What’s in a Cover?

My friend, novelist Morag Joss put an interesting post on her site recently about how her publisher had chosen two different covers and titles for her latest book  to appeal to two different markets – the U.S. and U.K. The covers are radically different  but the content is the same. One assumes that the publishers know their stuff but it is intriguing. The book for UK publication is called ‘Across the Bridge‘ and the US version ‘Among The Missing’.

First Impressions

One of these covers will probably attract you more than the other; you will be more likely to pick up one if browsing in a bookshop.

Whether we like it or not people judge a book by its cover. Every time you step into public view you are projecting an image. You may not like that idea and resolutely resist the idea that appearance matters and that will be the image you are projecting! It’s like your shadow, you can’t get rid of it, it’s always there. But you can choose, to a degree, what image you project.

So it is worth taking a few moments to consider if the ‘cover’ you are projecting to the world is the one you want out there. Is your ‘cover’ the best one for your target audience? When you first appear at an event or meeting, people look at you and make a judgement. It may be a positive assessment or it may not. If positive, you start with an advantage. If negative the reverse is true. You are on the back foot from the start and will have to work harder.

Which Cover?

Back to those covers. Here is the US version opposite. What do you think? Do you prefer the U.S version or the first? I’d love to know. If you are a US reader has the publisher shown the right cover to sell it to you, and likewise for the UK? Do tell!

And while we’re on the subject, what do you think of the cover of my book? You can be totally honest as hard copies are selling out and a new run will be coming soon. But there are still ‘first edition’ copies available!

Cats and Change! (And You?)

Today is recycling day in my village. We’re very lucky and almost everything gets taken for recycling here by the local council. That’s great but it does mean a lot of hustle and bustle on a Monday morning as I grab newspapers, bottles (!), plastic, milk bottle tops etc and make sure it’s all in the correct boxes and drag them to the front of the house.

I was doing that today surrounded by two very jumpy cats (mine). They always get very edgy on recycling day and run back and forth checking out what I’m up to, then pretending not to notice and indulge in frantic grooming (classic displacement activity…), then pop back to look only to run away frightened again.

This morning, in between making soothing type noises, (the neighbours think I am mad) I found myself wondering why they are always frightened of the noise when it happens every week, (although I guess a week really is a long time in ‘catolotics’.)

Cats and Humans Don’t Like Change

And then I thought, actually the cats are behaving like most of us humans.

Very few of us when faced with a change think that it will be a good thing for us. We either indulge in some frantic grooming type behaviour, i.e. trying to pretend it isn’t happening – denial; or we run about with our tails in the air with no clear purpose  assuming the worst will happen to us!

And very occasionally we are cool cats, and embrace it! We’re bold and take a long hard at what is actually going on and make a more realistic assessment of what it might mean to us, and then get as much out of it as we can.

I haven’t got any cool cats yet but I’m working on them! Here Kitty Kitty Kitty…..

What animal are you like when faced with something new? I like to think I’m more of a Tigger than an Eeyore….

Why Are Women Behind?

The U.K. Government say more women on boards or else…

But why do have we so few women on boards given that we’ve had the Equal Pay Act since 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act since 1975 right up to The Equality Act 2010?

It’s fascinating on one level that with all the legislation to back us up, we women still regularly earn less than men and are still significantly under represented at senior management levels in so many otherwise forward thinking companies.

Does the fault lie within ourselves? Well, of course, we could all do more to put ourselves out there (and Gloria Feldt, author of ‘No Excuses’ would certainly argue that women are ambivalent about taking power). But I believe it’s more than that.

A recent report from the Institute of Leadership and Management surveyed over 3000 managers which revealed that three quarters of the women felt there was a glass ceiling. It discovered several factors holding women back:

• Women had less confidence and self belief than men e.g. 20% of men will apply for a role despite only partially meeting its job description, compared to 14% of women.
• Women had varied career paths and had to step off career ladder to have children.
• Women didn’t expect to get senior positions and had lower aspirations than their male counterparts.

Gender Equality Pays

This is potentially a serious issue for business as companies that have invested in developing its women employees have found it pays dividends, which seems to suggest that those which do not are losing potential profits.

In 2008, research from Professor Michel Ferrar of Ceram Business School on companies from the French CAC40 stock exchange index, showed that the more women there were in a company’s management, the less the share price fell in 2008, the crux year of the global financial crisis. The only large French company to record a share price gain in 2008 was Hermes – whose management was 55% women, the second largest share among French blue chips.

Many companies think they have done the right thing by setting up and supporting in house women’s groups but in fact these have often served to ghettoise the problem and probably have contributed in some measure to women and men seeing the issue of gender equality as a women’s problem. If it is to succeed it needs to be an initiative across the board (no pun intended).

Additionally, most organisations have been set up in a very male-centric way. Male ways of behaviour are rewarded and seen as desirable, often by both genders. If you have one gender constantly trying to fit themselves into a structure and system designed primarily by and for the other, it will cause problems. Women should not have to behave like men to get on. What women bring to the (board) table needs to be equally valued.

So What to Do?
Penny de Valk, the ILM’s chief executive says it is crucial that employers who are serious about gender diversity take steps to find ways of nurturing women’s ambitions.

“Coaching and mentoring, in particular, have an invaluable role to play. We know that gender diversity drives performance organisations’ financial performance. Business leaders should need no encouragement to ensure their most talented employees move into leadership roles, regardless of their gender”

Time to take control, women! Grab this moment with both hands; there may never be a better time to challenge your organisation about its policy on developing women. If women are seriously under represented in your organisation, time to start asking why, of them and yourself…

If you’d like to know more about my Women Ahead programme, specifically designed to boost women’s confidence to progress at work, click here.

Women Lack Confidence…?

If I am forced to sum up what I do in three words I will say ‘boost women’s confidence‘.

I actually do a myriad of things, from courses, coaching, seminars, and writing but the leitmotif of all my work is giving women the confidence to fulfil their potential. To be all that they can be, whether that is about career progression or giving it all up and growing vegetables!

I was really interested therefore, to read of a survey undertaken by the Institute of Leadership and Management, Ambition & Gender. They spoke to 3,000 managers to find out what drives career ambition and to explore the barriers preventing women’s progression into senior management and leadership positions.

Confidence

Among their findings was the fact that women are less confident of their abilities than men. Over half of the women admitted to feelings of self doubt compared with 31% of men.

I don’t know why this might be but suspect a lot of it is to do with our attitudes to getting more women into senior positions. The tendency is to ‘fix’ women to behave more like men and not value as highly that which women bring to the workplace. In coaching,  I often find women berating themselves for not being more ambitious or ruthless, yet closer questioning reveals it’s much more about the compromises required to get there, rather than ability to do the job. As Penny de Valk, ILM’s chief executive says, the research highlights some of the complex dynamics of what is, in many cases, still a male-centric work culture.

Coaching Promotes Women’s Confidence

Penny went on to say that it is crucial that employers who are serious about gender diversity take steps to find ways to nuture women’s ambitions.

“This means developing transparent talent management systems and introducing leadership career models and development approaches that flex to meet individuals’ differing needs. Coaching and mentoring, in particular, have an invaluable role to play. We know that gender diversity drives organisations’ financial performance. Business leaders should need no encouragement to ensure their most talented employees move into leadership roles, regardless of their gender”

I have a whole series of career tips for women but perhaps my best single tip is to remember that the internal messages we give ourselves are hugely powerful. They can boost or diminish our confidence. If you are carrying round in your head some negative internal spam, identify them, then neutralise them, then replace them with something  positive and inspiring!

And if you’d like to find out more about working with me, please do contact me for an informal discussion.

If Women Ruled the World

If women ruled the world….

I ask this question on my Women Ahead course (designed to boost women’s confidence to move ahead at work) in order to illustrate how the world of work as we know it, could be different. It’s not about having a go at men but about thinking from a different perspective, expanding our horizons of what could be, and maybe understanding better why things are as they are.

Think about it for a minute. The world of work as we know it now evolved during the Industrial Revolution, when labour moved largely off the land into cities and a different type of employment. Men went to work and systems of working emerged dependent largely on the fact that there were women at home to literally keep the  home fires burning.

Women had little or no part in how work was organised.

Imagine though if we had. Allow yourself to imagine if the working world as we know it had been designed solely for women – all women. Imagine that men were at home, (apart from the poor ones who would be working very hard but for far less money than us) and imagine that actually most of the time it wasn’t even thought appropriate to educate them as, well, they were just going to marry successful working women and keep home. It would be a waste of investment. And as for getting the vote….what nonsense.

I have no doubt that different systems would have evolved. We might have a totally different working day, not 9-5 at all. We would certainly have  very sophisticated maternity and child care arrangements because we would have been very important people. Systems would have evolved to support us.  And they would be considered normal. School hours may have been designed differently. Just try and imagine. How many things would be different?

And I am also sure that as time went on and men began to get involved as society evolved they would find themselves at a disadvantage in the systems we had designed. But they would do their best because it was the way of the world and if they wanted to get on they would have to adapt. They would have to suppress some of their instinctive behaviour and behave like us, the dominant culture. We would have set the standards for behaviour in the world of work.

And as time went on, we women wouldn’t really have an incentive to change because actually it works quite well for us and anyway, some men can cope very well. Why look, there is that well known financier guy who is one of the 12.5% of men who has made it to the board in that company listed in the FTSE 100. So it’s fine, isn’t it? Obviously we’d like to see more men on boards but we can’t legislate for changing societal attitudes. We’ll ‘nudge’ them. We’ll encourage them, yes, that’ll do something.

Sometimes we need legislation to change society’s attitudes. If we hadn’t done that in the past, women wouldn’t be voting, children would still be working, and homosexuals would still be persecuted.

How to Get More Women on Board

Last week the UK government launched an initiative to get more women on the boards of the top FTSE companies. The proportion of women on FTSE 100 boards has plateaued at 12.5%, having increased little over the past three years, according to Cranfield University School of Management. In the FTSE 250, the proportion is just 7.8 per cent and more than half of companies have no women directors.

Other countries don’t have this problem. Norway introduced quotas which have been met; they now have 40% women on boards. I have family in Norway and attitudes there towards gender equality have long been different. When my sister in law and I had children in the 80s the attitudes and provision of childcare in our respective countries were absolutely poles apart! Even back then her husband could take time off as paternity leave. My partner discovered, almost by accident, that there was a discretionary 5 days leave for new fathers, which he promptly asked for. He was told he was the only teacher to have ever asked for it and ribbed mercilessly by his sports teaching colleagues.

It’s Not a Woman’s Issue

There are lots of good reasons why companies should have women in very senior positions (apart from the fact that it’s just plain right!). Companies who invest in women’s development find it reaps rewards across the board (no pun intended). But not just one token woman; the real changes begin when there are three or more at board level.

It’s a Man’s World

The world of work, particularly in traditional fields like law, finance, and local government, were set up and designed in a time when women didn’t work in these industries (women have always worked!) other than in support roles. Some business practices /models need challenging to enable women to fully participate. We all take it for granted that that’s how business works, and so we try to help women fit into this model…

I believe that leads to a dissonance, a misfit for most women that often accounts for why women dip out before they reach the top (along with all the other factors mitigating against women). We need to change the model so it works for all the workforce, not just half of it. So many discriminatory practices are so embedded in working culture that many of us don’t even notice them half the time; from how jobs are advertised, language used, how recruitment and interviews work (quite adversarial) to how women are treated in organisations.

Women’s Groups Don’t Work

I have come to believe that in house all women groups probably don’t help, at least in respect of those which exist to try and change the culture to one more gender balanced. I think they work well for women in other arenas but actually, if you want to change attitudes in the workplace, everyone has to sign up to it. Women’s groups run the risk of saying to men, “this is an issue for women, this is our problem”. Which allows it to become ghettoised. In fact, it is everyone’s problem and everyone in a company needs to understand and address it.

So Why Do I Run Women’s Courses?

It’s a good question and one I have answered more fully in a previous post. Men and women are different and currently the issues for women in the world of work are very different than those of men. The overall aim of my courses is to raise women’s aspirations and give them the confidence to challenge the status quo, to push themselves. I don’t bar men from these sessions but I have written and designed them with women in mind. Generally the issues are not pertinent or relevant for men. Men and women respond differently to personal development type seminars and generally speaking women are more comfortable exploring these issues with other women.

The call for gender equality is not about pretending we are all the same. It is about celebrating that difference and not allowing one to dominate. It is valuing the different qualities which women bring to the workplace as well as those of men.

I interviewed Avivah Wittenberg-Cox a while ago. She has written two great books on gender equality ‘Why Women mean Business‘ and ‘How Women mean Business‘. One thing she said resonated very strongly with me:

“If women in your organisation are still in grey and black suits the gender issue is still very live!”

Women are not men, and should not have to behave like men to get rewarded in the world of work. Society needs both men and women in the top echelons, middle echelons, and across all sectors of society. Bring on the women!

if you’d like to find out more about my course for women on the way up, please click this link.