Senior Women
Barbara Heilemann and Jan Elsner have developed rigorously grounded approaches to coaching women that have proven immensely successful.
Positive Leadership have built upon Barbara’s groundbreaking Masters research, identifying unconscious bias as the main barrier to women attaining and being retained at senior levels, and provide a pedagogy to explain why current and past initiatives to promote and keep women in executive roles and on boards have not worked. They have built a reputation for success in applying the empirically rigorous Positive Leadership model they developed in a strategic way to the dual challenges of building a critical mass of Senior Women in organisations and achieving representation of women on boards in Australia. The Positive Leadership solution is not steeped in ‘creating awareness’, laying blame or changing the individual, the protagonists or the organisation, and has no foundation in gender initiatives. The solution is to build what is causal to success and satisfaction whilst accepting the causes of adversity. The Positive Leadership Strategy is fundamentally different. It is about accepting and working with and around the known barriers to build a critical mass of women and broader difference at senior levels in the knowledge that at a change to critical mass levels will truly be possible.
THE ISSUE: LACK OF REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN AT SENIOR LEVELS
Much has actually been achieved by organisations in relation to the advancement of women in the last 30 years and particularly in the last decade. Graduates are recruited at often 50:50 ratios for men and women, and women are well represented up to middle management levels. However the interventions have not dealt with the ongoing barriers to women at senior levels. The representation of women at senior and board levels is not representative of the talent, education and potential of women.
Barbara Heilemann’s research has provided a model to understand ‘why’. Jan and Barbara use the premise of Positive Psychology to show that understanding ‘why’ does not provide a solution model that will deliver the outcome we are seeking.
Our approach is not about changing the organisation to make it better for women, or changing the women to make them better for the organisation at senior levels. Past strategies have been focused on fixing organisations by clearing barriers so women will then rise to the top or on fixing the women. Recently we have seen a proliferation of interventions to fix the men, and the women who look like them.
The Positive Leadership Strategy is fundamentally different. It is about accepting and working with and around the known barriers to build a critical mass of women and broader difference at senior levels in the knowledge that at a critical mass level change will truly be possible.
Together Jan and Barbara have worked since 2003 to build a scientifically driven case and a practical, accessible approach to building the learnable Psychological Capacities that enable high potential women to build flourishing careers. Their approach uses strengths as the foundation tool, appreciative processes as the foundation approach, and builds the psychological capital required for both success and satisfaction. The model presented synthesises a variety of Positive Psychology and Positive Organizational Scholarship theories, models and tools into a rigorously based, logical ‘How to’ methodology.
THE STRATEGY: BUILD CRITICAL MASS
Unconscious bias is the elephant in the room with regard to the lack of women in Senior and Leadership roles. We believe, based on research, that when we get critical mass (estimated to be somewhere between 25-30%) of women in senior roles that the change we are seeking, of acceptance and appreciation of difference, will occur. Decisions affecting women’s promotion and retention will change. And women will see diversity in role models, motivating them to think ‘if she can do it, so can I’ rather than ‘there isn’t anyone who looks like me so I don’t think I can do it’. Therefore, our strategy is to work to get a critical mass sooner than the 450 years the UN predicts if we continue with our current pace. (Eastman, 1997)
THE APPROACH
RAISE ACCEPTANCE VS AWARENESS
Unconscious bias is the hard to pinpoint causal culprit of the lack of women in senior roles. Raising awareness can lead to finger pointing and blame laying and we believe it is important to avoid this at all costs. We raise awareness specifically to build acceptance that we all have unconscious bias. It is based in long held personal values and beliefs and we use it as a filter to help us deal with complex information and to make decisions and judgements. It may or may not be evident in peoples’ politically correct or incorrect behaviour.
AVOID SOLUTION FOCUS: fixing what we don’t want
We can’t ‘fix’ bias. Traditional solution focused models may take us the next 450 years. Trying to remove bias is an impossibility as it will be replaced by other natural biases. Biases will change and moderate because of experiences over time. Solution focused models have worked extremely well to tackle the behavioural marginalisation of women, organisational barriers and tokenism where quotas are used. But there is no evidence goal based theories will work at the belief level.
BUILD CAPACITY
Instead of trying to shift what is deep-rooted and hard-wired, we focus on building measurable and buildable cognitive and emotional capacities that current science tells us is causal to optimal functioning, in men and women, in the face of adversity. This is about building resistance to difficulty rather than bounce-back resilience. It involves working with strengths rather than just development needs and especially building intrinsic motivation and satisfaction which is particularly important for women who tend to be more intrinsically motivated than men.
APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY APPROACH: Build what we do want.
Appreciative Inquiry is a whole organisational participative process (all levels, both genders) that discovers where things are really working well and develops strategies based on the aspiration of having more of what is already working and imagining what is possible if that benefit is maximised. It enables sharing and dissemination of real positive stories for the purpose of inspiration, adaptation and replication. It is not imagining the absence of a problem. It is imagining more of what is great as the foundation of transformational change.