While this is also true for men who, increasingly, are doing more on the home front, the conflict between family and work has traditionally been the most stubborn barrier that holds women back professionally. I remember when I had to return to work early after my first child was born, getting home on time was crucial. But my job was also vital to me, and to my family, since I was the sole earner. I spent many afternoons with one eye on the person talking too long at the last meeting of the day, and one eye on the door that would lead to the 5:55 p.m. train that would take me home to my baby. I learned how to sprint. Sometimes I made it, but often I didn’t. It never got easier, even as the girls got older. But then BlackBerry saved me. I could join the meeting on the ride home. I could answer questions from the ice rink where my youngest practised. I could step out briefly from the school play that I would have missed if I hadn’t been able to be on call.

  Phone mobility set me free, as it has many people juggling busy lives at home and work. Now you can be home with a sick child and Skype a meeting, offer feedback from a taxi, review a document while making dinner, or help your daughter with homework while en route from LA to Toronto (@AirCanada Wi-Fi, thank you). I think of my smartphone as a lifeline, connecting me to family in ways never before possible. Messaging has become the tool that keeps us in close touch, especially when I travel. And I travel a lot. Nothing says parental peace of mind quite like a ping from home. My girls send messages to let me know their plans, or that they’ve made it home safely, or to make “urgent” announcements, as when my youngest iMessaged me to tell me exactly what she wanted for her sweet sixteen party—when she was fourteen.

  These days, work is not somewhere you go; it’s something you do. And what we do in the knowledge economy is contribute our knowledge, our thoughts and ideas, or what makes us curious—wherever and whenever that happens. Increasingly, it means that individuals are assessed by their performance, not their presence. After all, younger generations, whose social lives are already deeply embedded in the digital media, will only be more likely to want to live their professional lives the same way. Already, research finds that Gen Y favours telecommuting not only for the work–life freedom it brings, but for the environmental benefits of being able to skip commutes and reduce vehicle emissions. As it is, the number of people working outside a traditional office is rising dramatically in the global village. Forecasts from the International Data Corporation, a multinational market intelligence firm, sugg
est the mobile worker population is expected to reach 1.3 billion this year, representing 37.2 percent of the total global workforce. And the Telework Research Network projected in 2013 that the mobile workforce will increase 63 percent over the next five years.

  But it’s taking time for businesses to recognize employee value isn’t measured by hours sitting at a desk. (I think we’ve all felt that judgement when a manager assumes if you’re not chained to the desk, you’re not working.) But there’s a growing recognition that employers have a lot to gain from allowing workers to work remotely: overhead savings, time otherwise lost in commutes, fewer sick days and higher productivity. Research shows telecommuters tend to work more efficiently, with fewer distractions and greater focus. A 2013 Citrix study showed 18 percent of small businesses in the United States, Canada and Australia are enjoying a 30 percent increase in productivity through the adoption of mobile work styles. And a 2011 WORKshift Canada report concluded employers can save more than $10,000 per year for every employee who telecommutes only two days each week.

  But perhaps the most compelling reason to support a mobile workforce is that it makes for happier employees. And happier employees are less likely to leave than those who are office-bound. A 2013 BMO study on telecommuting found that 64 percent of Canadian businesses surveyed saw a positive impact on morale and the ability to entice and retain high-quality employees. A 2010 Telus poll indicated 67 percent of Canadians surveyed would be more loyal to a company offering remote working flexibility. I’d argue that companies that might never have considered telecommuting, job sharing, flextime or compressed weeks now can’t afford not to do so (though of course this doesn’t apply to all occupations, such as teaching or jobs in the service industry).

  At Twitter, and at a lot of tech companies, there are no limits on vacation time. Employees are free to take off as many weeks per year as they like so long as their work is complete, and they’ve reached their specific goals or targets. An unlimited vacation policy is one that some find as hard to believe in as the free breakfasts, lunches and drinks available for all Twitter employees. (I almost cried when I first took in the daily spread, fresh from the tight-pursed public-sector culture of the CBC where in the last round of cuts I’d slashed the bottled water.) And Twitter’s generous employee benefits are not unique. A growing number of companies offer perks around meals and vacation time to encourage company loyalty and keep teams focused on their goals.

  There’s a valid concern that technology may enslave as much as liberate us, keep us tied to our jobs day and night. I get that. I’ve been caught out by my family in certain moments when my phone stole time from them. I remember looking up from it at the rink one afternoon, where my daughter was doing her training for speed skating, and there she stood pointing up at me in the stands, that one little index finger calling me out to pay attention! Ultimately, using the freedom technology can give us comes down to understanding your limits, knowing when to floor it and when to put on the brakes: again, flow, not balance. In many ways, technological innovation has forced the trend of managing out and spreading “on call” time more evenly across a team. When the BlackBerry made its debut while I was working at Hallmark in the early 2000s, I remember how it changed the culture of expectation. Suddenly there was a sense that everyone was always reachable, particularly in the non-stop news business and with several channels in several countries. I felt a new responsibility not to make people in other time zones wait to hear my decision before they could move ahead. For a while, I lost a whole lot of sleep and a bit of my sanity. But over time, I learned to delegate and deputize people, so that I was no longer the only decision-maker, or the place where a decision might be held up. Tech prompted me to share power and empower. And that’s a philosophy I’ve carried forward to today, in my new role leading multiple team members scattered across multiple time zones. Like it or not, and mostly I like it enormously, I am at the cutting edge of a new way of working in the world.

  [ VIII ]

  Thriving at the Edge of the Glass Cliff

  FOR SIX MONTHS BEFORE I was officially hired to head up the CBC, I was already doing the job. Richard Stursberg had left abruptly in August 2010, and I pinch-hit while the CBC brass looked for his replacement. Having had a successful four-year run in charge of television programming, I’d heard I was a candidate for the job. But I also heard that the president’s outside headhunters were shopping around, worried that I didn’t have the “gravitas” to take the helm. To quote US talk show host Katie Couric, who heard a similar comment about her at CBS Evening News, “gravitas” is Latin for “testicles.”

  I have no idea how many candidates sporting gravitas were interviewed to become executive vice-president before I was appointed, or how many applied. I did hear that men who might have been interested were less so because the job came with an absence of perks and a plethora of big responsibilities with a salary that wasn’t, intense scrutiny, low morale, high expectations, competition growing by the click and budget cuts looming. A dream job, right? Still, despite all the cons, I believed I had something worth giving and this was my shot to give it—and at the CBC, quite possibly the only one I’d have. Whatever stars aligned to finally convince the decision-makers that I had the right stuff to become the first woman to head up Canada’s national broadcaster, I may never know. What I do know is that the decision to install a woman in the corner office when a company is struggling is a common one. It’s so common that in management and academic circles it’s known as “the glass cliff.”

  Researchers at England’s University of Exeter coined the term in 2004 after a report in a British newspaper suggested that hiring women to lead is bad for business. The Times of London had run an exposé the year before linking the appointment of female board members to the poor health of a hundred of Britain’s biggest firms, prompting one pundit to write: “the triumphant march of women into the country’s boardrooms has wreaked havoc on companies’ performance and share prices.” But Exeter psychologists Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam had a closer look at the data and found that the women had not caused the companies to struggle, rather, the women were brought in after the firms had been struggling. Companies that had consistently poor performance with overall stock market declines were found to be more likely to appoint women to their boards; firms enjoying a period of share-price stability were more apt to appoint men. Writing in the British Journal of Management in 2005, the researchers concluded that women were more likely to be promoted to power during troubled times when the chances of failing are highest. In other words, women who manage to break through the glass ceiling often find themselves on the edge of a glass cliff, where there’s a strong risk of falling off. Other studies have found evidence that the glass cliff applies to ethnic minorities as well as women. Christy Glass and Alison Cook at Utah State University found the trend among Fortune 500 companies and NCAA Division I basketball coaches (visible minorities were much more likely to be promoted to coach losing teams). So whether it’s in the realm of business, sports or politics, it seems that women, or visible-minority men and women, are more likely to be tapped to lead when the going gets tough.

  Not everyone buys the theory, and there are plenty of examples of male chief executives thrust into a hot seat. But anecdotally at least, the glass-cliff pattern seems dead easy to spot: The US elected Barack Obama, its first black president, in the midst of one of the worst economic crises in the country’s history. Kim Campbell, Canada’s first and very short-lived female prime minister, came to power on the eve of the Conservative Party’s destruction at the polls. Iceland, in the wake of its stunning economic meltdown, elected its first female prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, and the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, to lead the rescue.

  In the corporate world, there’s Mary Barra, who kicked off her tenure as the first woman to run General Motors mired in an ignition-switch crisis linked to at least twenty-one deaths, a thirty-million-car recall and a congressional inquiry
. Sunoco ushered in Lynn L. Elsenhans, its first female chief executive, after its share prices had fallen about 52 percent. The first woman to lead Xerox, Anne Mulcahy, was promoted to CEO when it was under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and $17 billion in debt. Even Yahoo’s decision to hire Marissa Mayer was made at a time when the company was in dire need of fixing. A Forbes headline after her appointment read, “Did Marissa Mayer just receive the job offer of a lifetime or did she just ascend to the pinnacle of the glass cliff?”

  The Upside of Down

  SO WHY OPT for a woman at the top when an organization has hit the skids? I’d suspect that part of the motivation is a subtle sexist inclination to set women up for failure. Put a female in charge when she’s likely to flop, and if she does, she proves that a woman was never up to the task of leading. If, against the odds, she succeeds, great. Either way the firm looks like a progressive, equal opportunity shop. It’s a cynical perspective; though some evidence suggests it’s not a fictional one. There’s been speculation from The Huffington Post to The Hindustan Times as to whether Jill Abramson, who was fired as the first female editor of the New York Times after just two years on the job, was a victim of it (though she was replaced by the paper’s first black editor-in-chief). Researchers at Utah State found that women and minorities promoted during a crisis are allotted a year less time to show results than a male leader in the same position. In short, if the outliers don’t turn things around in a heartbeat they’re shoved off that glass cliff and often replaced by a traditional leader—literally, a white knight. Researchers have dubbed it “the saviour effect.” (I certainly felt the implied question mark when a headline after I took over at the public broadcaster screamed, “Queen Ceeb, Saviour of the CBC.”)