Cool research on women in the workforce.

This afternoon we had a conversation with Dr. Janine Buckner, Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Psychology at Seton Hall University, and a faculty member of the Elizabeth Ann Seton Center for Women's Studies. She pointed us to some great resources that she has used when studying gender disparity in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Dr. Buckner conducted research with colleagues Susan A. Nolan and Cecilia H. Marzabadi on young women pursuing career choices in these "STEM" fields while collaboratively writing for the book Are Women Achieving Equity in Chemistry? Dissolving Disparity, Catalyzing Change (Edited by Cecilia H. Marzabadi, Valerie J. Kuck, Susan A. Nolan and Janine P. Buckner).


Check out these links below:

The Center for the Study of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSWSTEM)
FemStats
Women Work!
National Organization for Women
The Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University
Council on Gender Parity in Labor and Education
Institute for Women's Policy Research
Women in a Global Workforce from Dell
Great Place to Work / Research Links
OPWSEM at Rutgers University
The Tutorials for Change, a web based tutorial set written by Virginia Valian of Hunter College. Valian, a social psychologist, does work on Gender Schemas and Science Careers.



The Seton Hall Psych department web page is currently being updated, but you can find some of the faculty contact info here.

Collaborate or Die

photo via flickr user 'zoom zoom'.

Collaborating across different silos and outside the box is becoming more and more important.

One of my favorite books is by a fellow consultant, Patrick Lencioni, and it’s entitled Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars. Just the title made me want to pick it up, because I feel so much of my energy facilitating groups is spent trying to help clients identify the harmful effects of "silo’d" thinking: the cost to individuals, teams, and business generally of thinking inside the box.

This is becoming especially imperative for US business, as it is incumbent on us to innovate ourselves out of the current crisis, and that’s going to require looking “across the aisle” and joining hands more than we have traditionally done.

I see boxes everywhere, with my coaching clients, the teams I support, and executive teams who run my client companies:

1. The individual: Boxed-in thinking about what you’re capable of, what your strengths really are, who would be interested in knowing you/networking with you, what people really think of you and what you bring to the table, etc. Often this thinking is difficult to get un-stuck from, without the help of a coach or consultant who opens you up to the world of professional possibilities that are really available to most people. Plus, the transference of confidence into someone is a really powerful motivator.



2. The team: What does the team do now, for the organization, and how could team members re-conceive themselves, their purpose, and the way they collaborate laterally? Teams get stuck in historical performance – “this is the way we’ve always done our function” – vs. thinking of all its possible stakeholders and driving value to each. It’s critical to stay relevant. This requires understanding what each stakeholder in the organization outside of the team WANTS and needs from the team, and mixing the team’s internal values/vision with external customer wants. This is the only way to achieve and maintain alignment.



3. The organization: Company-to-company collaboration is the way of the future. The metaphor I like to use is that of Supply Chain – whoever your suppliers are on the front end, and whoever your customers are at the back end, your company has the opportunity in our inter-connected world to reach beyond your four walls and use your influence and values to impact the practices of EVERY entity you touch. I hope we live to see in the next decade the larger corporations moving towards a model of investing in the suppliers and partners they so rely on, so that the quality of the ultimate output is better. This means seeing your business as connected, and responsible, beyond traditional definitions.

In the world of corporate diversity initiatives, collaborate or die takes on a whole new imperative. I work a lot with Affinity Groups (race, gender, age, sexual orientation-based employee groups at companies), and the days of the groups existing for community and networking purposes, and working in silo’s on their own initiatives, might be over. What will help the business case for diversity the most in corporate America is if these groups co-develop their strategies, to be interlinked, so that no leader who “doesn’t get it” can separate anyone anymore based on gender or color, because the groups can present a united front.

Identifying (and Developing) Top Talent

Great post by Seth Green of Social Edge, called Identifying (and Developing) Top Talent.

Seth's site talks about social entrepreneurship, a movement or concept that I think has a lot to say to leaders in all realms, not just social justice. Specifically his question about Fortune 500 CEOs struck a chord, given my work with them:

"Is there something that the private sector can learn from the personalized nature of evaluating social entrepreneurs? Should more Fortune 500 CEOs be judged on their sincerity and passion?"

Seth asks what competencies we would use to evaluate leaders, and how we would measure success or failure with these competencies. I am a non-profit lifer turned corporate leadership consultant, and I work a lot with corporate leaders to develop an awareness of their "inner social entrepreneur". A lot of times, the traits are innate: having authenticity and integrity, being comfortable with risk and challenging the dominant paradigm, and leading with an entrepreneurial quality. These characteristics, whether innate or learned with help, I believe are necessary for the leaders of the future in these companies, especially as the companies themselves struggle to become more transparent about their business practices. It also pushes companies to become more responsible corporate citizens. They are getting on board, slowly in some cases, but the movement is afoot.

What's compelling much of the activity I describe is of course Generation Y incoming talent, and its demands on the corporate world for the same characteristics ... integrity, responsibility, an inspirational place to work, and an openness to the contributions of talent at all levels, regardless of age, tenure, or experience. My hope is that the massive numbers of young people with different values than the dominant corporate paradigm will keep demanding a different relationship with their employer, and their leaders, and that this will result in a redefinition of how leadership has been defined (top-down, father knows best, homogenous/non-multi-cultural, etc.).

Getting the Message Across: Consulting to Instigate Change

In the process of starting to write my book, which I desperately need as a platform, but which is such an undertaking, especially b/c I've been focusing so much on building the consulting part of JBC - infrastructure and other boring stuff. My writing partner and I are so excited to document the changes we're seeing (and hope to see) in the workplace, in an accessible, fun, and useful book for agents of change everywhere!

I want to instigate ... sometimes I have to moderate that urge a little b/c all consultants know that it's all about "meeting the client where they're at". If you can move the client, even incrementally, you've done your job. It's tough to know when you're going too far, and you usually hear about it after the engagement, or workshop.

That's actually happened to me recently, where an audience of senior executives weren't ready yet to receive the info, and actually personalized their resistance back to me. Not fun!

But when the audience is with you, and invested in learning and actually changing, it's powerful. Those are the good days.

Diversity Means Nothing Like You Think It Does

It's always fascinating to tune in to a Gen Y wrestling with how his generation, and the older generations, deal with the question of diversity as it exists today: Has Gen-Y transcended race? by G'Ra Asim on The Daily Voice (Black America's Daily News Source).



This writer himself, demographically and educationally for example, embodies the contradictions so common among Gen Ys, when it comes to identity. As they enter the workforce in droves (they are a huge generation, compared to Generation X, and there are massive numbers of jobs that need to be filled over the next 10 years), my prediction is that companies will try, and fail, to integrate them into their Diversity Programs. They will fail to make this happen for the simple reason that diversity doesn't mean to Generation Y what it means to so many of us that built these "diversity" programs and initiatives in corporate America.

One of the managers in a recent session I facilitated brought up the example that the feedback from their company's firm-wide diversity training was decidedly mixed, from the younger demographic of participants. He shared that one young person asked "why do I have to learn how to work with my friend who's black?" Looking at the baggage that Baby Boomers carry around about race, and the desire to "fix it" through corporate diversity initiatives, you can see where the disconnect starts to occur, between the old guard and Generation Y: young people who've never known anything BUT a multi-cultural, multi-faceted environment.

A big open question for me is this: Is the answer to scrap all legacy diversity programs, because they don't resonate with incoming employees who will someday grow into the company's manager's and leaders? Is our "work" really done on the legacy issues of gender and race parity, especially at the senior level of companies, and in certain industries? And, finally, demographically speaking, do companies have a choice in the matter?