Professor Susan Vinnicombe, OBE

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Women in Surgery Conference 1 December
2008Women and Leadership

• Professor Susan Vinnicombe, OBE

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• Myths
• Women directors in the UK
• Does it matter?
• Womens leadership styles

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Myths around women and top leadership

• Myth 1
• Women arent interested
• In a study of more than 900 senior level
• Women and men from Fortune 1000 companies,
• Catalyst found that women and men have
• equal desires to have the CEO job
• (Catalyst, 2004)

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Myths around women and top leadership
Myths around women and top leadership

• Myth 2
• Women arent seen as Leaders
• 61 senior women quote style differences as a
  barrier to advancement (compared to 26 CEOs)
• 94 senior women see developing a style with
  which male managers are comfortable as a key
  career strategy for advancement.
• (Opportunity Now 2000)

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Myths around women and top leadership

• Myth 3
• Women havent got the right experience
• Male CEOs say there arent more women on boards
  because they lack general management experience
  and they havent been in the pipeline long enough
• Female directors say there arent more women on
  boards because of male stereotyping
• (Catalyst 1999)

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Work experience of new FTSE 100 directors2001 -
2004
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Previous directorship experience
 
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Myths around women and top leadership

• Myth 4
• Women dont take risks
• Data
• Women are more likely than men to be appointed
  onto corporate boards when the companies share
  prices have fallen
• (Ryan and Haslam, 2005)

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Myths around women and top leadership

• Myth 5
• Highly educated women are opting out of the
  workforce to become full time parents
• Data
• Women managers intentions to leave were based
  on a perceived lack of career opportunities
  within their work organisations, not on family
  reasons.
• (Stroh et al, 1996)

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2008
5 Female CEO FTSE 100
4.8 of Exec Directors of FTSE 100 are female
14.9 of NEDs of FTSE 100 are female
13 Exec Committee Directors are female
18 of senior managers are female
30 of managers are female
30 60 graduate entry is female
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Factors explaining lack of women directors

• Lack of a transparent, open selection process
  (80 NEDs through personal invitation of
  Chairman)
• No advertising of posts
• Some recent females appointed - struggling
• Key routes to the board-general management,
  operations, finance. (Women in HR and legal
  consistently overlooked)
• Poor briefs by Chairmen
• Search consultants seen to have their favourites

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Why does it matter that so few women makeit to
the top

• By 2010 just 20 of the workforce of the UK will
  be white male and under 45. 80 of workforce
  growth will be among women. Women will form a
  significant part of the available talent pool.
  If we select our leaders from only half the
  population waste of talent
• 71 of the main shoppers are women
• Women own 48 Britains personal wealth and this
  will rise to 60 in 2025
• Companies with women on the board perform better
  financially (ROE) and have better corporate
  governance
• Better corporate decision making. The biggest
  difference shown by Canadian Research is the
  significantly increased use of non-financial
  performance measures by boards with more women
  (e.g. innovation, CSR, employee satisfaction,
  customer satisfaction, communication, strategy
  implementation)

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Women with Attitude A LEADERS DOZEN12 THINGS
WOMEN WITH ATTITUDE DO AS LEADERS(A leader is
what a leader does)

• Professor Susan Vinnicombe OBE

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1 A leader resolves ethical dilemmas

• In the 1990s a British Airways sales team
  analysed rival airlines confidential booking
  information hacked off the reservation system,
  run by BA, that other airlines like Virgin fed
  into.
• BA used the data to try and poach customers away
  from rivals.
• As a middle manager in BA marketing, Barbara
  Cassani was enmeshed in the scam in a minor way.
• Her judgement The statistics were being gained
  completely illegally, yes, completely, but I had
  no idea at the time they were being collected.
  If I had known that they were being collected
  illegally I would have immediately stopped the
  activity. You do the best you can and when you
  find out that something is being done improperly
  you just stop it.

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1 A leader resolves ethical dilemmas

• Another transport boss, Ann Gloag of Stagecoach
  Buses and Trains, maintains that no bribes are
  ever given and that transparency is maintained.
• She said When you go to see presidents and
  ministers in developing countries they are always
  looking for bribes. They looked at us and said
  that we were very mean. We said that we will not
  give bribes it is a company policyabsolutely no
  bribes, but we will do projects that will benefit
  the whole country. In Kenya, for example, we set
  up an orphanage.
• In Malawi, she built a Burns Unit at Queen
  Elizabeth General Hospital.

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2 A leader is open with her people

• Dianne Thompson said
• If there is one huge difference between men and
  women in leading and there are manyit is that
  women tend to be more open!
• Throughout my career I know that women talk more
  openly about what they can do and what they cant
  do and the problems they have.

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3 A leader brings out the best in people

• I would distinguish leadership from management.
  I was taught at IBM that management is learning
  how to look after resources.
• Leadership is different. It involves inspiring
  people and causing them to do more than they
  think they can do. That to me is the greatest
  challenge and the greatest thrill of leading
  making people far more successful than they think
  they can be.

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4 A leader collaborates easily

• Anne Wood, as a film producer, believes in a
  collaborative leadership style. Her leadership
  role is to search for new talent.
• I am on the lookout all the time. I try people
  out. We do something that is very particular and
  we are looking for skills that people sometimes
  do not know they have.

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5 A leader shares the credit

• Sharing credit for Dame Marjorie Scardinos
  achievements comes naturally for her and is part
  of her leadership style. In her biggest
  acquisition she bought the publishers Simon
  Schuster for 4.6 billion in November 1998. She
  made the purchase with the help of Peter
  Jovanovich and immediately put him in charge of
  Pearson Education to include the new publisher
  and Pearsons own publishing arm Addison-Wesley
  and Longman. When she is in the full glare of
  the media announcing company results, she puts
  her arms around the other members of her top team
  to make it difficult for the photographers and
  camera men to exclude them from the frame, by
  focussing only on her.

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6 A leader shares the cash

• Dame Marjorie Scardino is still the only woman
  CEO of a FTSE 100 company. She earned 1.29
  million in salary last year, which gave her a
  ranking of number 25 among Britains top FTSE 100
  CEOs 99 men. She has extended share option
  schemes from 20 per cent when she became CEO five
  years ago to 96 per cent in 2001.
• Patricia Vaz at BT says I watch every year when
  salary reviews take place to make sure that we
  are not allowing people to be disadvantaged
  because of where they come from and who they
  areI strip out the females and the people of
  ethnic minorities to see if their performance
  rankings are in any way out of line with the
  males or the majority of the workforce.

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7 A leader is concerned about her people

• Dame Marjorie Scardino earned world-wide approval
  for an e-mail to each of Pearsons 28,000
  employees following the terrorist attacks of 9/11
  on the World Trade Center where 65 Pearson
  employees worked on the 17 floor of the north
  tower.
• The e-mail said
• Dear Everybody
• I want to make sure you know that our priority is
  that you are safe and sound in body and mind. Be
  guided by what you and your families need right
  now. There is no meeting you have to go to and
  no plane you have to get on if you dont feel
  comfortable doing it. For now look to yourselves
  and to your families, and to Pearson to help you
  any way we can.

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8 A leader is tenacious

• Patricia Vaz said To achieve a leadership
  position in any organisation you need tenacity
  you must keep going and keep trying and you have
  to be brave.
• I met a scuba diver instructor in the West
  Indies who said that he would rather teach a
  woman than a man in scuba diving, because a man
  will swim up to deaths door (as a macho thing),
  saying I can do this! whereas a woman will
  say can we avoid the danger?
• Ann Burdus said if women take on non-executive
  directorships they will do it properly, which
  means that they will spend most of Sunday reading
  the papers for next weeks board meeting.
• Ann Gloag There was a lot of criticism of
  stagecoach and our aggressive behaviour. It was
  not aggressive at all. It was just that we were
  the first to do it and there is a price to pay
  for being first.

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9 A leader is consultative

• Running the Royal Marsden Hospital was a huge job
  for Phylllis Cunningham, but for 24 years at the
  top she kept an open policy. She made it clear
  to others that she would listen to anyone from
  trade union representatives to politicians.
• She said I like to talk to people and get their
  views. But Im very careful not to usurp the
  authority of my directors or managers. Part of
  my management style was to be always
  approachable.

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10 A leader is conciliatory

• Prue Leath was as multi-tasked as a top manager
  could be. She ran a catering business, a cookery
  school, and her own restaurant at the same time.
  TV drama would depict all three businesses to be
  high-pressured.
• She says My management style was always
  conciliatory, non-confrontational. I wanted to
  encourage people to do their best and enjoy what
  they were doing. Its the teacher in me.

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11. A leader looks for opportunities and takes
risks

• The Scottish Business Insider magazine said of
  Ann Gloag, transport entrepreneur Its clear
  from voters (more than 250 senior executives who
  voted her the top award) that Ann Gloag triumphed
  because her peers highly appreciate her quite
  single-minded exhibition of business flair,
  strategic clarity and downright opportunism
• Ann Gloags father gave his entire bus drivers
  pension to help her and her brother start
  Stagecoach. She recalled He invested every
  penny of it with our company i think it was
  12,000. We tried to give it back but he would
  not take it. Now of course he has had a great
  deal of pleasure for his investment. But at the
  time, think of the faith that he had in us to
  give us 12,000 all he had.

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12 A leader is dedicated to the wider community

• Anita Roddick, Ann Gloag, Prue Leith, Ann Wood
  and Patsy Bloom are the most notable women who
  showed a social conscience in their dedication to
  the broader community. Their help of the young,
  the poor, the unemployed, the medically needy,
  the socially deprived, the handicapped, the
  marginated, the old, included sharing their
  wealth with them, dealing with their pressing
  needs, finding them work and creating other
  opportunities for them as employees, suppliers
  and consumers.
• Anita Roddick summed it up when she said Open
  up a typical management book and you will find it
  hard to avoid words like leadership,
  team-building, company culture or customer
  service. However, you will be lucky to find
  words like community, social justice, human
  rights, dignity, love or spirituality the
  emerging language of business.