to become powerful, authoritative, and assertive, and suppress their emotions and talk like a boss. It worked for me!
I stuck to this crusade for several years until one fateful incident at a workshop I was giving for women at the pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham. When I look back now, I can see how that workshop turned my whole world‐view upside down and led me to do the work I do today.
The workshop had started the usual way, with me preaching on about how women had to take control of their lives. When I got to the part about how to gain respect from your boss, one woman in the group stopped me.
“Why are you saying that it's women who have to change?” she asked. “What about men?”
In my mind, different meant less. There was a hierarchy, and women were lower on the ladder. I told the woman, “If you're here, it's because you're missing something.”
She didn't buy it. “We're not here because we think something's wrong with us. The problem is in the work environment. It is devaluing. That's all.”
I stuck to my line. “If you feel devalued, maybe there's something wrong with the way you put yourself across.”
But the woman didn't buy that either, and neither did any of her colleagues at the workshop. Exasperated, I ended the workshop and sent them home. I also went home – to think. And that's when I began to see that I had been getting it all wrong, all along. I understood that there was no point trying to make women act like men. Women were different from men!
At the time, I was also giving workshops to men on how to relate to women. The men actually acted very differently in workshops than women did. The men didn't nod while I was speaking, like the women. They didn't collaborate or brainstorm the same way as women. They didn't draw up lists the same way or discuss things the same way either. When I thought about my work at Sony, I realized that men and women worked differently there, too. I had always chalked these differences up to personality differences, but I started wondering if there wasn't more to it.
Well, there was! I decided to see what scientists and researchers were saying about gender differences and they had a lot to say! By the mid‐1980s, the facts were there. Men and women really were different. They think differently. They process information differently. They communicate differently.
What a huge mistake it has been, and continues to be, to try to turn women into men! Ever since that fateful workshop at the pharmaceutical company, my life has been dedicated to showing men and women how they are different, and helping them overcome the challenges caused by their differences. And we can see change happening today.
“That's a great story, Barbara. You found a way to succeed at Sony by accepting the environment and changing your nature to fit in. You just assumed, as many women and men do today, that the business environment is what it is and that you either learn to swim or drown. Men across the globe are now realizing that it's the environment that needs to change, not the women in it.”
“You have your own story, Richard. You saw through that blind spot years ago, around the time when we first met at CIBC Wood Gundy.”
“That's right, Barbara. Over the run of my career, I've learned that including women and men in my management teams led to superior results compared to men alone (or women alone, although that rarely happened). I didn't come to this conclusion until I had substantial experience in management.”
The truth is, I didn't care much about the issue of advancing women in management and leadership for the first half of my working life. What I really cared about was my own advancement. But as I took on larger, more complex tasks, I had to seek greater diversity in the creation of the teams. Inevitably I became convinced that diversity led to better results than if I had limited myself to the narrower universe of men. I didn't really know why this happened, but just accepted it as fact.
I became an advocate for this approach in the firms that I joined. My views often met with mixed reactions, but I didn't care. It worked for me, and I intended to keep doing it. As I became more senior, I was able to effect systemic change in the firms I served. We would hire more women graduates at the introductory level, we would have programs to hang on to these women through the critical first seven to ten years of their career, and we would move women into more senior levels to be visible role models not only to other women but also to men.
In order to build support for this approach I had to get the men I worked with on my side. Remember: today, it is men who lead most companies – which is why this book speaks to men about how it is in their interest to change their preconceptions and behavior.
The first task is to drop as much gender bias as possible from what I call the “plumbing” of the company, a concept Barbara and I will explore more closely in a later chapter.
This meant recruitment committees had to be balanced. Promotion committees had to be balanced, not just in terms of numbers but also in terms of power. Getting the plumbing right meant changing our hiring practices and setting targets that would help us achieve our goals. It also meant changing benefit policies to accept that good maternity leave policies see more women returning from maternity leave. It meant ensuring that we were considering women as well as men in everything we did, from interviews to succession planning and board appointments.
My employer's maternity leave policies were probably the last thing on my mind in my first five years as an employee without management responsibilities. As a male employee, what possible interest could I have in these policies? Surely people wiser and more experienced than I had adopted policies at some time in the past that were fair and reasonable to both the employee and the firm.
Once I moved into management, I remember a friend outside the equity division telling me that some people were unhappy with my leadership. I couldn't understand why, given that our financial results had dramatically improved under my leadership. What more could I do for the company and for the employees? My friend told me some employees felt that I was insensitive to their needs and were, at the least, calling my leadership into question. It seemed to center around the maternity issue.
About the same time, Richard Venn, president of Wood Gundy, asked me to come see him. I assumed that I was going to be commended for the equities division's financial performance. To my surprise, it was to discuss my role with regard to the division's maternity policies.
Richard Venn listened to me as I explained that I assumed that the company had good policies and the whole matter was someone else's responsibility. Richard said that was not good enough, that I was their leader, and they expected me to act for them. He clearly wanted me to do something and that was fine by me. I knew I would have his support.
After reflecting on it that evening I decided to go to the source and sit down with some of the employees who were being affected and find out what was bothering them. It didn't take long for these discussions to get right to the point. The point was that our maternity policies were unfair and uncompetitive and what was I going to do about it? They saw me as their boss and their only hope to effect change.
My next step was to find out why our policies were unfair and uncompetitive. Of course this was not the prevailing view of the HR department, and so, with that department's help, I began an analysis of maternity policies at other leading firms. It became clear to me that we were on the lower end of the quality spectrum.
This was not good enough. Given that we were a leading firm, this didn't seem to fit with our position in the industry. I decided that we should have the best maternity policies in the industry, commensurate with our position as a market leader. I would institute these new maternity policies for the women who worked for me in capital markets. Then the rest of the firm would follow, and they did!
