WHARTON LEADERSHIP DIGEST 

June, 2003, Volume 7, Number 9

CONTENTS   

Leaders in a Global Economy:  A Study of Executive Women and Men

Leadership Book:  A Purpose in Your Pursuits
Leadership and Governance:  Building Both in Denmark's Public Sector 
Quote of the Month:  Everything is Possible with the Right Leadership


LEADERS IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY: A Study of Executive Women and Men

By Ellen Galinsky, President and Co-Founder, Families and Work Institute, in collaboration with Catalyst and Boston College Center for Work and Family 

The Leaders in a Global Economy project grew out of the concerns of a group of companies that had identified the growing need for attracting, developing and retaining women as a key competitive business strategy. They had been working on doing so for a number of years, but felt there were still many challenges -- both subtle and overt -- to overcome.  

This project, developed by Families and Work Institute, Catalyst, and Boston College Center for Work & Family, is the largest cross-company study of global executives and the relationship between gender and career advancement ever conducted.  In all, 1,192 executives participated in the survey from ten cooperating companies:  Baxter International; Citigroup; J.P. Morgan Chase; Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu; Dow Chemical; Eli Lilly; Goldman, Sachs; IBM; Marriott; and Procter & Gamble.  

The study examined nine widespread assumptions about women executives, and it found support for some but not for others:  

Common Wisdom One:  The higher women climb, the more they have to give up in their personal and family lives.  

Finding:  Women executives are more likely than men executives to have made important life decisions in order to manage both their careers and their personal lives: 

o 18 percent of women versus 9 percent of men have delayed marriage or a commitment to a partner and 3 percent of women versus 1 percent of men have decided not to marry. 

o  Executive men and women have lives at home that are very different from one another:  74 percent of women surveyed have a spouse/partner who is employed full-time while 75 percent of men surveyed have a spouse/partner who is not employed. 

However, we find that women executives in higher status jobs have not given up more in their personal and family lives to manage their careers than women executives in lower status  jobs, even when we control for the differences in their ages.  In fact, women at reporting levels closer to the CEO are more likely to have children and less likely to have decided not to have children than other women executives. 

Common Wisdom Two:  Executives have to be work-centric in order to feel successful and to succeed in their careers. 

Finding:  Most executives are, in fact, work-centric:  61 percent have placed a higher or much higher priority on their work than on their personal or family lives over the past year.  However, 32 percent -- men and women alike -- have placed the same priority on work and on their personal or family lives.  We call these executives "dual-centric."  

o  Executives who are dual-centric feel more successful at work, are less stressed, and have an easier time managing the demands of their work and personal/family lives.  Women who are dual-centric have advanced to higher reporting levels and also feel more successful in their home lives.  

Common Wisdom Three:  Men are more ambitious than women.  

Finding:  While it is true that men on average have higher aspirations than women (19% of men executives aspire to be a CEO or Managing Partner compared with 9% of women), a significant group of women hope to join their senior management committee (43%).  By comparison, 54% of senior men have this aspiration.  

Importantly, however, one in four executives has reduced her or his aspirations -- women more so than men (34% of women versus 21% of men).   The most frequently selected reason is the same for both women and men:  according to the 67 percent who have reduced their aspirations, a very important reason is "the sacrifices I would have to make in my personal or family life."   

Common Wisdom Four:  Companies need to use different strategies to help women and men succeed.  

Finding:  Most executives -- both men and women -- see business-focused strategies as the most helpful organizational strategies in their advancing: 

o  83 percent note the opportunities for leadership positions and 80 percent note challenging assignments as strategies that have been very helpful in their success.  

Common Wisdom Five:  Men and women use different personal strategies to succeed.  

Finding:  Executive women and men describe the personal strategies that have helped them succeed as much more alike than different.  These include both so-called "masculine" strategies, such as "taking risks and challenges" and "standing up for what I think," as well as so-called "feminine" strategies, such as "being collaborative." 

Common Wisdom Six:  Men and women face different organizational barriers to advancement. 

Finding:  Women report facing many more obstacles than men -- specifically being excluded from important networks, having a limited number of role models, having limited opportunities for experiences in line or in general management positions, facing gender stereotypes, and being in dual-career families. 

Common Wisdom Seven:  It is higher-level executives -- male and female alike -- who stand in the way or help those below them succeed.  

Finding:  When asked about the person who has helped them the most, 87 percent of all executives refer to a man.  Among men, 95 percent were helped most by a man, and among women, 19 percent were helped the most by a woman.  Women who have had a woman as the most helpful person are more likely than other women to have reached reporting levels 1 or 2. 

Common Wisdom Eight:  Women executives are more likely to leave their jobs than men and for different reasons.  

Finding:  By the time they have reached these top levels, an equal number of men and women executives -- 44 percent -- plan to leave their jobs in five years or less -- a large turnover in executive talent.  Almost three in ten -- 29% -- plan to leave in five years or less but not retire, women more so than men, perhaps because women executives are younger on average than men.   

While there are clearly some differences between men and women in the obstacles that have limited their careers, when men and women encounter these obstacles, their desire to stay with their company is affected in the same way.  Both men and women need to feel recognized for their performance and perceive the performance evaluation system as fair, to feel included in important networks, to see opportunities for growth and advancement, and to have sponsors and role models.  

Common Wisdom Nine:  Retention strategies should focus on the "hard" issues of promotion and compensation, not the "softer" issues. 

Finding:  In order to retain talent in the executive ranks, employers need to attend not only to matters of promotion and compensation, but also to the so-called softer issues (which these analyses reveal are not soft at all) such as respect, acceptance of individual differences, support in the workplace, job quality, and flexibility. 

Note:  Ellen Galinsky can be reached at egalinsky@familiesandwork.org, and Catalyst at www.catalystwomen.org and the Boston College Center for Work and Family at www.bc.edu/cwf.  For further findings from this study, including regional findings, action steps, and recommendations for employers, go to www.familiesandwork.org.


Leadership Book:  A Purpose in Your Pursuits 

By Kate Faber, Coordinator, Wharton Leadership Center  

Recent world events have prompted many people to re-examine how they spend their time.  From the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the accounting scandals that have felled companies, employees are looking for more than a paycheck from their employers these days.  Faith-based avenues may be one solution according to Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life. 

Warren is the pastor of Saddleback Church, a 16,000-active-member church in southern California affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.  He has developed a 40-day self-development program based on the premise that people exist for a higher purpose and should actively bring it into their daily lives and work place.  He asks "What will you live for?" and suggests that the answer for many requires a change in "your priorities, your schedule, your relationships, and everything else." 

For each day of the 40-day program, The Purpose Driven Life offers a point to ponder, a verse to remember, and a question to consider in one's routine activities.  For the 16th day, for instance, the issue is "what matters most," and he suggests that the "importance of things can be measured by how much time we are willing to invest in them.  The more time you give to something, the more you reveal its importance and value to you.  If you want to know a person's priorities, just look at how they use their time." 

The Purpose Driven Life provide a pragmatic guide for focusing and articulating one life's daily priorities based on a transcendent moral code, an approach that some will find useful in an era of uncertainty and distress. 

Note:  Kate Faber can be reached at kfaber@wharton.upenn.edu.  The book:  Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Zondervan, 2002).


Leadership and Governance:  Building Both in Denmark's Public Sector 

By the Executive Committee of Denmark's Forum for Executive Public Management (Forum for Offentlig Topledelse):  Karsten Dybvad, Permanent Secretary of the Danish Ministry of Finance; Peter Gorm, Managing Director of Local Government Denmark; Otto Larsen, Managing Director of Danish Regions; Jorgen Rosted, Development Director of National Agency for Enterprise and Housing; Henrik Hassenkam, Commissioner of the Danish Ministry of Finance.  

The Project's Focus and Limits 

In recent years, the issue of management has been very definitely placed on the agenda for the public sector.  This has led, amongst other things, to a broad agreement on and recognition of the fact that good management makes a difference, and that good management is the key to quality, efficiency and change.  

The Forum for Executive Public Management (henceforth the Forum) has been established as a 2-year project that aims to focus on that niche of public management that involves the most senior executive's function as the manager of a public sector, politically-led organization.  

Executive public management differs from management at other levels inasmuch as the senior executive's function in a public sector organization is mainly concerned with management of the organization, interplay with the political management regarding the organization objectives, strategies, etc., and the provision of guidance in the political process. The Forum wishes to focus on the management tasks and strategies of the senior executive as an operational and strategic manager within the politically-determined managerial framework. The senior executive's contribution to the political process lies outside the scope of the Forum. This part of the senior executive's work forms a prerequisite for the work of the Forum.  

The target group for the Forum consists of Permanent Secretaries, county and municipal directors, and other executive managers whose managerial conditions are largely determined by the political leadership, and whose management responsibilities possess a corresponding complexity and weight.  In addition, relevant researchers and other debaters will be encouraged to take part in the work.  

Aims 

The ambition of the Forum is to make a practical contribution to placing "good executive management" on the agenda as one significant answer to the challenges faced by the public sector today. This will be achieved by: 

1. describing the common characteristics of the managerial framework for senior executives in the public sector,  

2. providing a framework and basis for a debate on the managerial tasks and strategies of the senior executive, and  

3. creating a common understanding of:

   o  what Public Governance means in Denmark (good executive public management)

   o  the skills that will be required by a senior executive in the future within this definition
   of Public Governance.  

Public Governance in Denmark 

The Forum wishes to generate a debate on and development of the concept of Public Governance, as a basis for further improvements in the competence of executive public management in Denmark.  Public Governance is in this context conceived of as a description of the decision-making system and decision-making skills involved in the day-to-day management of a public sector organization.  Public Governance may be preliminarily defined as: 

"The interplay of the most senior public sector executives with the political leadership and the supply system concerning the goals, results and behavior necessary to ensure that the state organization is, on the one hand, capable of handling the requirements and expectations of the surrounding environment, and, on the other hand, is itself capable of influencing developments."  

Interplay with the political leadership refers in this context to the interplay arising in connection with the political determination of the managerial framework for the senior executive.  

Public Governance is thus distinct both from the concept of public government, which is concerned with representation, the structure of the political system, and its legitimacy and parliamentary basis, and from the concept of public management, which focuses more narrowly on various managerial disciplines.

Why Public Governance? 

The need for a debate on Public Governance and the development of a common understanding of this in a Danish context is justified by the changes that have occurred in the role of the senior executive in a politically-led organization.  In parallel with this have come changes in state organizations and their outward relationships, as well as in the role and function of politicians. These factors form the background for an attempt to describe the scope of the senior executive's actions and skills in a politically-led organization.  

The need to develop Public Governance is thus justified by the assumption that the public sector is characterized by some fundamental conditions associated with democratic values, which provide special game rules for management in the public sector; i.e. Public Governance differs significantly from Corporate Governance.  

Besides this, developments in the public sector have gradually given rise to new values, requirements and considerations which have created a wide range of dilemmas and contrary pressures for senior public sector executives. This underlines the current need to illuminate the necessary skills that the future senior public sector executive must possess, as well as the senior executive's role in the development of public, politically-led organizations as dynamic and flexible decision-making systems.  

The relevant questions are:  What is the significance of the public sector's fundamental conditions for the decision-making and delegation systems and for the senior executive's choice of management strategies?  How can politics be integrated into the supply system?  What is the role of interplay with the political leadership in the senior executive's professional organization management? And what are the managerial strategies and skills that will ensure the necessary results and effects? 

Procedure 

The Forum will be launched  for the target group of senior public sector executives in state and local authorities at an opening conference to be held at the start of September 2003. The opening conference will create awareness of the project and provide impetus for its subsequent activities and debates.  

The Forum will emphasize an empirical and practical approach to illuminating the managerial framework of senior executives.  The ambition to create a common understanding of Public Governance in Denmark, as well of the skills that a senior executive in the public sector will require within this understanding, will be debated under three thematic headings:  

1)      The interplay between the political leadership and the professional senior executive regarding goals and strategies.

2)      When professionalism, politics and management must go hand in hand.

3)      Senior management and communication in the knowledge society.  

While the first two themes will be particularly associated with the discussion and development of Public Governance, theme three will deal more with the requirements towards the senior executive's own competence profile, and with management in the knowledge and information society of the future.  Themes one and two will be oriented towards the senior executive's management of the supply system, whereas theme three will deal with the senior executive's role in relation to the environment of the public sector organization.  

These three themes raise common and relevant issues for senior public sector management across the boundaries of state and local authorities.  The ways in which these issues manifest themselves within the respective levels and areas, however, is very different.  The illumination of these three themes will, to the extent necessary, take account of the different conditions prevailing in state and local authorities.  

The work of the Forum will encompass various analyses and debates, involving representatives of the target group of senior public sector executives as well as researchers.  

The project's concluding report will be based on the activities of the Forum and its conclusions.  

As the end product of the project, the Forum will aim to develop a concept for Public Governance in Denmark, as well as other products that can be of assistance in creating a common understanding of the skills that are required of a senior executive in the public sector in order to match this framework for Public Governance.  

Note:  Information on the Forum for Executive Public Management can be found at www.publicgovernance.dk, and contact can be made at info@publicgovernance.dk. 
 

Quote of the Month:  Everything is Possible with the Right Leadership  

Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina "is a better CEO now [2003] than when she arrived [1999].  She is wary of overpromising, is far more operationally minded, and has proven to be more adept at cost cutting than many predicted.  She's survived a trail by fire and shown no signs of cracking…   In November, 2002, Fiorina introduced a new ad campaign entitled 'Everything is Possible' at the Comdex trade show.  She explained the campaign in a speech at the conference.  'It is an affirmation of our belief that progress is not made by the cynics and the doubters.  It is made by those who believe everything is possible.'" 

"Everything isn't probable, however, and much will depend on Fiorina herself." 

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University of Pennsylvania