INBOUND 2016: Alexia Vernon "The Missing Ingredient in Women's Leadership"

I have a confession to make. I seriously considered scrapping everything that I had prepared to say today in the aftermath of Tuesday's election results. But I am not going to do that. While I fear that this moment may go down as one of the worst with respect to women's leadership, I am going to go high. I am going to keep an open mind, and I'm going to posit that this could also be the moment where organizations decide to be ground zero and be the place where women's leadership is cultivated and valued and where there's a cultural shift that supports women to fulfill their potential. One thing I suspect we can all agree upon, irrespective of where we lie politically, is that we're all pretty exhausted of divisive, partisan conversations. So I assure you that this is not going to be a political presentation. And with that, let's soldier on. It's important for me to share with you that I have spent most of my life in communities of women and girls. I had the privilege of going to an all girls middle school and high school. I majored in women's studies, pursued graduate work in the area. I even taught women's studies for a number of years before launching my own women's leadership coaching, consulting and training company. So I know that extraordinary things can happen in communities of women. I am the product and a creator of them. But. There's always a but. I also know too well that women's leadership development experiences do not always facilitate the full impact that they are intended to. In the United States and throughout much of the world, there are simply not enough women who are raising their hands and saying, I feel prepared to lead. And as we also know very keenly, when women do raise their hands and say I am uniquely qualified to lead, too often they are seen and treated radically different than their male counterparts. About 10 years ago, I had the opportunity to be the closing keynote speaker for a prestigious social enterprise conference. I arrived a little bit early in time for the participants pitch fest. Each of the approximately 100 young people in attendance had two minutes to present their big idea for how to harness entrepreneurial solutions to solve a big social, economic or environmental problem. And the pitches were good. The pitches actually were outstanding across the board. They were bold, they were well researched. They. They were full of heart. The finalists in this pitch fest were voted on by the other people in attendance. The room had about 100 people, average age 25. The makeup was 50% female, 50% male. And I share these details with you so that you can appreciate why when the finalists names were announced. I thought I must have heard incorrectly, because every single finalist's name was male. In a room full of 100 young people, average age 25, not one woman's voice was picked. As I so often do whenever I am stirred up, I started asking questions of whomever would speak to me. And I asked, what just happened? Where are the voices of our young women? And what I heard from both the women and the men was shocking, sobering. Both the young women and the young men told me, well, we were tasked to pick the best speaker. And when I asked what that meant, they told me, well, you know, who projects confidence, who takes up space, who has a lot of volume in front of an audience? What we would call a more masculine model of leadership. And yet when I asked, but who were the speakers that you felt connected to, whose ideas you wanted to champion? What I heard again and again and again were the names of the women. Why? Well, I heard from the young women and the young men that it was many of the women's voices that they felt most connected to because they were vulnerable. They told stories. In many cases, they actually admitted, this is what I still need to learn in order for my idea to be successful and sustainable. And yet that wasn't deemed good. Speaking less than a month after that experience, I hit the reset button on my newly formed consulting business and knew that I needed to focus 100% on women's leadership. Lakshmi Balachandra, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, talks about this very problem in her research. An expert on the role of gender in acquiring early stage funding, Balachandra's research suggests that there are three key criteria that funders look for when making decisions about what entrepreneur to fund. Do you want to know what those three are? Good. I don't have a slide prepared if you don't. They are confidence, comfort level, and passionate enthusiasm. Notably missing from that list. Well, an entrepreneur's qualifications, the caliber of the pitch, the validity of the business idea. But I digress. Now, to be sure, confidence, comfort level and passionate enthusiasm have tremendous gender implications. Not only for women who are seeking to access capital for their startups, but for women who are seeking to be leaders in their companies. For women who are seeking to be leaders in their countries, I had to. Whether because of biology, sociology, or more likely, a combination of the two, when men step up and perform the functions of leadership, they are perceived to be, well, more leader like. And so while today I want to share with you some actionable strategies to empower women's leadership within your organizations. Whether you're looking to cultivate leadership for yourself or for your people, and share the very important shifts that must transpire in cultures for individual women's leadership to actually be celebrated. What I know is we have to begin by resetting our own individual thinking and behavior for any of this other work to actually stick and make impact. One of the assumptions that I hear a lot from well intentioned folks is that we've got to address pay equity. And while of course we want women to be paid the same as men for the work that they do, the truth is that pay equity is just one piece of being able to retain and promote high potential women. Another assumption that I will often hear is that high potential women need more female role models, more female mentors. And I don't disagree. It is challenging to envision ourselves being able to do something if we have never seen somebody who looks like us do it. But when most positions are still held by men, it is vital for women to cultivate relationships with male mentors and male champions as well, since we know that so many opportunities are are passed on based on somebody's network. So who a senior leader, mentors and champions is often going to learn about and be positioned for opportunities that other people simply don't know exist. Another assumption that we absolutely, positively need to tackle the notion that cultivating a female leadership pipeline is the right thing to do. Drinking eight glasses of water a day is the right thing to do, but how many of us do it? That's not enough of a compelling reason. Whenever somebody tells me that in her organization, they know it's the right thing to do. Usually this comes out of hr, and I adore hr. But there's a little piece of me that dies inside because I recognize that that is not going to get results. And the good news is that investing in female leaders makes sound business sense. We know from myriad studies that the more women there are in senior leadership positions, the more profitable a company is. I'm not a science or math person, I hate telling you that, but I had the privilege of going to Space Camp when I was 12 years old and I got bullied for having a lot of hair on my legs. And I decided that day I was done with science. Nonetheless, true story. Nonetheless, I know that if we could make the argument and as women and as men focus more on the business case, we might actually see more women's leadership initiatives get passed through. What we also know from research coming out of Diversity Inc. S top 10 companies for executive Women is that Women who self report that they're in companies that are conducive to women's leadership boards average approximately 27.5% women. Women comprise almost a third of the senior leadership positions Overall. Management. Almost 50% female and 68% of female managers have participated in some kind of mentorship program. Now, I want to draw your attention to the last two bullet points because this is an area where there is some room Here we know that more and more companies are achieving almost, if not near perfect, gender equity at the management level. And yet as we move into director, vp, senior leadership positions, that's where the chasm starts. So as we start to look at what needs to fundamentally shift in how we develop women's leadership skills, we don't want to reserve that leadership development for those folks who've already made it to the director or VP level. We want to start start earlier before women start leaking out of leadership pipelines. With respect to dangerous assumptions, I hear a lot. We need to have more women in leadership development programs. Now, to be clear, I do not disagree with that. However, the way we develop women's leadership needs to be re envisioned. I shared with you that my background is in women's studies, but it's also in theater. I was a theater minor and I had the opportunity to do some training with one of the Second City training institutes. And at least in the early aughts, there was a belief that was sometimes articulated even by male teachers that women were not as funny as men. And I can remember being really frustrated by this and finally having the opportunity to have an improv teacher who was female when I was at one of the advanced levels. Kay Cannon. And in case that name doesn't sound familiar, she went on to be a writer and producer for 30 Rock, New Girl, the Pitch Perfect movies. She's executive producer of Girl Boss, the new Netflix series that's coming. So she knows a thing or two or 20 about humor. And I remember saying to her, kay, what's up with this? Where do you think this comes from? And she said, I believe that the issue is that comedy, humor, it's all about being comfortable in your body. It's about trusting your instincts. It's about going with your first decision and not looking back. And that is something that does favor men and how they think and how they behave. Well, when I went on to do graduate work in the areas of women's leadership and adult learning theory, what I discovered is that Kay's musings were actually spot on. The way women learn and perform best is through rehearsal and role play. So when we think about what does women's leadership need to look like in order to empower women to cultivate the confidence as well as the competence to lead well, it means that the programs we create must give women opportunities to get up on our feet and to practice the real world leadership skills that in many cases we simply haven't yet had an opportunity to perform. In those women's leadership experiences, we have to have opportunities to take risks, to fail and to get back up again. And in that process, receive real time behavior based coaching and feedback so that we can solidify the mindset, the skills and the behaviors that are working get rid of the ones that aren't. It's that experiential leadership training that is going to help us to boost our sense of worthiness and ultimately enable us to transfer our learning into higher leadership aspirations and into higher and sustained leadership performance. This is not to say that mentorship programs, books, conferences, professional development opportunities don't matter. But if we don't give women opportunities to actually get a little dirty, to role play, rehearse, what we know is that confidence and competence, it's not going to happen. Now I would posit that single sex leadership development environments do this best. And I'm certainly not the only person who has ever said this. Many of our most profitable companies understand the business case and have their own women's leadership development programs. What we know is that for women, academic achievement goes up, as does ambition in single sex colleges. 30% of Business Week's rising female stars graduated from a women's college. 30% of board members of the Fortune 1000 did, and so did Hillary Clinton. Now, in addition to saying we need to create an environment that's experiential, where women can get up, they can actually try leadership out, they can get coaching and feedback in the process. We need to understand, well, what are those competencies that are not.