Balancing the executive committee
Ever wondered why companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 25 per cent more likely to experience above-average profitability and outperform their peers, but there is still an alarming lack of women in executive roles? This is the question that Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Chair in Organisational Behaviour and Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, sought to answer when she spoke at a conference organised by the Financial Times recently.
Herminia – an authority on leadership and expert on the advancement of women to senior executive posts – was part of a panel of experts brought together at the FT Women in Business Europe Summit on 13 June to consider how companies can improve gender diversity. Alongside Bridget Lea, Managing Director, Commercial Division at BT EE; Angela Tangas, CEO of dentsu UK&I; and Burcin Ressamoglu, CEO of Sodexo Engage UK, Herminia discussed how companies can transform the way they recruit and assess talent to boost female representation in senior board positions.
One of the key points the FT was seeking to understand is how companies might debias their talent strategies. Herminia noted that research has shown that most talent strategies are biased in one way or another. For example, women’s performance is less likely to get translated into judgements of potential than it is for men. Not surprisingly, in a new, ongoing study (with LBS professors Isabel Fernadez Mateo and Dana Kanze) in collaboration with Edge Certification, she is finding a significant gender gap in how men and women perceive talent policies.
This issue around ‘potential’ was addressed earlier in the year by Herminia when she contributed to a Raconteur article ahead of International Women’s Day, which looked at the issue of: ‘The FTSE gender gap: why do so few women lead the nation’s top plcs?’. In that, Herminia noted that recruiting managers potentially cut male candidates more slack in the selection process if they don’t meet all the requirements of the role whereas women are less likely to benefit from “a bet on their potential”.
Herminia is also an expert on the subject of sponsorship and mentorship programmes, regularly writing on the need for women to have sponsors who can help to advance their careers. At the FT event, Herminia stressed that companies know what to do, they just don’t know how to do it well enough and they don’t put enough energy into it.
She suggests that companies should focus on destination roles and how to get people there as women are not getting the key P&L roles in their 30s and 40s, which are the steppingstones to the top. Boards managing executive succession planning to bring through more female talent really need to focus on getting women into the big roles early enough, Herminia concludes.
