Our Turn (13 page)

After all, if technology has brought us anything, it is the freedom and flexibility to manage ourselves, our tasks and our time. When neither time nor place is an impediment to communicating, it makes
you
the boss of you—able to wear many hats at once, engage in several conversations simultaneously, resolve scheduling conflicts between work and home, and work where and when we can.

From a logistical standpoint this has been a boon, especially for women, making the eternal work–life juggle just that much easier to handle. While this is also true for men who, increasingly, are doing more on the home front, the conflict between family and work has traditionally been the most stubborn barrier that holds women back professionally. I remember when I had to return to work early after my first child was born, getting home on time was crucial. But my job was also vital to me, and to my family, since I was the sole earner. I spent many afternoons with one eye on the person talking too long at the last meeting of the day, and one eye on the door that would lead to the 5:55 p.m. train that would take me home to my baby. I learned how to sprint. Sometimes I made it, but often
I didn't. It never got easier, even as the girls got older. But then BlackBerry saved me. I could join the meeting on the ride home. I could answer questions from the ice rink where my youngest practised. I could step out briefly from the school play that I would have missed if I hadn't been able to be on call.

Phone mobility set me free, as it has many people juggling busy lives at home and work. Now you can be home with a sick child and Skype a meeting, offer feedback from a taxi, review a document while making dinner, or help your daughter with homework while en route from LA to Toronto (@AirCanada Wi-Fi, thank you). I think of my smartphone as a lifeline, connecting me to family in ways never before possible. Messaging has become the tool that keeps us in close touch, especially when I travel. And I travel a lot. Nothing says parental peace of mind quite like a ping from home. My girls send messages to let me know their plans, or that they've made it home safely, or to make “urgent” announcements, as when my youngest iMessaged me to tell me exactly what she wanted for her sweet sixteen party—when she was fourteen.

These days, work is not somewhere you
go
; it's something you
do.
And what we do in the knowledge economy is contribute our knowledge, our thoughts and ideas, or what makes us curious—wherever and whenever that happens. Increasingly, it means that individuals are assessed by their performance, not their presence. After all, younger generations, whose social lives are already deeply embedded in the digital media, will only be more likely to want to live their professional lives the same way. Already, research finds that Gen Y favours telecommuting not only for the work–life
freedom it brings, but for the environmental benefits of being able to skip commutes and reduce vehicle emissions. As it is, the number of people working outside a traditional office is rising dramatically in the global village. Forecasts from the International Data Corporation, a multinational market intelligence firm, suggest the mobile worker population is expected to reach 1.3 billion this year, representing 37.2 percent of the total global workforce. And the Telework Research Network projected in 2013 that the mobile workforce will increase 63 percent over the next five years.

But it's taking time for businesses to recognize employee value isn't measured by hours sitting at a desk. (I think we've all felt that judgement when a manager assumes if you're not chained to the desk, you're not working.) But there's a growing recognition that employers have a lot to gain from allowing workers to work remotely: overhead savings, time otherwise lost in commutes, fewer sick days and higher productivity. Research shows telecommuters tend to work more efficiently, with fewer distractions and greater focus. A 2013 Citrix study showed 18 percent of small businesses in the United States, Canada and Australia are enjoying a 30 percent increase in productivity through the adoption of mobile work styles. And a 2011 WORKshift Canada report concluded employers can save more than $10,000 per year for every employee who telecommutes only two days each week.

But perhaps the most compelling reason to support a mobile workforce is that it makes for happier employees. And happier employees are less likely to leave than those who are office-bound. A 2013 BMO study on telecommuting found that 64 percent of Canadian businesses surveyed
saw a positive impact on morale and the ability to entice and retain high-quality employees. A 2010 Telus poll indicated 67 percent of Canadians surveyed would be more loyal to a company offering remote working flexibility. I'd argue that companies that might never have considered telecommuting, job sharing, flextime or compressed weeks now can't afford not to do so (though of course this doesn't apply to all occupations, such as teaching or jobs in the service industry).

At Twitter, and at a lot of tech companies, there are no limits on vacation time. Employees are free to take off as many weeks per year as they like so long as their work is complete, and they've reached their specific goals or targets. An unlimited vacation policy is one that some find as hard to believe in as the free breakfasts, lunches and drinks available for all Twitter employees. (I almost cried when I first took in the daily spread, fresh from the tight-pursed public-sector culture of the CBC where in the last round of cuts I'd slashed the bottled water.) And Twitter's generous employee benefits are not unique. A growing number of companies offer perks around meals and vacation time to encourage company loyalty and keep teams focused on their goals.

There's a valid concern that technology may enslave as much as liberate us, keep us tied to our jobs day and night. I get that. I've been caught out by my family in certain moments when my phone stole time from them. I remember looking up from it at the rink one afternoon, where my daughter was doing her training for speed skating, and there she stood pointing up at me in the stands, that one little index finger calling me out to pay attention! Ultimately,
using the freedom technology can give us comes down to understanding your limits, knowing when to floor it and when to put on the brakes: again, flow, not balance. In many ways, technological innovation has forced the trend of managing out and spreading “on call” time more evenly across a team. When the BlackBerry made its debut while I was working at Hallmark in the early 2000s, I remember how it changed the culture of expectation. Suddenly there was a sense that everyone was always reachable, particularly in the non-stop news business and with several channels in several countries. I felt a new responsibility not to make people in other time zones wait to hear my decision before they could move ahead. For a while, I lost a whole lot of sleep and a bit of my sanity. But over time, I learned to delegate and deputize people, so that I was no longer the only decision-maker, or the place where a decision might be held up. Tech prompted me to share power and empower. And that's a philosophy I've carried forward to today, in my new role leading multiple team members scattered across multiple time zones. Like it or not, and mostly I like it enormously, I am at the cutting edge of a new way of working in the world.

[ VIII ]

Thriving at the Edge of the Glass Cliff

FOR SIX MONTHS BEFORE
I was officially hired to head up the CBC, I was already doing the job. Richard Stursberg had left abruptly in August 2010, and I pinch-hit while the CBC brass looked for his replacement. Having had a successful four-year run in charge of television programming, I'd heard I was a candidate for the job. But I also heard that the president's outside headhunters were shopping around, worried that I didn't have the “gravitas” to take the helm. To quote US talk show host Katie Couric, who heard a similar comment about her at
CBS Evening News
, “gravitas” is Latin for “testicles.”

I have no idea how many candidates sporting gravitas were interviewed to become executive vice-president before I was appointed, or how many applied. I did hear that men who might have been interested were less so because the job came with an absence of perks and a plethora of big responsibilities with a salary that wasn't, intense scrutiny, low
morale, high expectations, competition growing by the click and budget cuts looming. A dream job, right? Still, despite all the cons, I believed I had something worth giving and this was my shot to give it—and at the CBC, quite possibly the only one I'd have. Whatever stars aligned to finally convince the decision-makers that I had the right stuff to become the first woman to head up Canada's national broadcaster, I may never know. What I do know is that the decision to install a woman in the corner office when a company is struggling is a common one. It's so common that in management and academic circles it's known as “the glass cliff.”

Researchers at England's University of Exeter coined the term in 2004 after a report in a British newspaper suggested that hiring women to lead is bad for business. The
Times
of London had run an exposé the year before linking the appointment of female board members to the poor health of a hundred of Britain's biggest firms, prompting one pundit to write: “the triumphant march of women into the country's boardrooms has wreaked havoc on companies' performance and share prices.” But Exeter psychologists Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam had a closer look at the data and found that the women had not caused the companies to struggle, rather, the women were brought in
after
the firms had been struggling. Companies that had consistently poor performance with overall stock market declines were found to be more likely to appoint women to their boards; firms enjoying a period of share-price stability were more apt to appoint men. Writing in the
British Journal of Management
in 2005, the researchers concluded that women were more likely to be promoted to power during
troubled times when the chances of failing are highest. In other words, women who manage to break through the glass ceiling often find themselves on the edge of a glass cliff, where there's a strong risk of falling off. Other studies have found evidence that the glass cliff applies to ethnic minorities as well as women. Christy Glass and Alison Cook at Utah State University found the trend among Fortune 500 companies and NCAA Division I basketball coaches (visible minorities were much more likely to be promoted to coach losing teams). So whether it's in the realm of business, sports or politics, it seems that women, or visible-minority men and women, are more likely to be tapped to lead when the going gets tough.

Not everyone buys the theory, and there are plenty of examples of male chief executives thrust into a hot seat. But anecdotally at least, the glass-cliff pattern seems dead easy to spot: The US elected Barack Obama, its first black president, in the midst of one of the worst economic crises in the country's history. Kim Campbell, Canada's first and very short-lived female prime minister, came to power on the eve of the Conservative Party's destruction at the polls. Iceland, in the wake of its stunning economic meltdown, elected its first female prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, and the world's first openly lesbian head of state, to lead the rescue.

In the corporate world, there's Mary Barra, who kicked off her tenure as the first woman to run General Motors mired in an ignition-switch crisis linked to at least twenty-one deaths, a thirty-million-car recall and a congressional inquiry. Sunoco ushered in Lynn L. Elsenhans, its first female chief executive, after its share prices had fallen about 52 percent. The
first woman to lead Xerox, Anne Mulcahy, was promoted to CEO when it was under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and $17 billion in debt. Even Yahoo's decision to hire Marissa Mayer was made at a time when the company was in dire need of fixing. A
Forbes
headline after her appointment read, “Did Marissa Mayer just receive the job offer of a lifetime or did she just ascend to the pinnacle of the glass cliff?”

The Upside of Down

SO WHY OPT
for a woman at the top when an organization has hit the skids? I'd suspect that part of the motivation is a subtle sexist inclination to set women up for failure. Put a female in charge when she's likely to flop, and if she does, she proves that a woman was never up to the task of leading. If, against the odds, she succeeds, great. Either way the firm looks like a progressive, equal opportunity shop. It's a cynical perspective; though some evidence suggests it's not a fictional one. There's been speculation from
The Huffington Post
to
The Hindustan Times
as to whether Jill Abramson, who was fired as the first female editor of the
New York Times
after just two years on the job, was a victim of it (though she was replaced by the paper's first black editor-in-chief). Researchers at Utah State found that women and minorities promoted during a crisis are allotted a year less time to show results than a male leader in the same position. In short, if the outliers don't turn things around in a heartbeat they're shoved off that glass cliff and often replaced by a traditional leader—literally, a white knight. Researchers have dubbed it “the saviour effect.”
(I certainly felt the implied question mark when a headline after I took over at the public broadcaster screamed, “Queen Ceeb, Saviour of the CBC.”)

But aside from old-boys'-club biases, I think there are other, more instructive dynamics at work when women are chosen to lead in troubled times. For starters, who a company hires has a lot to do with who lines up for the job. It's my sense that women may be more inclined to take on a riskier, less appealing job. Men tend to want immediate results. They're more interested in leadership positions with the seeds of success already sown in. Trying to lead a corporation out of a tailspin is messy. Like when you clean out an old desk drawer, you have to take everything out and sort through what's worth keeping before you can reorganize it, and you could end up looking at a much bigger mess.

I think women are more comfortable with that; for women, life is often messy. We often have to deal with other people's needs and emotions, a multitude of demands and deadlines. Every day is a bit like cleaning out the desk drawer. You take stock of what's on the agenda, figure out what you can fit in when and what you have to let go. I think men are also less inclined to clean up someone else's mess. Not only does it take too long to get results, the risk of failure is too high and so is the possibility that a failure marked against your name could damage your leadership prospects for a long time to come. Women tend to measure success a bit differently. Given that less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 company chief executives are female, I'd say the rare opportunity for a woman to finally break through the glass ceiling outweighs the risk of failure. That's how I felt about the big
CBC job: This is the shot that you've got. You might fall flat on your face, but you might not. And if you don't give it what you can, you'll never know what you can do.

Too often we women don't put our hands up for things—assignments, positions or promotions—unless we're absolutely positively sure we can handle it. But if we're going to test ourselves to our limits, we have to trust our ability to make things work, a point I'll explore more in the final chapter. More of us should put our hands up, vie for the risky positions and promotions. We shouldn't shy away from the cliffs, we should seek them out, and stand tall on the edge. Was I apprehensive about taking on the mammoth task of modernizing a coast-to-coast multimedia company of five thousand employees? You bet. At that moment, there was no doubting where I stood, right on the edge of a slippery and jagged precipice. But it only made me more determined to dig in my heels (yes, the high kind).

And here's the less cynical perspective: there are many good reasons for companies in crisis to ask a woman to steer the ship out of the storm. When an organization is faring well, it's reluctant to rock the boat; better to stay the course, and hire “the expected.” When it's adrift or sinking in a financial or public relations storm, the status quo is already out the window and it's logical to opt for change: to choose a new kind of leader and chart a new course. Putting a woman or a leader from a visible minority at the helm sends a clear and instant message that change is afoot simply by virtue of the leader
not being
male or white. My initial entry at the CBC made waves in part because I looked nothing like leaders who had come before. And I believe there's a growing
recognition, backed by research, and dazzling examples, that women are well suited to lead when times get tough.

The first female chief executives at Sunoco and Xerox have both been widely credited for turning their companies' fortunes around. Even Mary Barra at GM, who started her historic tenure with profuse apologies for faulty ignition switches, earned kudos for her forthright handling of the crisis, launching an internal investigation and promising to regain the public's trust. And Ellen Kullman, who was named the first female CEO of DuPont when earnings at the 212-year-old company had plummeted, increased those earnings by 24 percent in three years, landing her on
Fortune
magazine's top 50 list of the world's greatest leaders.

It Really Is Our Turn

NO ONE LIKES TO BE PUT IN A BOX
or described as a set of typical qualities, but there are attributes traditionally held to be “feminine” traits whether we're born with them, learn them or both. For years in the workplace, these qualities put women neatly into a corner, but not the corner office. Take multi-tasking. A woman's ability to do more than one thing at a time indicated a problem: she lacked focus. Or worse: she had to do so many things because people gave her all the tasks. Women's tendencies to be sensitive and empathetic, good communicators and listeners who could anticipate the needs of others: these were seen as “soft skills” suited to support staff, but not vital for success at a senior level. But today, all those characteristics that confined women to the low rungs of corporate ladders are now seen as tickets to the corner
office. A wide range of management studies, involving interviews with hundreds of executives from different countries and industries, are finding that traditionally feminine traits are now at the core of successful modern leadership.

There are signs, albeit modest, that this is translating into real advancement for women: Female chief executives are still incredibly rare, but their numbers are growing and the trend is predicted to accelerate, according to the 2013 Chief Executive Study from Strategy&, the global management consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Examining 14 years of data on the turnover of CEOs at 2,500 of the world's largest public companies, the study predicts that women will make up a third of CEOs by 2040. What's more, companies have been going out of their way to hire women: women were more likely than men to be recruited to the position of CEO from outside a firm than from within it. That might partly reflect an absence of women in senior positions within a company who might make worthy candidates. But I believe that companies are now coming to appreciate the value that a woman leader has to offer.

At its heart, leading effectively has as much to do with reading people as reading spreadsheets. Over the years, I've worked for many impressively brilliant bosses and while I love working for smart bosses, a high IQ without the presence of a healthy EQ isn't good enough today. And here again, women shine: studies consistently show that females have an edge in matters of reading and interpreting the emotions of others. A 2014 European study of more than 4,600 people, for instance, found that women outperformed men in almost all aspects of emotional intelligence, including understanding, facilitating
and managing emotions. Bottom line: women know how to build bridges over troubled waters. Women tend to be better communicators, and better at building communities. I can't tell you how many times I have been asked to step up and translate a boss's message or idea to the wider group. It's why the role of spokesperson often fell to me. I'm someone who had worked her way up, and I relate to the teams at any level, because at different points in my career I've also experienced what they were going through.

Of course leading is not just about the ablility to communicate, but what you communicate. Talk the talk, sure, but you better be able to walk the walk. Since women score highly in many studies when it comes to mentoring, motivating and mobilizing people to contribute, create and innovate, they are primed to lead in times where a turnaround is necessary. A 2012 Dutch study from the University of Groningen (which also found women are overrepresented in leadership roles during a crisis) concluded that “feminine” qualities are most desirable when an organization is in peril. The study found that men prefer to exert hierarchy and authority to solve problems, whereas women rely on tact and understanding to manage workplace turmoil.

There's also a belief that seeing a woman at the helm signals a less aggressive and more healing approach, softer, humbler, more collaborative and reasoned, which is exactly what you want if your company is on the cliff, fractured and floundering, has to publicly apologize, or dig its way out of debt. Last year, the
Cambridge Journal of Economics
published “The Lehman Sisters Hypothesis,” which by title alone essentially suggests the mostly male-led Wall Street firm
might have survived if it had had more women at the top. As those glass-cliff researchers from Exeter found, companies that did appoint a woman during a financial downturn actually experienced a marked increase in share price after the appointment. Yet despite all this, we tend to underappreciate the value we can bring to corner offices. In one of the most influential reports on the perceptions of gender and leadership, a meta-analysis of nearly a hundred studies published in 2014, researchers from the College of Business at Florida International University found that while men rate themselves as being significantly more effective leaders than women rate themselves, other people rate women as significantly more effective than men.