Realizing the power of talented women
In 2010, eBay embarked on a journey to bring more women into its top ranks. It found that commitment, measurement, and culture outweigh a business case and HR policies.
During
the summer of 2013—about
two and a half
years after the start of a major effort to increase the number and
proportion of senior-leadership roles held by women at eBay Inc.1 —we
conducted a global gender-diversity survey on the attitudes and
experiences of our top 1,700 leaders. The
survey revealed some good news: for example, our leaders—women and
men alike—consider gender diversity an important business goal.
Moreover, we found no aspiration gap: women and men, in roughly the
same proportion, want to move up.
Many
of the findings, however, were troubling, for they suggested that men
and women experience the company in strikingly different ways. A
majority of women, for instance, felt that their male colleagues
didn’t understand them very well, though a majority of men felt
well understood by the women. Likewise, women were significantly less
likely than men to believe that their opinions were listened to and
more likely to doubt that the most deserving people received
promotions. Finally, we did not see any significant differences in
the survey results across geographic regions. Our gender-diversity
challenges (and therefore opportunities) were global ones. We were
both frustrated and motivated by these survey results.
But
they didn’t necessarily surprise us. The company’s gender
initiative really had significantly increased the representation of
women in leadership roles. Between 2011 and 2013, in fact, their
number rose by 30 percent annually, and we increased the proportion
of leadership roles held by women every year. This early progress
exceeded our expectations and showed that it is possible to make a
difference.
Nonetheless,
we believed that our demographic results ran ahead of the cultural
reality—the numbers were moving in a positive direction, but the
experience of women at our company wasn’t yet notably different. At
the root of the challenge, we believed, was the pervasive mix of
unconscious mind-sets, behavior, and “blind spots” that color
anyone’s perceptions of gender. Now, with some wind at our backs
from the progress on demographics, and armed with the data from the
gender survey, we committed ourselves to addressing our cultural
challenges.
‘This is personal’
Even
getting to this point took significant effort. Gender diversity has
long been a passion of our CEO, John Donahoe, but it wasn’t
something he could tackle immediately upon assuming the role, in
2008. The global recession and a business turnaround at eBay came
first.
By
2010, the turnaround was succeeding, and John was keen to sustain it.
In a competitive marketplace for talent, he argued, eBay should
create a business climate where talented women could thrive. At the
end of that year, he launched our Women’s Initiative Network (WIN).
Although today this effort includes women at all levels, we began
with leaders, defined as directors and higher, because we wanted to
start with something manageable that we could do well. Besides, if
you don’t have role models at the top, it’s harder to encourage
women at earlier stages of their careers to pursue their aspirations.
At
our first global WIN Summit, in January 2011, eBay’s 200
highest-ranking women met with our senior-executive team for three
days of professional development and networking. At the outset, John
went onstage and described, in quite personal and moving terms, why
gender diversity matters so much to him. He recalled one of his
wife’s more challenging career experiences and concluded, “I just
remember thinking: my God, she has a tougher row to hoe than me.”
He went on to discuss her career experience over 25 years, the issues
she has faced as a successful professional woman, and how it felt to
observe all this. John finished by explaining his aspirations for WIN
and his desire for a more supportive, inclusive environment at eBay.
“This is personal,” he told us.
Indeed,
from the outset, John’s personal conviction rather than a
conventional business case inspired our gender-diversity
initiative—not because the case is irrelevant4 but
because it can’t, in itself, generate enough passion and conviction
to sustain gender diversity as a priority. Our company’s experience
thus far suggests that a committed chief executive and C-suite are
essential to telegraph the importance of the effort. When senior
leaders engage with something, others are encouraged to make
individual commitments, establish shared goals, and accept collective
accountability. Real change can’t happen without a commitment from
the top, because that’s where people take their cues.
Soon
after the WIN Summit, John publicly demonstrated his commitment by
proposing to eBay’s board that he be held accountable for the
effort’s success. The focus areas he chose included increasing the
number of women in leadership roles, reducing their attrition rate
below that of men, and improving women’s satisfaction with their
jobs and work. He also committed himself to mentoring five women
leaders. (We should note here that we do not set quotas, which we
philosophically oppose; we simply aim to achieve progress.)
John’s
role modeling had a remarkable effect. About a year after he had
taken on the goals—a year when the initiative was broadly discussed
internally—he was in a meeting with our senior vice presidents.
John was reviewing his annual goals when someone spontaneously
suggested that they all adopt a similar set of gender-related ones.
By the end of the discussion, all our senior vice presidents (about
20 of our most senior leaders) had agreed to include gender-related
items in their annual goals. Later that year, we rolled out a
modified version of the goals to all our vice presidents (about 170
leaders). These included:
- All open leadership positions should have a diverse slate of candidates and interviewers.
- Top-talent women, at every level, should have career-development plans and discuss them with their managers.
- Leaders should monitor the diversity of their promotion pipelines to ensure fairness.
- Each senior vice president and vice president should help to develop top-talent women by mentoring or sponsoring five of them.
- The company would continue to measure progress on our demographics regularly.
Why
did we wait a year for this to happen? After all, we could have
mandated goals right away. We didn’t, because we strongly felt that
senior leaders needed to find and “own” their roles in our gender
diversity effort at their own pace. John called this “meeting
everybody where they’re at in the journey.”
A focused approach
The
goals our leaders chose helped us focus on a few essential people
processes in the early days: recruiting, promotions, and development
planning. This, in turn, inspired straightforward and obvious
changes. For example, we insist on diverse slates of candidates.
We’ve expanded our pool of women candidates for top-management jobs
by looking more carefully internally, by more actively leveraging our
leaders’ and employees’ personal networks, and by expecting our
sourcers to find more diverse candidates. In addition, we stepped up
our presence at targeted recruiting events, such as the annual Grace
Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the conference of the
Society of Women Engineers.
Other
changes seemed straightforward but in reality required us to take on
hidden biases more directly. In our promotion and
development-planning processes, for example, we wanted to counter the
assumption that managers—men and women alike—know what teammates
want from their careers. That’s particularly dangerous for women
because a manager can unwittingly make incorrect assumptions about
things like their geographic mobility or interest in stepping up to
the next level. In addition, if a woman doesn’t have a deliberate
conversation about her aspirations with her manager, she may assume
that merely doing good work and keeping her head down will win her
promotion.
To
help counter this problem, we began encouraging all women in
leadership roles to define their aspirations, create a plan to
achieve them, and discuss it with their managers. Because talking
about gender is difficult for everyone, we created simple tools our
managers can use to prompt and sustain productive development
conversations (see sidebar, “Talking the talk to thrive”).
Measure and share
Companies
measure what matters. We pull our gender data twice a year and share
this internally at our leadership forums and WIN events. Measurement
is essential to establish a baseline for tracking progress and to
reinforce accountability. Everyone knows we will be transparent with
the numbers inside our company.
At
the beginning of 2011, shortly after WIN started, we determined the
number and proportion of women leaders across the organization and in
each business, function, region, and critical talent segment. We
looked at the number and proportion of women hires and promotions,
compared the attrition rates of our men and women leaders, and
established the number and proportion of women at every management
level. Looking at the data is motivating. It reinforces our
commitment to gender diversity and instills confidence that the
company is serious.
We
share the demographic data at meetings of senior vice presidents and
vice presidents and at each global WIN Summit. The data are also
discussed at staff meetings convened by the heads of each business
and function and by the technology and customer-service/operations
groups. These organizations therefore see their own gender data,
including the mix by level, the progress and status of women leaders,
and the outcomes of decisions on hires, promotions, and terminations.
In the staff meetings, we also show the number and proportion of
women leaders reporting to the direct reports of each business-unit
president, so all of them can see the data.
It’s
hugely important to share this kind of information within the company
because progress begets progress, and even senior leaders need
encouragement to maintain focus and enthusiasm. Last and perhaps most
important, transparency demonstrates commitment and conviction. With
this in mind, our CEO and senior leadership team recently made the
decision to publicly share key data about diversity at eBay for the
first time. As our data shows, we have made notable progress on
gender diversity. But we still have much work to do.6
Changing the culture—for everyone
Since
WIN began, eBay has more than doubled the number of women in
leadership roles. At the same time, we have increased the proportion
of women in leadership by improving the promotion rates and (notably)
our retention of female leaders. We’ve made progress across all
businesses, functions, geographic regions, and key workforce
segments, including technology. Yet the numbers can also tell a
different story. At the most senior level, we are still almost
exclusively male, and our board diversity remains a work in progress.
Despite the impressive increase in numbers at the director-and-above
level, we are far from declaring victory and are in fact humbled by
our experience thus far.
We
know that shifting the culture to improve the day-to-day experience
of women at eBay has only just begun. Yet cultural change is
essential because culture trumps all: even the best policies fail if
employees think it isn’t really acceptable to avail themselves of
them without hurting their careers. Furthermore, women must have
faith that our people processes are fair to feel confident that they
can build lasting careers at eBay.
The
perception of fairness in people processes matters to everyone, not
just women. Many of the concerns they expressed in our survey—for
example, about promotions, hiring, challenging assignments,
mentorship, or the visibility of job opportunities—worried men too.
By improving our execution and the perceived fairness of our people
processes, we can make eBay a better place for women and men to build
their careers.
This
is no small undertaking—nearly 6,000 people managers around the
globe must raise their game—but it is also a tremendous
opportunity. We intend to spur cultural change through multiple
efforts, including our people-manager-effectiveness initiative
already under way. We have just embarked on this journey.
As
we reflect on what drove the early progress of our gender-diversity
initiative, it is clear that a few things mattered most: senior
leadership commitment and conviction, a focus on a few people
processes, and the measurement of our data. Our continued progress
will require shifting mind-sets and changing our culture so each
employee gains a greater awareness and understanding of these issues
and becomes better equipped to embrace our differences and support
our successes.
This
isn’t just a journey for women. Academic research shows that
everyone has gender biases and expectations. Women and men acquire
these attitudes, many of them unconscious, early in life. Starting
with the children we raise, we must rewrite the norms that limit both
genders, and this will take time. “Meeting everybody where they’re
at in the journey” is hard while establishing trust and sustaining
momentum for change, but it’s a worthy effort. In the future,
winning companies will be those that learn to deploy the entire
workforce productively and inclusively. We hope eBay will be one of
them.
Michelle
Angier is
the global leader of eBay’s Women’s Initiative Network.
Beth
Axelrod the
company’s senior vice president of human resources, is an alumna of
McKinsey’s London and Stamford offices, where she was a principal.
In the late 1990s, she was a leader of McKinsey’s War for Talent
project, which quantified the challenges that leading US companies
faced in finding talented executives.
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Organization/Realizing_the_power_of_talented_women?cid=mckq50-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1409
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