The many-faceted shock of grooming mid-career women for the C-suite

by means of Rita McGrath

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Posted on Dynamic Strategies: May 22, 2008 2:03 PM

What answer the purpose the active time from birth to death prospects of female scientists, the not partial chaos of the mid-career managers’ life, the failure to adequately make known new cadres of leaders internally, and escalating CEO reward acquire in common? Let me insinuate that these are interrelated phenomena whose connections with one another may have existence poorly understood.

Let’s start with female scientists. According to a carefully done and well-researched study, American companies have an abysmal trail record at retaining female scientists, technological populate, and engineers as they move into mid-career. Faced with hostile workplaces, few peers, daunting working hours, and poor prospects for promotion, talented women leave in droves. Although 41% of younger scientists, engineers, and technology the multitude are female, their fourth book of the pentateuch; census of the hebrews collapse catastrophically. Rather than whine about not having enough H1-B visas to supply technical positions, the authors suggest that a better answer might exist untruthful right in the state the noses of leaders in corporate America. Were just individual quarter of women drop-outs to stay in their careers, they estimate that some 220,000 talented canaille might have existence retained in the science and technology workforce in the US.

What transact we bring to an end from all this? For technology companies, the ranks of potential leaders are depleted disproportionately of female aptness.

Turning now to the chaos of mid career, Louann Brizendine makes that case that embedded career patterns also disproportionately damage the prospects of women. While all managers with the possible to reach “C Suite” positions go into overdrive in their late 30’s and 40’s, women are more probable than men to have many other commitments to honor. Among these are pre-adolescent and teenage children, who need unpredictable and varying parental attention, much of which falls to women to cope by. Sports, activities, teen issues and other distractions at home mean that a lot of women’s mental amplitude is chewed up by coping. Stepping forward to take on even more responsibility at drudge can seem overwhelming at that point, reports Brizendine.

What happens is that women for example a group in their 40’s are far in a less degree likely to push themselves forward to the next level—they have enough on their plates. Again, they vanish from the pipeline foolishly because the window of consideration in many companies slams close up face to face with they are in readiness to take that next frisking. I’ve been talking about this for years, in the words immediately preceding of women and men having different life cycles, while organizations are built around men’s life cycles. So again, we have a lot of women who will never have existence considered for more senior leadership positions, a absent group of talent.

Then, map against this exodus of forte the fact that crowd companies have no systematic process despite managing succession and pile bench depth even when it comes to men! Further, the basics of developing and retaining talent seem to escape many companies. Where does completely this leave us?

• Poor track records at support and promoting half the qualified management talent (assuming such talent is distributed across the population)• Poor practices for developing people• Poor practices for developing succession plans

So where does this adieu multitude companies? At the extremity of the day, forced to look outside the organization as far as concerns an external CEO “saviour” because they haven’t done the hard job of developing internal power. So by what means does this sudden into runaway CEO Compensation?

I was recently privileged to have being at a conference at which Jack Welch, the former GE CEO, was present. He observed that both the succession crisis and higher CEO take revenge upon are related, noting that McInerney (hired at 3M) got a “Brinks truck” abounding of extra pay. Bob Nardelli (who went to Home Depot) got brace Brinks trucks. Meanwhile Jeff Immelt, who got the internal promotion got “a pat on the head and 20%.” His highly important argument is that CEO talent commands a huge price premium when boards haven’t done their jobs to develop canaille and succession plans.

Which brings me to the last bit of data that ties all this together—John Cassidy of the magazine Portfolio notes the continuing escalation of CEO reparation, today reinforced by individual employment contracts which make it “almost incapable of occurring” for a Board to fire a CEO without paying him (or her) a kings’ ransom. His solution is for Boards of Directors to grow spines and start to demand more accountability for performance.

To me, spineless Board members are hardly going to solve this locality. Rather, developing significative pools of executive talent are in greater numbers likely to be the answer. Imagine hundreds of thousands of highly qualified women who remain in the workforce with the potential to join the C-suite. Imagine if every company had an intelligent wont to make known its leadership talent, using on the job training, executive education and enriching feedback. Imagine, as my coadjutor Linda Hill from Harvard has proposed, if you could find leaders in less conventional ways than the up or out hierarchies we traditionally rely upon? Guess what—fewer companies would have to rely on expensive outsiders, in that place would be more talent available and the ability of a few highly regarded players to demand extra compensation could be diminished. Maybe that’s a more constructive plot than hoping for Board members to try discipline in the midst of a frenzied bidding war.