Our Turn

by Stewart, Kirstine;

  But aside from old-boys’-club biases, I think there are other, more instructive dynamics at work when women are chosen to lead in troubled times. For starters, who a company hires has a lot to do with who lines up for the job. It’s my sense that women may be more inclined to take on a riskier, less appealing job. Men tend to want immediate results. They’re more interested in leadership positions with the seeds of success already sown in. Trying to lead a corporation out of a tailspin is messy. Like when you clean out an old desk drawer, you have to take everything out and sort through what’s worth keeping before you can reorganize it, and you could end up looking at a much bigger mess.

  I think women are more comfortable with that; for women, life is often messy. We often have to deal with other people’s needs and emotions, a multitude of demands and deadlines. Every day is a bit like cleaning out the desk drawer. You take stock of what’s on the agenda, figure out what you can fit in when and what you have to let go. I think men are also less inclined to clean up someone else’s mess. Not only does it take too long to get results, the risk of failure is too high and so is the possibility that a failure marked against your name could damage your leadership prospects for a long time to come. Women tend to measure success a bit differently. Given that less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 company chief executives are female, I’d say the rare opportunity for a woman to finally break through the glass ceiling outweighs the risk of failure. That’s how I felt about the big CBC job: This is the shot that you’ve got. You might fall flat on your face, but you might not. And if you don’t give it what you can, you’ll never know what you can do.

  Too often we women don’t put our hands up for things—assignments, positions or promotions—unless we’re absolutely positively sure we can handle it. But if we’re going to test ourselves to our limits, we have to trust our ability to make things work, a point I’ll explore more in the final chapter. More of us should put our hands up, vie for the risky positions and promotions. We shouldn’t shy away from the cliffs, we should seek them out, and stand tall on the edge. Was I apprehensive about taking on the mammoth task of modernizing a coast-to-coast multimedia company of five thousand employees? You bet. At that moment, there was no doubting where I stood, right on the edge of a slippery and jagged precipice. But it only made me more determined to dig in my heels (yes, the high kind).

  And here’s the less cynical perspective: there are many good reasons for companies in crisis to ask a woman to steer the ship out of the storm. When an organization is faring well, it’s reluctant to rock the boat; better to stay the course, and hire “the expected.” When it’s adrift or sinking in a financial or public relations storm, the status quo is already out the window and it’s logical to opt for change: to choose a new kind of leader and chart a new course. Putting a woman or a leader from a visible minority at the helm sends a clear and instant message that change is afoot simply by virtue of the leader not being male or white. My initial entry at the CBC made waves in part because I looked nothing like leaders who had come before. And I believe there’s a growing recognition, backed by research, and dazzling examples, that women are well suited to lead when times get tough.

  The first female chief executives at Sunoco and Xerox have both been widely credited for turning their companies’ fortunes around. Even Mary Barra at GM, who started her historic tenure with profuse apologies for faulty ignition switches, earned kudos for her forthright handling of the crisis, launching an internal investigation and promising to regain the public’s trust. And Ellen Kullman, who was named the first female CEO of DuPont when earnings at the 212-year-old company had plummeted, increased those earnings by 24 percent in three years, landing her on Fortune magazine’s top 50 list of the world’s greatest leaders.

  It Really Is Our Turn

  NO ONE LIKES TO BE PUT IN A BOX or described as a set of typical qualities, but there are attributes traditionally held to be “feminine” traits whether we’re born with them, learn them or both. For years in the workplace, these qualities put women neatly into a corner, but not the corner office. Take multi-tasking. A woman’s ability to do more than one thing at a time indicated a problem: she lacked focus. Or worse: she had to do so many things because people gave her all the tasks. Women’s tendencies to be sensitive and empathetic, good communicators and listeners who could anticipate the needs of others: these were seen as “soft skills” suited to support staff, but not vital for success at a senior level. But today, all those characteristics that confined women to the low rungs of corporate ladders are now seen as tickets to the corner office. A wide range of management studies, involving interviews with hundreds of executives from different countries and industries, are finding that traditionally feminine traits are now at the core of successful modern leadership.

  There are signs, albeit modest, that this is translating into real advancement for women: Female chief executives are still incredibly rare, but their numbers are growing and the trend is predicted to accelerate, according to the 2013 Chief Executive Study from Strategy&, the global management consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Examining 14 years of data on the turnover of CEOs at 2,500 of the world’s largest public companies, the study predicts that women will make up a third of CEOs by 2040. What’s more, companies have been going out of their way to hire women: women were more likely than men to be recruited to the position of CEO from outside a firm than from within it. That might partly reflect an absence of women in senior positions within a company who might make worthy candidates. But I believe that companies are now coming to appreciate the value that a woman leader has to offer.

  At its heart, leading effectively has as much to do with reading people as reading spreadsheets. Over the years, I’ve worked for many impressively brilliant bosses and while I love working for smart bosses, a high IQ without the presence of a healthy EQ isn’t good enough today. And here again, women shine: studies consistently show that females have an edge in matters of reading and interpreting the emotions of others. A 2014 European study of more than 4,600 people, for instance, found that women outperformed men in almost all aspects of emotional intelligence, including understanding, facilitating and managing emotions. Bottom line: women know how to build bridges over troubled waters. Women tend to be better communicators, and better at building communities. I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked to step up and translate a boss’s message or idea to the wider group. It’s why the role of spokesperson often fell to me. I’m someone who had worked her way up, and I relate to the teams at any level, because at different points in my career I’ve also experienced what they were going through.

  Of course leading is not just about the ablility to communicate, but what you communicate. Talk the talk, sure, but you better be able to walk the walk. Since women score highly in many studies when it comes to mentoring, motivating and mobilizing people to contribute, create and innovate, they are primed to lead in times where a turnaround is necessary. A 2012 Dutch study from the University of Groningen (which also found women are overrepresented in leadership roles during a crisis) concluded that “feminine” qualities are most desirable when an organization is in peril. The study found that men prefer to exert hierarchy and authority to solve problems, whereas women rely on tact and understanding to manage workplace turmoil.

  There’s also a belief that seeing a woman at the helm signals a less aggressive and more healing approach, softer, humbler, more collaborative and reasoned, which is exactly what you want if your company is on the cliff, fractured and floundering, has to publicly apologize, or dig its way out of debt. Last year, the Cambridge Journal of Economics published “The Lehman Sisters Hypothesis,” which by title alone essentially suggests the mostly male-led Wall Street firm might have survived if it had had more women at the top. As those glass-cliff researchers from Exeter found, companies that did appoint a woman during a financial downturn actually experienced a marked increase in share price after the appointment. Yet despite all this, we
tend to underappreciate the value we can bring to corner offices. In one of the most influential reports on the perceptions of gender and leadership, a meta-analysis of nearly a hundred studies published in 2014, researchers from the College of Business at Florida International University found that while men rate themselves as being significantly more effective leaders than women rate themselves, other people rate women as significantly more effective than men.

  The hard lesson in all of this is that women have to learn to see their natural talents as powerful leadership assets. Flex those muscles and understand how effective they can be. Too often, we keep our heads down, do the grunt work and keep our thoughts to ourselves, hoarding our knowledge like nuts for a winter that might never come. But here’s the thing: winter has arrived. This is the moment to present ourselves as leaders, to speak up and vocalize our vision. There’s profound opportunity here. These are volatile, and vulnerable, times. Women have what it takes to lead from that proverbial cliff, and those cliffs are everywhere now.

  Fearlessly Uncertain

  THE RAPID SPREAD OF digital technology has disrupted, and in some cases, destroyed, the business model in many sectors of the economy. Media, music, publishing, retail, travel, finance, banking, health care: it’s practically impossible to think of an industry where technology hasn’t changed the game. Profit margins are being squeezed. Competition has grown and gone global. Revenue streams are drying up and many companies, even long-standing, storied institutions, have been caught off guard. Just keeping internal systems current is a challenge. Even companies who saw change coming are scrambling to adapt, and that’s no easy feat when there’s no clear way forward. No one knows what strategies will fly or fail when change is the only constant. In this environment, who isn’t leading from a cliff?

  The only way to find a solid footing today is to explore new paths, and once again this is where I believe women also have a certain advantage. Women tend to be fearless in the ways that matter most in today’s climate of uncertainty. In a time when information and data rule the day, being fearless often means admitting what it is you don’t know. It’s risky to forge ahead, blind to the possibilities hidden in the wealth of data that swirls around us. In 2010, before the GPS became ubiquitous, Sheilas’ Wheels, a British car insurance firm, actually investigated if there was any truth to the stereotype that men hate to ask for directions, and found that men in the UK drive an average of 276 extra miles per year because they’d rather be lost than have a stranger point the way. (A quarter of the men polled said they’d drive around for half an hour before asking. A stubborn 12 percent said they’d never ask.)

  The corollary to this is that women are more comfortable asking (three-quarters of them, according to the study) because women are less likely to see asking for help as a show of weakness. If we need assistance to complete a task or get where we’re going, we ask for it. (Another study from Exeter found that women would be less likely to take a precarious, glass-cliff job if it lacked social resources such as employee support; for men the deal-breaker was a lack of financial resources.)

  For me, having repeatedly been the outsider recruited to shake things up or build something new, plotting the way forward always starts with stepping into the unknown, while relying on those who are already there to help me navigate. Unlike some male leaders I’ve witnessed, I’ve never thought that the only way forward is to obliterate the existing landscape. At Hallmark, when I realized I lacked information about audience tastes in the various countries, I worked with the head of research to commission studies to get it. At Twitter, when I was building the Canadian business from scratch, I tapped into the knowledge and insights of the new team, just as they tapped into mine. Asking people for input can set in motion a healthy chain of events in the workplace by countering those negative feelings that many employees have around feeling irrelevant. When you ask people to share their opinions or insights, you reinforce the message that you value what they know. If you act on what you hear from them, it signals that what they contribute counts. To see formerly alienated teams come alive after they finally see that their work matters is a thrilling thing.

  Of course people can sometimes be reluctant to contribute, worried that they will wear the blame if an idea or strategy backfires. And I understand that apprehension. I’ve been there. When I was at Alliance Atlantis I had a pivotal moment where I felt that I’d been unfairly left holding the bag. We had been looking for ways to increase revenues at the Food Network with programs that would broaden our audience: it was all about pushing margins. My boss at the time suggested that I take a look at our CRTC description to see if it gave us any flexibility on the kinds of shows we could air. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the independent public authority that regulates broadcasters in Canada, had set out rules for our operation and among them was a very small programming allowance suggesting that we could show movies so long as they were food related. So we went ahead and added movies to our Sunday night time slot, features such as Chocolat and Eat Drink Man Woman. But not for long. The CRTC came down on us with a strict warning: we had misinterpreted the clause and would face consequences if we didn’t stop. Suddenly my boss and the head of communications developed short-term memory loss, forgetting this was a decision we made together, and in a meeting called me out for my mistake. I was livid. I was embarrassed. I felt abandoned and I vowed to never leave anyone hanging in the way they had left me. As a leader, in times of crisis, failure or mistake, the buck stops with you. Every leader along the chain should feel that kind of responsibility so that the entire team is supported from all angles. We are in this together and to shirk responsibility or, worse, assign blame only serves to teach a team not to reach so far next time because there is no net to catch you if you slip. At one time or another, we all do slip.

  Of course, no one likes to take responsibility for bad decisions or bad news. But being brave enough to communicate fearlessly in good times and bad is essential if you hope to foster a healthy environment where everyone does the same. There were too many times in my TV career where people haven’t been brave enough to own up to the fact that they were part of a decision-making process that resulted in a hard-to-swallow or unpopular call. Programming decisions were made in an open discussion where all executives weighed in before we reached a consensus and a call was finalized. Yet when one of those executives had to deliver bad news and let the cast or producers know that a show was to be rescheduled or dropped, too many times they would fold and dodge: “Yeah, sorry, I loved it but ‘the boss’ says no.” Or a producer would want to make a creative cast or crew change, and ask for our backing, then tell the person who was being fired, “Sorry, network says we have to.”

  Not owning your decisions creates an environment of distress at all levels. The people hearing the bad news lose faith in the executive, who now appears to have no clout or influence. Worse, they lose faith in an organization that looks like it’s being run arbitrarily from the top. And eventually, the boss finds out, as I invariably did, that the executive shirked responsibility for a decision they were a pivotal part of, and the boss loses trust in the executive, who then really does lose trust and influence. Leaders undermine their own ability to lead when they want to play the nice guy and pass the blame on.

  That sour experience at Alliance Atlantis taught me an important lesson about the value of integrity in leadership, one that I feel is critical in creating the kind of open culture needed to succeed today. When so much depends on innovation, on out-of-the-box ideas, every team member has to feel comfortable and confident pitching theirs. They have to feel the leader has their back and they won’t be punished for things that don’t always work out the way you hoped. Even in failure, there’s something to be learned and that lesson can inform the next move you make. A leader has to make sure their team understands that’s how your shop rolls. And creating that culture of trust and solidarity can begin with the smallest of gestures, which is also someth
ing I learned from a boss. On my first trip abroad for Paragon with Isme Bennie, I ordered breakfast to my room, and a yogurt and orange juice arrived along with a bill for $35. I nearly choked. I thought, “I am going to get fired the first day of my first business trip.” But when I told her what happened, apologized and offered to pay the bill, she just looked at me and said, “No, you won’t pay. You’re here on business. You have to eat. That’s what things cost here. It’s the cost of doing business.”

  I went on to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue on that trip. Good ROI. But that’s not what stuck with me. It was what Isme had said. It may sound like an insignificant exchange, but to me it set a standard of decency and mutual respect I’d like to think I’ve carried with me ever since. Those small gestures are essential to building strong workplace relationships: sending flowers when someone’s had a baby, remembering to write a note of congratulations, hosting a team party for a job well done. I’ve done all of these, many times, and been happy to pay for it out of my own pocket (a necessity in an environment where cuts force out the niceties). Trust and respect are not things you can demand, they have to be earned. If you treat others as you’d like to be treated, with honesty and decency, it tends to come around, especially when it matters most.

  Under the old hierarchies, when being a boss was all about consolidating power, there was scant appreciation for developing workplace relationships in this way. But today, when it’s not about power but about building connections with employees and the customers you serve, it’s the smart way to operate. According to research from Exeter and the Netherlands’ University of Groningen, men view influence as an attribute that wins over employees and gains their acceptance, while women view employee acceptance as a factor that leads to influence. In these new ways of working and leading, women have an edge.