Our Turn (12 page)

Working my way up from the corporate bottom, I learned from the leaders and managers above me that those who kept information and the power to make decisions to themselves were soon overwhelmed and, in the worst of times, paralysed. Since they didn't bring their people into the circle of information, their people couldn't do their part to handle a task and then that task was badly handled. There was danger, too, when leaders only tapped people they liked, creating an inner circle of their friends as opposed to seeking out those who could do the job best. In its worst manifestations, such a leadership style creates an emperor-has-no-clothes scenario, leaders surrounding themselves with the nodding heads of old boys' clubs and protective circles of mean girls. A successful, modern leader doesn't need a cheerleading
squad. Quite the opposite. The first thing a leader needs is the trust, respect and support of her team, because trust encourages constructive criticism, disagreement and healthy debate. And though trust and respect is a two-way street built between leader and team, it's up to leaders to set the example. A leader's transparency can be shocking for some and a refreshing change for others. But it's a necessary first step to building a healthy relationship with a team. It takes guts to share information, the good and the bad, and to trust a team to do its best with it. But in today's world the risk you take by trying to go it alone as a leader isn't worth it, especially when it causes you to ignore the wealth of brainpower you can harness when you are open.

It has been hard for women in particular to share power; we've had it so rarely, the last thing we want to do is let it get away. And when information is power, sometimes we hold it back with the belief that we can handle a matter ourselves. I know I've often assumed that I could manage a situation solo, when I could have benefited by bringing other bright minds to bear. Sometimes we don't share because we underestimate the significance of our knowledge or don't recognize that we actually do have valuable information to contribute. That young woman who approached me after my talk at the Rotman School, for instance, likely had a whole wealth of valuable data points that were being missed because she felt she could only provide answers to questions the sales team asked. Yet how much more valuable would her research be if she served up the answers to questions they never knew to ask? How much personal capital would she build by allowing the team to benefit from her insights?

Information moves at high speeds and volatility rules the markets. Data about trends, opportunities, the competition, about customers and from customers, flies in around the clock from everywhere. And it demands the attention of a nimble team to digest it because any of it might require action. The kind of leader who is going to excel under these conditions doesn't keep knowledge under lock and key, but sets it out in the wild for her team to absorb, analyze and interpret. The modern leader's role is to appreciate the information flooding in from multiple inputs and then to consult with the team to figure out the best way forward. Ultimately, it remains the job of the leader to act. But today, the only way to build power is to share power, because leadership is not really about exercising power at all. It's about influence.

The old ways of working centred on the idea of power as the key to maintaining control. But having control is a vain hope today. People resist being led by fear and don't want to work for companies that don't have their best interests at heart. The best you can aim for is the capacity to indirectly shape people's opinions and behaviours because they believe what you say, what you stand for and see you and your organization as trustworthy. The global village doesn't judge companies on their bottom lines and, increasingly, not even on their brands, but on their authenticity, their reputations and the integrity of their interactions with the people they serve. The more empathic, innovative and responsive a company is, the more influence they are likely to wield. Which is why I think we're about to see a meaningful breakthrough in the numbers of women in leadership roles. Those qualities the market now demands of its companies and corporations
are traits long considered “feminine.” Caliper, the Princeton-based talent management company, recently studied the personal attributes of male and female leaders from nineteen different business sectors. The research, which included in-depth interviews with fifty-nine women from top companies in the US and the UK, such as Bank of America, Deloitte & Touche, Deutsche Bank, The Economist Group, IBM, Kohler, Molson Coors and several others, found that women scored significantly higher than men on sociability, flexibility, the ability to read situations, build consensus and form strategy—and form it quickly.

If we women can get over the temptation to hide what we know, or what we think, and put it out there, we have precisely what it takes to lead today: an aptitude for synthesizing information from many sources, anticipating needs and appreciating various viewpoints, even those contrary to our own. What's more, as research has also shown, women are particularly strong at encouraging others to share their views and contribute their creative energies for the betterment of the team. And that's the deal-breaker. Because what hasn't changed amid the seismic shifts of the information age—what has only become more important—is that any organization is only going to be as strong as the teams who work for them. Today, it's all about
the people
.

Growing the New

IN THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY,
human capital is the asset that matters the most. When the world's leading hotelier, taxi company, retailer and information provider owns no hotels,
no taxis, no stores, or publications, it's not a leap to conclude that what's crucial for any enterprise to succeed are
ideas
—and those don't roll off the old assembly lines. You have to grow ideas, and that means first clearing a field, planting the seeds and then nurturing them. The right leaders for success today know to rule not by law but by motivation: giving people a voice, respecting individual values and encouraging brainstorming to create an environment where it's safe to experiment, and propose new, even unorthodox, ideas. Leading today is not about what the boss thinks, but how the boss responds, and the more input a leader can draw from a dynamic and eclectic team, the better that response will be.

According to the Center for Talent Innovation, this is another area where women have an advantage because they're naturals at fostering these kinds of innovative teams. Its research, based on 1,800 survey responses and interviews with dozens of executives, team leaders and employees at Fortune 500 companies, finds the kind of leaders most likely to create these inclusive, speak-up cultures are those who keenly appreciate the value of different perspectives because they themselves are different from the traditional leader—as in non-European, under thirty-five, or female. In short, mix it up at the top and those bolts of brilliance are more likely to shoot up from the bottom: bolts that might well pay big dividends. When business professors at the University of Maryland and Columbia University studied the effect of gender diversity on top companies in the S&P Composite 1500 list, they found that firms that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks.

I think a woman's leadership strength comes from our general inclination to want to do not just a decent job, but the best job we can do. While we might sometimes be inclined to play our cards close to the vest, we're also usually comfortable admitting what we don't know and reaching out to our networks of people to find the information we need. If it means assembling the best team and ignoring the conventional company structure to figure things out, as I did at the CBC to prep our coverage for the Sochi Olympics, that's what we'll do. If you want to encourage innovation or solve a problem, then gathering multiple perspectives and creating teams diverse in background and in ideas is the best way to get it. Input from different cultures, genders and generations usually brings constructive challenges to the status quo. Diversity is as good for a garden as it is for business—not just to be socially conscious, but to stay competitive. If your firm is filled with people who all have the same backgrounds and tend to share the same opinions, chances are, as the folks at Nokia learned the hard way, opportunities will be missed. A recent article in the
Guardian
told the story of Beam, the bourbon company whose net profits soared to a record high of $2.5 billion in 2012 after it acquired Skinnygirl Cocktails, a line of premixed drinks created by reality-TV star Bethenny Frankel. She had approached all the major liquor companies, run mostly by males, and they had turned her down flat, so she decided to go it alone. Frankel went on to sell so many cases that the men from Beam came to her, offering $39 million for the brand. It was a stunning example of how the largely male-run liquor companies had missed a major market opportunity by thinking they knew their
customers best. But it's hardly the only evidence that firms lacking diversity are losing out.

A
Harvard Business Review
study from 2013, involving 1,800 professionals, found that employees of firms with true diversity were 45 percent more likely to report a growth in market share over the previous year, and 70 percent more likely to report the capture of a new market. A diverse company simply has a better shot at connecting with global markets that are only becoming ever more diverse. In Canada today we have four generations working together for the first time in history (the Silent Generation, Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y), and a visible-minority population growing five times faster than the increase for the population as a whole, according to the 2006 Canadian census. In the US, the Census Bureau predicts minorities will be the majority by 2042. And when it comes to gender diversity, companies have every reason to include more women in their teams, not just because women drive about, oh, 80 percent of all purchasing decisions, make up half the population and, morally, it's just the right thing to do. But because it's the smart thing to do. There's a growing body of compelling research that shows including women makes groups smarter.

Psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College recently completed a fascinating series of studies to examine whether some groups, like some individuals, are reliably smarter than others. They assembled 697 volunteers, grouped them into teams of two to five, and gave each team a series of tasks designed to reflect real-world problems, tasks that involved brainstorming, logical analysis, and others that focused on coordination and moral reasoning.
They found groups that did well on one task did well on others too. When they tried to figure out what made these teams “smarter” they were surprised by what they found. The successful teams weren't filled with high-IQ members or packed with extroverts or keeners who raised the level of collective intelligence. Rather, the smart teams were those where members contributed to the group discussions equally, as opposed to having one or two dominate. Members of the smart teams scored higher on a visual test designed to measure how well the volunteers could read the emotions of others just by looking at facial images in which only the eyes were visible (a test called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes”). The teams with more women outperformed teams with more men—and the more women a team had, the better they performed. This, the researchers concluded, had a lot to do with the fact women outscored men on the emotional intelligence “mind-reading” test.

But what was just as surprising—and incredibly relevant given the way our tech world works—is that the researchers discovered in a follow-up study that this result held true even when the teams worked exclusively online. As they wrote earlier this year in a much-discussed piece in the
New York Times
, “Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face.” And once again the upshot was the same: women were consistently better at reading between the lines to interpret other people's emotions, which, in turn, was a key factor in how well the team performed.

As this kind of evidence mounts, so does the urgency to recruit more women at all levels in the corporate world. And
for women, who can often be hesitant to step up and speak out, there's never been a better time to be heard.

I'm the Boss of Me

AS MUCH AS RECRUITING
the right team is essential to success, holding on to that talent is crucial for survival. If leaders don't create an environment that fosters employee engagement and empowerment, their people will up and leave them for the competition. The race for good people, and women especially, is fierce and global.

I think one major frustration that can make employees bolt from a job is feeling irrelevant. Just as leadership characteristics are changing, so is employee culture. When bosses ruled by decree, employees were accustomed to following the rules, ready to receive and deliver on their marching orders, keeping their opinions to themselves if they hoped to keep their jobs. It wasn't long ago that dictatorial memos from the boss were met with resigned silence. Today that sort of top-down, one-way relationship seems as ludicrous as Mr. Burns. Now, when I send a note to the team, an excited chain of responses greets it, ranging from
“Agree +1”
to
“Is this what we really want to do as a company?”
As a leader you not only have to be ready to deal with those responses, you should encourage them. Nothing puts a wedge between leader and team more than the thought that one doesn't care about the other. Nothing is more demoralizing than to think your opinion doesn't matter. Creating an environment where differences are respected is one of the most important things a leader can foster to ensure success.

What matters to modern employees is to feel that they're making a meaningful contribution, that they have purpose and a stake in the work they do, and a certain amount of autonomy in how it gets done. The importance of meaningful work is bound to increase as younger generations make their way through the workforce. People in their twenties and thirties right now have been raised to speak their minds, to have and share opinions, and to be listened to and accommodated when they do. And technology, along with this generational rise, is driving this cultural shift too.