I have two two clients that are both lean and successful, but with very different cultures. Both have female dominated factory floors – I don’t know the numbers but easily 2/3 of the front line folks are women. One of them has a female COO and when the top management group gets together better than half of them are of the fairer sex. The other has two women out of a top management group of 35-40 people. Both companies are led by men who are compassionate, fair and do not have a discriminatory bone in their body. So why the difference?
The one with fewer women at the top does not do anything wrong. They don’t go out of their way to only hire and promote men. Their approach is generally to promote and hire the best person who falls into their lap when management openings arise. In short, they follow the letter of the law and, beyond that, are genuinely willing to hire and promote qualified women, but few qualified women maneuver their way into the candidate pool.
The one with more women than men doesn’t exclusively look for women when they hire – they don’t reverse discriminate. Rather, they do a couple of subtle things: For one, they are more aware of the qualifications and capabilities of all of their employees. Most companies have a lot of people in the front lines, at the bottom of the organizational totem pole, who are punching well below their weight. These people have a few years of college but left without a degree, or they have unique experience elsewhere, or they are simply very, very smart but for one reason or another never applied those smarts to their advanced education or their early career. For a whole lot of reasons, women tend to fall in one of those categories quite often. This company simply finds and takes advantage of their diamonds in the rough very, very well. Since most of their shop floor diamonds are women, they mine more women than men for advancement.
The other thing they do is to hire more through networking than through unrelated third parties. They don’t look to recruiters or ads in Monster or the like except as a last resort. Their first move is always to talk to their employees and aggressively urge them to identify friends, neighbors or relatives who might be qualified and interested. Not too surprising that, when they look to a predominantly female work force for such recommendations, they get a lot of women – old friends, classmates and the like – referred to them.
The importance of the resulting gender diversity at the top was brought home to me in a recent conversation with a friend – a female – who works for a Fortune 500 manufacturer. She works in a relatively low level accounting position in a clerical-type office dominated by women in similar clerical-type roles. I had always thought of her as kind, but not terribly sympathetic to those claiming to be victims of discrimination … the sort of person whose inclination is to believe that people generally make their own luck and that most ‘victims’ of discrimination actually did something to cause the perceived slight. Her employer recently announced a major senior management reorganization and, based on her generally self-reliant world view I was surprised when her reaction to the reorganization was to rather derisively point out that 18 of the 20 new executive appointments were men. Until then I didn’t think she was the sort of person who cared … or noticed – but, of course, she does.
When I think about it, the level of shop floor engagement and the overall honesty – often harsh honesty – at the company with a strong female management presence is much higher than at the testosterone heavy company.
Good people don’t care whether the boss is male or female, black or white, Anglo or Hispanic. But when people look at the leadership team – the folks with the power and bigger paychecks – and see few or no people that look like themselves it sends a message, whether that message reflects management’s honest views or not. When all of those women on the shop floor see women in the low paying ranks and men at the top, how could they fail to notice and personalize it?
In fact, the approach of the company that looks to its workforce for talent, regardless of resume highlights, reflects both superior respect for its employees and simply better management that more effectively utilizes the talent it has.
There are lots of generally valid explanations for the generally lower earnings of women – women don’t major in engineering and science to the extent men do, women take more time off for child bearing and raising, etc… – but generally valid truths are irrelevant to specific situations. That woman – the one running that machine over there – is not some philosophical, universal entity. She is (as is everyone in the company) a unique entity with unique skills, motivations and capabilities and what may be generally true of women has nothing to do with the truth about her. Maybe she deserves a shot at greater responsibility and maybe she doesn’t. But when the company is like my client that rarely has capable women falling into their candidate pool, or the company my friend works for with a 90% male senior staff, it seems pretty clear that the company is being driven by generalities rather than one-on-one respect and appreciation for individuals and, as a result, leaving a lot of talent on the table and sending an unintended, demotivating message to a lot of good employees.
Original: http://www.idatix.com/manufacturing-leadership/do-you-have-binders-full-of-women/
Kevin says
Your last line is golden – in effect “respect for individual people” instead of simply “respect for people.” Powerful distinction.
Jack Parsons says
There is a chance here to also comment on the tendency for some to hire and promote those folks who are made in their own image just from the standpoint of having the same personality type and general interests usually within the same gender; the old boys’ network if you will. We not only miss the unique viewpoint and approaches of another gender, but the contributions of those with different leadership styles whether that style is analytical, creative, people oriented or task oriented. We need all of these approaches to be successful.
david foster says
“Most companies have a lot of people in the front lines, at the bottom of the organizational totem pole, who are punching well below their weight”
Yeah. Runaway credentialism has resulted in a vast waste of talents, with harm to millions of individuals and to the economy as a whole.
Somewhere today there’s a factory worker who would make a good department manager, maybe a good manager for the overall plant someday, but will never get the job because he lacks a college degree. Somewhere there’s a good bank branch manager who *does* have a college degree, but will never get the regional management position she wants and would do well at, because she doesn’t have an MBA. And somewhere there’s a guy who *does* have an MBA, but won’t get a job with an investment bank because his degree isn’t from an “elite” school.
Bill Waddell says
Jack – You are exactly right. Too many managers, in the honest but misguided pursuit of team and culture bulding, hire clones of themselves thinking seeing eye to eye on everything makes for an effective, harmonious team, when disagreement is actually a healthy element of progress.
David. Amen to that. When I wrote it I realized that ‘runaway credentialism’ is a topic for a post itself. I believe it is another reason why smaller companies often outperform the multi-nationals. The bigger the company, the more weight they put on academic and other credentials, as you so clearly pointed out.
Jim G says
I heartily agree that ‘runaway credentialism’ would be a great topic. I am one of those without the “right” credentials for my job. The big multinational company I work for now would never have given me a chance if the family owned business I previously worked for had not recognized some potential.
I hope everyone reading this will remember that unused human potential is one of the 8 wastes and look around at their employees and think, “who could be doing even more for us”.
David Hallsted says
I would like to further highlight the discrimination within the male hierarchy.
I, being a short white male see nothing but tall white males in upper management.
I get the message loud and clear.
david foster says
Jack..”the tendency for some to hire and promote those folks who are made in their own image just from the standpoint of having the same personality type and general interests usually within the same gender”
I attended a management class in which one of our guest speakers was a psychology professor of the Jungian persuasion. He made the point that you will be tempted to hire people of the same personality type as yourself, and if you give in to this temptation, you will all have the same blind spots and will march happily off the cliff together.
(He was speaking particularly about the kind of personality attributes measured by the MTBI…introvert vs extrovert, intuitive vs sensation, judgment vs perceiving, etc. Indeed, I think that in a work context, the differences between two people of the same gender but of very different psychological types can exceed the difference between two people of opposite genders but similar types)
Robert Drescher says
Bill you nailed a good point and it doesn’t just apply to women it applies to all workers. Far too often we look for people in to narrow a way, because of that we miss out on many opportunities because we have ignored the talents and abilities of those people already in our organization. The blame for this falls onto to both senior management and HR, because next to no one spends time to identifying and listing the skills of most of our workforces. Somehow we have come to a point when an MBA is considered more important than actual experience, even though history has shown that these MBAs really do not deliver a better result.
A good example is the Canadian banks vs. the US Banks, Canada avoid the banking problems because we have tightly regulated and very large banks, but there is one other difference in Canada most of our banks still develop their own employees from the bottom up, sending them to school along the way if needed as they develop. I know of quite a few people that started as tellers that are currently executives with their bank, to them experience was how they gained the knowledge of their key business.
If we want to do a better job and have more successful companies we need to change these habits not just because they scream about discrimination of one form or another, but because we need a wider range of ideas to drive our businesses than we are currently getting. Here I will share a couple other reasons to look at people with different backgrounds.
In fact your blog got me to touch up and post something on my blog I wrote for small local group a while ago.
Thanks for bring up those often touchy and thorny issues to many people try to ignore, it really rises the level of discussion.
Martin B says
Well said, David H. I’m 5′ 2″ tall and everyone looks down on me, in both senses of the word.
(To be fair I should mention I had a boss who was even shorter than me. He fired me from the construction company where we both worked, then left the company and started his own very successful construction company.)