With COVID stressors forcing women to abandon careers, how do you get male business leaders to lean in? Talk to them about Profit & Loss, not just Diversity & Inclusion.
On this IWD, we #Choosetochallenge senior male leaders
By Philip Grosch & Heather Odendaal
As a man, I’m a bit of an outlier when it comes to championing gender equality. It’s women like my co-author Heather Odendaal, who are running organizations such as WNorth, (where she’s founder and CEO), Catalyst, The Prosperity Project and #movethedial (which has sadly been paused during Covid), who are leading the charge on the issue. But a decade ago, after more than 30 years in the corporate sector, the majority of which I was largely ignorant about the obstacles to success women face in the workplace. I discovered that women were leaving our firm at mid-career at a significantly higher rate than their male counterparts, began educating myself about why, and inadvertently became an advocate for their advancement. So, in September, when I read the McKinsey/Leanin.org Women in the Workplace 2020 study about how record numbers of women are contemplating hitting pause on or completely abandoning their careers due to pandemic-related inequities, I knew the price of that development — and not just for the women.
Even pre-pandemic, experts were predicting it would take another hundred years to achieve gender parity. Now they are predicting that unless we reverse this trend, not only will the paltry gains we’ve made be rolled back, Covid risks becoming a ticking time bomb with massive ramifications to corporations and the economy down the road.
After thinking deeply about these issues, it has become clear that the only way we’ll see significant change is by getting male business leaders to step up. How do we engage their interest? By re-framing the issue as a business imperative and discussing it in a language they understand, which is the language of profit and loss, not diversity and inclusion.
D&I leaders are wonderful people. They truly believe in social justice and they dedicate their careers to that quest. And we can agree that social justice is a worthy goal. But in my experience, when D&I leaders get in front of male business leaders and start talking their social justice talk, the moment they leave the room, the men smile and say, Okay, now we can get back to business. (To be clear, male business leaders are still disproportionally in positions of power , “.. men still dramatically outnumber, outrank and out-earn women” according to The Power Gap, the Globe’s recent investigative report on deeply-entrenched inequities in the modern workforce — not because they’re smarter or more capable than women, but because they’re the beneficiaries of historical forces.)
Pushing D&I on male business leaders by lecturing them that it’s good for them isn’t a winning strategy. Ask their mothers how well that strategy worked getting them to eat their brussels sprouts. Does D&I have a role to play? Yes. But it should be to support and enable the leaders by providing data on pipeline, hiring and compensation issues and proposing policies and educational initiatives to help move things forward — not run the show.
Business success is driven by talent. A leader’s job is to create an environment where their top talent can thrive. That’s why the argument to male business leaders shouldn’t be, ‘You have to build a diverse team because it’s the right thing to do’, even though that may well be the case. The argument should be, ‘You should implement that strategy because if you create an environment where your best and brightest can rise to the top, it will help you achieve your market growth goals’.
One thing people don’t like to talk about much is that CEOs typically rise from critical P&L functions, not support functions like HR, D&I, marketing, legal and procurement. While women have made great strides in those areas, their goals differ from the ones who own the P&L side, who basically have one goal: to attract and retain top performers who will drive business to the next level, because that’s what they’re measured on. While there are certainly exceptions, P&L leaders don’t really care if you’re pink, green, yellow, blue, male, female or somewhere in between. For them, it’s not a gender, race or ethnicity thing. It’s a talent thing.
We are not knocking D&I people, whom we believe have a critical role to play. We’re saying that when you ask a male CEO for his plan to achieve gender equality and he refers you to his D&I leader, he’s not only passing the buck. He’s setting up his D&I leader for an impossible task. D&I cannot solve this problem. Pretending that it can is at best disingenuous and at worst shameful.
What’s the solution? Every CEO has to stand up and say diversity and inclusion is a top priority. Then he has to put his money where his mouth is by selecting the business leaders who report to him based not only on their track records for delivering results, but also on their records for sponsoring diverse and inclusive teams. Next, he has to direct and empower those leaders to own the issue by requiring every single one of them to produce a business plan outlining how they’ll use diversity and inclusion as a strategic asset to drive business results. Then he has to measure their success in the same way he measures their ability to meet their financial business goals and make the P&L numbers work. Finally, he has to decide how their compensation will be impacted if they fail to make measurable progress achieving that goal.
Once you start to shift the lens through which you view these issues, it’s amazing how quickly you can start to turn the Titanic around. Let’s say you’re a business leader and a talented woman on your team is struggling because of Covid pressures. If her stress is overwhelming, either her performance will suffer, or she’ll quit. If you’re a smart leader, you’ll ask her what you can do to support her, then look for ways that you can.
Maybe she needs extra compensation, so she doesn’t have to abandon a career she loves and at which she excels simply because she’s the lower wage earner in her household and someone has to look after the kids. If you believe she’s going to be an important part of your company’s future, losing her would be a seriously bad outcome given the high cost of recruiting and nurturing talent. In our view, doing anything less than moving heaven and earth to help her would be a false economy.
Maybe money isn’t the issue. Maybe she just needs an accommodation to her schedule, or a pass on some Zoom meetings. Maybe all she needs is some empathy for what she’s going through. It’s not always about the money. It’s about men recognizing that women cannot get through this alone. And that investing in their success isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s a smart business decision, and a critical one for our country.
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Philip Grosch is a HeForShe role model, Catalyst Canada Champion and recently retired Partner at PwC, a global professional services firm where he built a business case and gained leadership support for the co-creation of a Women in Leadership (WiL) program that significantly increased the number of women who advanced to senior and partnership roles.
Heather Odendaal is co-founder and CEO at WNORTH, a global organization and membership network dedicated to bridging the Gender Power Gap by elevating women in the corporate leadership pipeline.
