Catalyst Blog

Last month, my colleagues Jan Combopiano, Vice President & Chief Knowledge Officer, and Michael J. Chamberlain, Senior Director, Brand Management & Events, hosted a webinar on our latest research on the importance of sponsorship. The event was a tremendous success, with more than 1,500 people from around the world logging in and participating in the conversation. In fact, Jan and Michael received more than 150 questions from participants—far too many to address within the one-hour session!

With this in mind, I’ve invited them to answer one of the most frequently asked questions related to this research: How can I secure sponsorship if I do not have direct access to influential people in my organization? Jan and Michael, take it away!

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An influential sponsor can make all the difference in your career, but how do you secure one? Even if you do not have direct access to influential people in your organization, you can still land a sponsor who will advocate for you from behind closed doors.

Here’s how.

First, be good at what you do. In fact, be awesome! Sponsorship is not about entitlement—you need to earn it. You need to be a top performer to inspire others to take you under their wings.

Once you are on top of your game, you need to get noticed. You might not work on the same floor—or even in the same time zone—as your company’s most influential leaders. But that’s OK. Impress the people around you—every colleague you have exposure too might have the connections you need. You might not have the top boss’ ear, but others might, and they can speak highly about you to the people that matter.

For added visibility, try to volunteer inside your organization. Or organize networking events outside the office. Attend conferences where you think influential coworkers might be and speak with them there. And, have an elevator speech prepared—make sure colleagues get to know who you are and what you want to do. Do you know anyone who works on the company newsletter? If so, volunteer to write an article, or try to get featured.

There is no silver bullet to finding a powerful sponsor—everyone’s path is different. The important thing is to do a great job, take risks, and be creative. Leaders are always on the lookout for the next crop of talent. Get their attention. Help them notice you.

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Jan Combopiano, Vice President & Chief Knowledge Officer, Catalyst, leads knowledge management efforts at Catalyst, leveraging resources and expertise to serve stakeholders, preserve the organization’s history, and maintain the knowledge infrastructure. As head of the Information Center, Ms. Combopiano oversees library functions, including research requests from Catalyst staff, member organizations, the media, and outside researchers. In her operations role for the Research Department, she shepherds Catalyst work from concept to historical preservation, including the content for the annual Catalyst Awards Conference.

Michael Chamberlain, Senior Director, Brand Management & Events, is responsible for the care and keeping of the Catalyst brand, with major responsibilities including assessing external perceptions of the brand by target audiences and creating consistent positioning across, and external to, Catalyst. Mr. Chamberlain also plans and oversees all events related to Catalyst Research launches, CEO Summits, member and non-member convening opportunities, and the annual Catalyst Awards  Conference and Dinner.

What is India Inc.? For me, it’s not just India’s booming business sector. It’s also a phrase suggesting tremendous opportunity for Indian women and business.

India is undergoing explosive GDP growth—and a skilled labor shortage to match. Yet amid this tremendous thirst for talent, deep gender gaps persist. Women represent only 36% of the labor force—less than half that of men—and only 3% to 6% of senior management.

To mark the launch of our new report, Leadership Gap in India Inc., I’ve asked our Senior Advisor in India, Deepali Bagati, to write about what’s at stake in this emerging market. Women, she says, are core to India Inc.’s sustainable growth.

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Deepali Bagati writes:

India Inc.—the land of opportunities, relationships and contradictions—is a place where organizations find themselves thriving on growth and innovation, but also challenged by the talent crunch: finding and keeping top talent. Organizations are hiring aggressively, and employees are jumping ship even more aggressively especially at the skilled/managerial level. Culturally, the importance of relationships cannot be emphasized enough, and “who you know” continues to be critical in getting close to the ladder, let alone moving up the ladder.

Although women continue to be bogged down with familial and societal stereotypes about their roles and abilities, the burgeoning middle class, intense consumerism and a thirst for upward mobility in urban India is opening doors for women. In rural India, a million plus women are functioning as grassroots leaders in the Panchayati Raj Institutions, and rural India has already been anointed as the unexplored and untapped market with unprecedented opportunities.  

The India story is no longer about whether this is a growth play, but more about maximizing and accelerating this growth by leveraging female talent. A unique window of opportunity beckons the key stakeholders and decision-makers—the majority of who are still male—to set in motion processes and programs that bring more women into the workforce and create an agile and inclusive workplace.   (more…)

 Guest blog by Anne Summers, writer, journalist and author in Sydney

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Australia’s reputation for being a “blokey,” male-dominated, female-unfriendly country is being mugged by the reality that women now occupy a significant number of the nation’s highest positions.

The Prime Minister, the Governor-General (Australia’s head of state), the deputy leader of the Opposition, 20% of the federal cabinet, 35% of the Senate, 27% of the House of Representatives and three of the seven members of the highest court are women.

In New South Wales, the most populous state, a female triumvirate reigns supreme: the state’s governor, the premier, and the mayor of its capital city, Sydney, are all women—as are 28% of its parliamentarians. Oh, and the deputy Premier is female.  A woman also heads Queensland—a state that in the past was often referred to as the “Deep North” for its aggressively masculine and, often, racist culture.

When the politically powerful get together, the photographs sometimes suggest that men are now the minority when it comes to running the country.

Yet even Australians are surprised when presented with these facts.  It’s as if we had not noticed these incremental improvements until just seven weeks ago when Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female Prime Minister.  It took all the publicity that accompanied Gillard taking over the highest job in the land to reveal the welcome news that with so many other women in important positions, maybe Australia was not such a chauvinist backwater after all.

Suddenly, as we looked around, and counted up the women, we could hold our heads high.  Even if the picture is not so rosy when it comes to business, when it comes to political leadership Australian women are finally at the podium, the table, the bench, everywhere it counts.

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Anne Summers is a Sydney-based writer, journalist and author, whose latest books are The Lost Mother and On Luck. She writes opinion columns for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Age. Anne helped organize and facilitate the annual Serious Women’s Business conference, Australia’s pre-eminent conference for women aspiring to leadership, from 2001-2009. Her book The End of Equality was published in 2003 and her autobiography Ducks on the Pond came out in 1999.

Guest blog by Morten Huse, Professor of Organization and Management, BI Norwegian School of Management and President of the European Academy of Management

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In Norway, 40% of the board members of publicly traded companies are women. That’s because they must be—by law.

Norway’s approach is considered progressive. Indeed, many call the country’s initiative the boldest move anywhere to address an issue that one author has flagged as “one of the most durable barriers to gender equality.” Not surprisingly, other countries are thinking about following in Norway’s footsteps. However, business leaders, politicians and women in these countries are first asking whether or not the legislative solution has in fact made a difference in Norway.

Several studies, including one that I recently undertook with co-author Sabina Nielsen, have been conducted to explore the following factors:

- The societal impact of power balance, democracy and culture

- The business impact relating to diversity, competence and critical mass

- The individual impact focusing on the glass ceiling, careers and tokenism

Simple answers about the law’s effectiveness are not yet possible.  Before drawing conclusions, we need to understand and define aspects of value creation, including the tasks boards are to perform, plus the identities and behaviors of women board members compared with those of men board members. We also need to understand the effect of board processes, working styles and leadership.

In our study—based on responses to a questionnaire from 392 board members in 120 firms—my co-author and I did not find differences between women’s and men’s responses. We found that women directors may impact board involvement in strategic decision-making, but that the degree of impact depended upon the diverse values and professional experiences the women brought to board service as well as the perception of equality among the women and men board directors. Furthermore, we found that the degree of impact depended upon how the women used their knowledge and skills in the boardroom. Knowledge and diversity matter only if they are used, and many boards do not have processes or a leadership style that encourage the use of knowledge and skills.

That said, our study did show that the Norwegian law mandating a quota for women on boards has had a significant effect on how boards achieve their objectives. Members and their leaders have started to pay attention, not only to board composition, but also to the inner workings of boards. Moreover, we found that tokenism did not seem to be important for newly elected women who feel they are as influential as their male counterparts and considered as equals.

Finally, our research revealed the importance of critical mass on decision-making. As we noted in our study, “If women with similar (traditional) professional experiences but different values are selected, they may be able to enrich board decision-making.” The impact was considerably greater on boards with at least three women.

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Morten Huse is Professor of Organization and Management at BI Norwegian School of Management and President of the European Academy of Management. He has written, edited or co-authored more than one hundred scientific articles and 15 books, including Boards, Governance and Value Creation: The Human Side of Corporate Governance (Cambridge 2007) and The Value Creating Board (Routledge 2009).

Guest blogger: Laura Liswood, Secretary General, Council of Women World Leaders, and Senior Advisor, Goldman Sachs

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I love nature and its diversity. It provides many wondrous experiences—a plethora of flowers and animals, diverse landscapes, and a fabulous array of human beings.

And yet nature is tricky, too. I’m particularly focused on two parts of nature.

One part is that nature promises to happen “naturally.” And some things do. The sun rises and sets naturally, salmon swim upstream to spawn naturally, birds migrate naturally. 

For women, we have often been told that our progress will occur naturally. That is, fill the pipeline, get into the organizations, educate and provide healthy lives for girls and women, and we will prosper and succeed naturally. Turns out some things just aren’t as natural as we thought.

For example, the World Economic Forum has published a gender gap index for five years. It tracks the gaps between resources allocated, and positions in society, for men and women in four areas: health, education, economic empowerment and political participation. The good news is that gaps in healthcare and education are almost closed in many countries of the world. Many of us believed once those gaps closed, the economic and political gaps would close naturally. Nothing could be further from the truth. The gaps in the latter two categories are staggering—only 59% of the gap closed economically (and even worse in some countries) and just 17% of the gap closed politically. It turns out we will need much more affirmative approaches to close these two gaps, and that won’t be easy nor will they close naturally.

Companies are hiring women (and other diverse groups) in higher and higher numbers. But they don’t seem to be making it to the top—women are 50% of the labor force and only 3% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies.  Nature abandoned these groups.

The second bone I have to pick with nature is the sleight of hand it has played on us in regards to diversity. There is no question that diversity of plants, animals, foods, people, or ideas is a good thing. But when organizations commit to that goal of diversity when it comes to people, they often stumble. As Catalyst points out in its extensive research, even in a simple dyad of diversity—women and men—we are baffled and burdened by stereotypes and preferences and assumptions and archetypes.

In my book, The Loudest Duck, I reflect on how the Noah’s Ark approach that many organizations take isn’t working. (“If we could only get two of each in the Ark, we’ll have our diversity.”) The workplace giraffe looks at his colleague, the zebra, and thinks, consciously or unconsciously, that this zebra is one funny looking animal and can’t possibly perform given its stubby neck, silly stripes and propensity to “talk” kind of strangely.

Our unconscious beliefs and perceptions about who others are get in the way of creating a fair and meritocratic workplace for those who are diverse. I once saw a sign that said, “We hire because they are different and fire because they are not the same.” Nature provided us with diversity. If only it had given us the tools to naturally use it.

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Laura Liswood co-founded the Council of Women World Leaders with  Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland. Liswood serves as Secretary General of the Council, which is composed of women presidents, prime ministers and heads of government. In 1997, Liswood co-founded The White House Project, which is dedicated to electing a woman President of the United States. Her work with women presidents and prime ministers was the inspiration for the Project, which seeks to change the cultural message in the United States about women as leaders. In 2001, Liswood was named Managing Director, Global Leadership and Diversity, for Goldman Sachs, a global investment bank, and today is a Senior Advisor to the firm.