Our Turn (14 page)

The hard lesson in all of this is that women have to learn to see their natural talents as powerful leadership assets. Flex those muscles and understand how effective they can be. Too often, we keep our heads down, do the grunt work and keep our thoughts to ourselves, hoarding our knowledge like nuts for a winter that might never come. But here's the thing: winter has arrived. This is the moment to present ourselves as leaders, to speak up and vocalize our vision. There's profound opportunity here. These are volatile, and vulnerable, times. Women have what it takes to lead from that proverbial cliff, and those cliffs are everywhere now.

Fearlessly Uncertain

THE RAPID SPREAD OF
digital technology has disrupted, and in some cases, destroyed, the business model in many sectors of the economy. Media, music, publishing, retail, travel,
finance, banking, health care: it's practically impossible to think of an industry where technology hasn't changed the game. Profit margins are being squeezed. Competition has grown and gone global. Revenue streams are drying up and many companies, even long-standing, storied institutions, have been caught off guard. Just keeping internal systems current is a challenge. Even companies who saw change coming are scrambling to adapt, and that's no easy feat when there's no clear way forward. No one knows what strategies will fly or fail when change is the only constant. In this environment, who isn't leading from a cliff?

The only way to find a solid footing today is to explore new paths, and once again this is where I believe women also have a certain advantage. Women tend to be fearless in the ways that matter most in today's climate of uncertainty. In a time when information and data rule the day, being fearless often means admitting what it is you don't know. It's risky to forge ahead, blind to the possibilities hidden in the wealth of data that swirls around us. In 2010, before the GPS became ubiquitous, Sheilas' Wheels, a British car insurance firm, actually investigated if there was any truth to the stereotype that men hate to ask for directions, and found that men in the UK drive an average of 276 extra miles per year because they'd rather be lost than have a stranger point the way. (A quarter of the men polled said they'd drive around for half an hour before asking. A stubborn 12 percent said they'd never ask.)

The corollary to this is that women are more comfortable asking (three-quarters of them, according to the study) because women are less likely to see asking for help as a show of weakness. If we need assistance to complete a task or get where
we're going, we ask for it. (Another study from Exeter found that women would be less likely to take a precarious, glass-cliff job if it lacked social resources such as employee support; for men the deal-breaker was a lack of financial resources.)

For me, having repeatedly been the outsider recruited to shake things up or build something new, plotting the way forward always starts with stepping into the unknown, while relying on those who are already there to help me navigate. Unlike some male leaders I've witnessed, I've never thought that the only way forward is to obliterate the existing landscape. At Hallmark, when I realized I lacked information about audience tastes in the various countries, I worked with the head of research to commission studies to get it. At Twitter, when I was building the Canadian business from scratch, I tapped into the knowledge and insights of the new team, just as they tapped into mine. Asking people for input can set in motion a healthy chain of events in the workplace by countering those negative feelings that many employees have around feeling irrelevant. When you ask people to share their opinions or insights, you reinforce the message that you value what they know. If you act on what you hear from them, it signals that what they contribute counts. To see formerly alienated teams come alive after they finally see that their work matters is a thrilling thing.

Of course people can sometimes be reluctant to contribute, worried that they will wear the blame if an idea or strategy backfires. And I understand that apprehension. I've been there. When I was at Alliance Atlantis I had a pivotal moment where I felt that I'd been unfairly left holding the bag. We had been looking for ways to increase revenues at the Food Network with programs that would broaden our audience:
it was all about pushing margins. My boss at the time suggested that I take a look at our CRTC description to see if it gave us any flexibility on the kinds of shows we could air. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the independent public authority that regulates broadcasters in Canada, had set out rules for our operation and among them was a very small programming allowance suggesting that we could show movies so long as they were food related. So we went ahead and added movies to our Sunday night time slot, features such as
Chocolat
and
Eat Drink Man Woman
. But not for long. The CRTC came down on us with a strict warning: we had misinterpreted the clause and would face consequences if we didn't stop. Suddenly my boss and the head of communications developed short-term memory loss, forgetting this was a decision we made together, and in a meeting called me out for
my
mistake. I was livid. I was embarrassed. I felt abandoned and I vowed to never leave anyone hanging in the way they had left me. As a leader, in times of crisis, failure or mistake, the buck stops with you. Every leader along the chain should feel that kind of responsibility so that the entire team is supported from all angles. We are in this together and to shirk responsibility or, worse, assign blame only serves to teach a team not to reach so far next time because there is no net to catch you if you slip. At one time or another, we all do slip.

Of course, no one
likes
to take responsibility for bad decisions or bad news. But being brave enough to communicate fearlessly in good times and bad is essential if you hope to foster a healthy environment where everyone does the same. There were too many times in my TV career where people
haven't been brave enough to own up to the fact that they were part of a decision-making process that resulted in a hard-to-swallow or unpopular call. Programming decisions were made in an open discussion where all executives weighed in before we reached a consensus and a call was finalized. Yet when one of those executives had to deliver bad news and let the cast or producers know that a show was to be rescheduled or dropped, too many times they would fold and dodge: “Yeah, sorry, I loved it but ‘the boss' says no.” Or a producer would want to make a creative cast or crew change, and ask for our backing, then tell the person who was being fired, “Sorry, network says we have to.”

Not owning your decisions creates an environment of distress at all levels. The people hearing the bad news lose faith in the executive, who now appears to have no clout or influence. Worse, they lose faith in an organization that looks like it's being run arbitrarily from the top. And eventually, the boss finds out, as I invariably did, that the executive shirked responsibility for a decision they were a pivotal part of, and the boss loses trust in the executive, who then really does lose trust and influence. Leaders undermine their own ability to lead when they want to play the nice guy and pass the blame on.

That sour experience at Alliance Atlantis taught me an important lesson about the value of integrity in leadership, one that I feel is critical in creating the kind of open culture needed to succeed today. When so much depends on innovation, on out-of-the-box ideas, every team member has to feel comfortable and confident pitching theirs. They have to feel the leader has their back and they won't be punished for things that don't always work out the way you hoped. Even in
failure, there's something to be learned and that lesson can inform the next move you make. A leader has to make sure their team understands that's how your shop rolls. And creating that culture of trust and solidarity can begin with the smallest of gestures, which is also something I learned from a boss. On my first trip abroad for Paragon with Isme Bennie, I ordered breakfast to my room, and a yogurt and orange juice arrived along with a bill for $35. I nearly choked. I thought, “I am going to get fired the first day of my first business trip.” But when I told her what happened, apologized and offered to pay the bill, she just looked at me and said, “No, you won't pay. You're here on business. You have to eat. That's what things cost here. It's the cost of doing business.”

I went on to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue on that trip. Good ROI. But that's not what stuck with me. It was what Isme had said. It may sound like an insignificant exchange, but to me it set a standard of decency and mutual respect I'd like to think I've carried with me ever since. Those small gestures are essential to building strong workplace relationships: sending flowers when someone's had a baby, remembering to write a note of congratulations, hosting a team party for a job well done. I've done all of these, many times, and been happy to pay for it out of my own pocket (a necessity in an environment where cuts force out the niceties). Trust and respect are not things you can demand, they have to be earned. If you treat others as you'd like to be treated, with honesty and decency, it tends to come around, especially when it matters most.

Under the old hierarchies, when being a boss was all about consolidating power, there was scant appreciation for
developing workplace relationships in this way. But today, when it's not about power but about building connections with employees and the customers you serve, it's the smart way to operate. According to research from Exeter and the Netherlands' University of Groningen, men view influence as an attribute that wins over employees and gains their acceptance, while women view employee acceptance as a factor that leads to influence. In these new ways of working and leading, women have an edge.

It's a Woman's World

RECENTLY, THE NEWS WEBSITE
Mashable featured a colourful graph illustrating the way social media is changing how companies have to do business. Taken from data from Soren Gordhamer, author of
Wisdom 2.0,
it highlights how companies have to shift from selling to connecting, from running large campaigns to small acts, from controlling the message to transparency, and from being hard to reach to being available virtually everywhere. What's striking to me is that women usually excel at all the non-traditional ways that a company now has to position itself in the market. Women have already demonstrated, in dramatic fashion, that they are remarkably comfortable communicating and wielding influence in the digital sphere: they dominate the web. Several studies and surveys, from the Pew Research Centre, Nielsen and Burst Media, have found that women are the heaviest users of social media sites—and not just teenage girls, but women ages forty through sixty. They're more likely than men to have a blog or a well-developed digital
persona, to share photos and videos, to shop online, to consume news, comment and interact with brands.

I also think that where some women might lack the time to reach out to strangers through old-school, face-to-face networking channels, or feel uncomfortable doing so, they have found in the web a new and liberating way to connect. I'm someone who is generally shy and often runs on a tight schedule; the digital sphere allows even a time-taxed introvert like me to be an extrovert, to engage and network. A
Fast Company
article from February 2015 suggests that introverts are, in fact, the best networkers on Twitter. It featured a marketing manager from Georgia who described herself as “extremely shy” and said that because of social media she had been able to advance professionally much faster and further than if she had been limited to face-to-face events. Even my mother, whose stroke cost her the ability to speak and move, is active online. With nothing more than the slight mobility of a single finger on her right hand, she taps out messages, tweets and loves to post pictures on Throwback Thursdays.

The point is that women can thrive in the information age, as users of the technology and as entrepreneurs. They've been starting an average of more than five hundred companies a day in the last seven years, launching businesses at twice the rate of men, according to a 2014 report from American Express OPEN. Based on data from the US Census Bureau, the report also finds that between 1997 and 2014, the number of women-owned firms grew at one-and-a-half times the national average in the US. If that's not a testament to women's ability to go boldly into this information age, to take risks and lead in volatile times, I don't know what is. Some of this growth can
be explained by an increase in self-employed women benefiting from the flexibility tech provides to better juggle work and family, as in the rise of the “mompreneurs.” But that's only part of the story. With the exception of large, publicly traded corporations, the report found that not only revenue, but employment growth among women-owned firms, topped that of all other firms. (Remarkable, too, is the double-digit growth in the number of companies launched by women of colour, who now own one in three of all firms started by women in the US.) In all, the report estimates that as of 2014 there were nearly 9.1 million enterprises owned by women, employing 7.9 million workers and generating $1.4 trillion in revenues.

At the same time that women are branching out on their own in ever-growing numbers, they are also well placed to play a leading role in the economic sectors that will matter most in the coming years. The US Census Bureau estimates that women make up more than two-thirds of employees in ten of the fifteen job categories expected to grow most quickly over the next decade. These categories include health, social and educational services, but also technical occupations in accounting, science and law. Meanwhile, women are well placed to rise through the ranks in their chosen fields as they continue to acquire the lion's share of post-secondary education. According to Statistics Canada's 2011 National Household Survey, 55 percent of adults between the ages of 25 to 34 with a college diploma were women. Women also represented 59 percent of young adults with a university degree, 58 percent with a master's degree, and 62 percent of adults with a medical degree. The only university-degree level at which young women are not the majority of holders are doctorates, but
even there women are close to half, obtaining more than 47 percent of PhDs.