Role Model Behavior
In September, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announcedshe was pregnant with twin girls,
she said she planned to follow roughly the same course as she had after the
delivery of her son in 2012: “taking limited time off and working
throughout.” Even though Yahoo, under her leadership, had recently revamped its
maternity and paternity leave and benefits policies to be far more generous for
employees, including eight weeks of paid leave for both new mothers and new
fathers, the CEO declined to take advantage of these changes herself.
Predictably, the announcement inspired a lot of hand-wringing about her
failure to serve as a good role model. Calling Mayer’s decision
“disappointing,” Anne Weisberg, senior vice president at the Families and Work
Institute in New York, declared, “She’s a role model
and I think she should take whatever Yahoo’s parental leave is.” Weisberg added
that the way in which corporate leaders handle the issue of parental leave is
“hugely symbolic,” not only for their own employees but “for women everywhere.”
She concluded: “It’s not just a personal choice.”
But of course it is a personal choice. These and other
comments bring to mind past laments about senior women who had supposedly
failed in their duty to serve as role models by opting to make personal
decisions based on their own assessment of what was most important in their
lives. This persistent meme first got going in the mid-90s, as a tiny number of
women began ascending into highly visible senior corporate positions.
When Brenda Barnes in 1997
resigned as president and CEO of Pepsi-Cola North America in order to spend
more time with her family, the decision was exhaustively scrutinized for the “message” it might send,
both to other women and to employers. Barnes was castigated by some for failing
to serve as a role model for women who aspired to leadership positions, and applauded
by others for serving as a role model for women who had accepted the ostensible
futility of imagining they could “have it all.” That Barnes had a right to make
her choice based on personal considerations seemed to play no role in either
narrative. (Barnes would return to the corporate world in 1999, and served as
CEO of Sara Lee from 2005 to 2010, when she suffered a stroke.)
Not only do women routinely come in for criticism as failed role models
because of highly public work-life balance decisions, but they also reap
opprobrium for failing in this regard for problems that lie well outside the
work-life scope. When Martha Stewart, the home entertainment doyenne turned
media mogul, was indicted for insider trading in 2003, and subsequently
served time in federal prison, it set off a cascade of soul-searching about
whether her failure to be a role model might actually put other women’s
achievements in jeopardy. Is the progress women have made in the last 50 years
really so fragile as to be put at risk by Martha Stewart’s brief lapse into
spectacularly bad judgment about personal investments? Nobody, of course, would
think to extrapolate the behavior of one male corporate executive to his entire
gender.
In my experience, women are highly resilient and generally clear-eyed
about the need to calculate trade-offs, and they do a pretty effective job of
making choices that support their individual goals. This is not to say that we
don’t benefit from having role models whose accomplishments, comportment, or
demeanor inspire us. But it doesn’t mean that we slavishly copy them or make
all our decisions based on theirs, as adolescents do when trying on adulthood.
Role models are especially important for women who aspire to leadership
positions because they demonstrate that such aspirations are possible.
That’s the takeaway from the realistic but moving tribute Erica
Dhawan, chief executive officer of consulting firm Cotential, gave Erin Callan,
who rose to the position of chief financial officer at Lehman Brothers and was
regarded as a high-profile success story before the firm blew up. Dhawan
admired Callan and took inspiration from her visibility, success, and buoyant
brand of female confidence. She defended Callan fiercely when the firm managed
to shift some of the blame for its epically bad calls on her. But Dhawan did
not conclude that Callan’s public ouster meant that she herself was doomed to
fail, or that women couldn’t succeed in investment banking, or that Callan had
somehow failed her and other women. She learned from Callan but didn’t model
her life on hers.
The role model pushback that Marissa Mayer faced in 2015 is disturbing
for two reasons. It presumes, incorrectly, that women can only see a path
forward if someone else models it for them in every particular. And it assumes,
also incorrectly, that women owe it to one another to make choices that somehow
serve the best interests of all other women. Being successful at a demanding
job while trying to maintain a rewarding personal and family life is tough
enough for anyone — of any gender — in our 24/7 work culture. Asking women to
also calculate their career choices based on their potential impact upon all
other women seems an unreasonably heavy burden. Perhaps most perniciously, it
can also have the effect of compounding the guilt that women are already too
likely to feel.
In my work, I constantly encounter women who feel guilty for not leading
“balanced” lives –– even though today’s workplaces often make doing so nearly
impossible. I talk to women who feel guilty for working too hard because it
takes them away from their families. I talk to women who feel guilty about
spending time with their families because it takes them away from work. And I
talk to women who manage to feel guilty on both accounts. Do we really want to
also shame them for failing to serve as proper role models?
Several years ago, I participated in a large conference at which a
successful female executive on one of the panels railed against a younger woman
whose company had paid to put her through Harvard Business School. Two years
after earning her MBA, the younger woman left her company to take a few years
off. “How dare she take up a perfectly good space at Harvard
Business School?” the woman on the panel demanded. “What kind of message does
that send to the next woman who wants to go? Will the company even be willing
to send another woman?” In other words, she viewed the woman who attended HBS
as having an obligation to stay with her company even if she
didn’t want to, in order to justify its investment and (possibly) make things
easier for other women.
Such controversies are particularly insidious in an environment
saturated by social media, one in which people feel free to weigh in, publicly,
loudly, and snarkily, about one another’s lives. But the personal is not always
political. Sometimes it’s strictly personal, and nobody else’s business.
Recognizing this would serve us all well.
Sally Helgesen is an author, speaker, and
leadership development consultant, whose most recent book is The
Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work (with
Julie Johnson; Berrett-Koehler, 2010).
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Role-Model-Behavior?gko=b1800
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