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I came across a number of interesting practical ideas. One was an effort by Deutsche Telekom to ensure that there were at least 30% women at all levels of seniority. I liked that specific, numeric target and realised that most of us were making a mistake in not setting clear goals. We needed to measure our progress (or lack of it) and have a way of tracking women’s advancement just like our other business objectives. The literature I was reading on group behaviour suggested that 30% was a point at which critical mass was reached – and that resonated with me personally. As I thought about my own experiences, being the only woman in the room made me feel self-conscious and I chose my interventions carefully on those occasions. If there were several items on the agenda where I might have a different opinion from the rest of the group, I would speak up about just one or two. If there were three women out of ten people, I was just another person in the room and felt confident to speak freely.
The way in which Deutsche Telekom was promoting its ambition was also appealing: ‘Taking on more women in management positions is not about the enforcement of misconstrued egalitarianism,’ said the company’s then chief executive, René Obermann. ‘Having a greater number of women at the top will quite simply enable us to operate better.’ Not only was the statement striking in deliberately distancing the move from political correctness and towards the business case, but it was all the more impactful coming from a man.
I realised that women talking to women about women’s issues was never going to get us very far. We can encourage each other and feel less alone, but we are likely to need those in leadership positions – mostly men – to help us actually succeed, to open those doors that may be half-closed. This is nothing to be embarrassed about: men on the way up in their careers have long had champions or sponsors in more senior positions, who act as a sounding board, give them a reference, or even line them up for the next role.
But it still wasn’t obvious how to pull these thoughts into an action plan, so Mary and I invited almost all the senior businesswomen we knew to a lunch to solicit their input. Over forty came along. I stood up and suggested we needed a new approach if we were to break the deadlock and see more women fulfil their potential in our businesses. Some of those present made it clear afterwards that they did not want to be part of a specific women’s initiative, expressing concerns about how that would be perceived by their male peers. Later, I’m happy to say, and particularly after men had joined the campaign, a number of those women became generous supporters. Others were sceptical about the idea that we might ever be able to find a better way forward, after so many years of disappointing progress. All they could see ahead was an extrapolation of the past.
But a new opportunity was arising just as we were having these discussions. As is so often the case, what we actually needed was a vision, not a spreadsheet. The cataclysmic global financial crisis had thrown up a new possibility for us to explore. As analysts, regulators and policy-makers pored over the wreckage of the financial collapse, it seemed obvious with hindsight that bank boards and management teams comprised almost entirely of conventional, middle-aged, affluent men were inherently flawed. The directors might be individually brilliant, but if they were cut from the same cloth, educated similarly and moved in the same social circles, they were far more likely to back each other’s opinions than to challenge them.
‘Groupthink’ is far from a new concept: the term was devised in 1952 by American William Whyte, who used it to refer to similar people not just agreeing with each other but more perniciously believing that they are ‘right and good’ as well, and so excluding dissenting voices. It’s not an unusual phenomenon; many catastrophes long before the 2008 financial crisis have been blamed at least in part on groupthink, including the January 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster, when the shuttle broke up within two minutes of take-off, killing the seven crew members. The analysis of what went wrong showed how the inconvenient truth spoken by engineers concerned about the risks of launching in unusually cold conditions was disregarded by NASA managers in their ‘go fever’. A decade earlier, psychologist Irving Janis had studied American foreign policy disasters and identified eight symptoms of groupthink. The symptoms include the illusion of invulnerability, minds closed to warnings, the stereotyping of dissenters as stupid or biased, and pressure on group members to conform or be silent.
Sadly, it seems hard to learn from our mistakes. The subject matter was different in the financial crisis but the hallmarks of groupthink were present again. By early 2010, the realisation was growing that the boardroom, described by former fund manager Lord Myners in 2008 as ‘a retirement home for the great and the good’, needed a big shake-up. The door was ajar for different ‘types’ of people to become directors and an obvious place to start was to address the scarcity of women on boards.
In 2008, fewer than 12% of the directors at the UK’s top 100 listed companies were women. Almost a quarter of those companies had all-male boards. Royal Bank of Scotland had just one female director out of eighteen at the time of its ill-fated acquisition of ABN AMRO that precipitated the bank’s downfall. Many of these board members had very similar backgrounds, too – in fact, studying a picture of the 17 male directors at the time is like playing a game of ‘spot the difference’. It may be hard to believe, but the boards of the next 250 biggest UK listed companies, the FTSE 250, were even more male-dominated. In 2008 less than half of FTSE-250 companies had any female directors at all and the average representation was just 7%. Besides risking groupthink, 93% men is clearly not representative of society or (almost) any company’s customer base.
This was a big, emerging and brand-new opportunity, so I persevered with the idea of doing something different, despite the lukewarm feedback. I arranged a smaller lunch for 14 women out of the group of 40 who had responded positively. We were meeting on a Monday; the Friday before, I suddenly felt anxious that we might have yet another inconclusive conversation. I emailed attendees, suggesting the specific idea of the 30% Club. Over Monday’s lunch we agreed on a simple, narrow but ambitious goal: to reach 30% women on UK company boards over the following five years through voluntary, business-led change. The members of the Club needed to be the chairmen of the boards, since these were their boards and they had the authority to change things.
Of course, they were almost exclusively chairmen – at the time, just a single FTSE-100 company, Land Securities, had a female chair, Dame Alison Carnwath. Dame Alison has been a fantastic supporter of the 30% Club – but we needed more than one. So that very same afternoon, we tested out the 30% Club idea on two highly regarded and prominent FTSE-100 chairmen: Sir Roger Carr, then chairman of Centrica, and Sir Win Bischoff, then chairman of Lloyds Bank. Would they support a campaign led by chairmen aimed at reaching 30% women on boards? Both immediately said yes. In their own words, ‘when we have women on our boards, the dynamic is better, the decision-making is better – but there are too few of them’.
Sir Roger’s and Sir Win’s evangelism transformed the thinking around the issue. There were many dissenters and sceptics to start with, but the endorsement of these leading, male captains of industry made others sit up and take note. Maybe, just maybe, the under-representation of women on boards was about more than ‘just’ fairness? A new dynamic began to develop, encouraging more business leaders to join in. This different angle also proved newsworthy: when we launched later that year, with seven founding chairmen supporters, the Financial Times ran both a cover story and a prominent interview featuring Sir Roger and Sir Win. The message was clear: the scarcity of women at the top was no longer a women’s issue but everyone’s issue. Men and women were going to work together to resolve it.
But evangelism does not necessarily lead to results. Another newspaper wrote at the time that the 30% Club had a worthy ambition but ‘was very vague about how it was going to achieve it’. I soon realised that this vagueness was in fact an essential ingredient. Nothing had worked before so we needed to draw up a new map to reach our destination. We were wholly open to fresh ideas; we listened and adapted quickly as we made progress or encountered setbacks. Most of the time it was like driving in fog: we could see the immediate few feet in front, but the rest of the route was unclear. As long as we kept progressing, and learning from what was working and what wasn’t, we could reach the goal. I became a great believer in pilots to test ideas quickly rather than endless theorising. After all, we knew we had to experiment to make progress.
The approach the 30% Club took was to think big, start small but start now.
The fear of what might go wrong
In 2016, Harvard Business School Professor Iris Bohnet, the author of the acclaimed book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, wrote a case study about the rapid rise in the number of women on UK boards, something that has so far eluded the United States. Iris invited me over to help teach the case study to the first group of students. I had never even been to a Harvard MBA class, let alone taught one, and it was a fascinating experience. Professor Bohnet split the 80 students into five groups, each role-playing one of the parties involved (the government, the cross-party task force established under Labour peer Lord Mervyn Davies, the 30% Club, the executive search community and investors). The students’ first task was to list the difficulties they saw ahead. I then explained what had actually happened, whether the anticipated problems arose and how we overcame them. It was an intriguing exercise. The students came up with a cumulative total of no less than 53 potential problems. Many did arise and I started my remarks by noting that it was lucky I had not heard them before we embarked on the campaign, as it would have seemed an impossible task.
It is so easy to come up with reasons not to do something. There is always something that might go wrong. It is often very hard to envisage how to navigate through problems before they arise – but when we encounter them, I’ve found, we can often cope and find a way through. It’s very important not to panic at the lack of visibility or the unexpected twists and turns but to see that as part of the journey. That holds true in our careers as well as our personal lives, and helps us achieve so much more than if we hesitate over each step for fear of not being able to see the next or of how we will cope when we get there.
As it turned out, despite the wobbles and setbacks, the 30% Club’s timing caught the mood of the moment. The financial crisis created real appetite for change, then a few months after the 30% Club launch, Lord Davies concluded his cross-party public review into the scarcity of women on UK company boards. He made ten recommendations: like the 30% Club, he backed voluntary action rather than mandatory quotas. Lord Davies told me at the time that he had a number of reasons not to recommend legislation: one was that his daughter would ‘never speak to him again’, another was that the 30% Club chairmen supporters had promised that if given the chance, they would deliver progress through voluntary action.
Over the next five years the Davies Steering Committee and the 30% Club formed a powerful double act, combining supportive public policy with private sector action. By the time we reached our shared self-imposed deadline of end-2015, the results for the FTSE 100 fell between Lord Davies’ 25% and our 30% goals. Over 26% of FTSE-100 board positions were held by women (we finally broke past 30% in September 2018) and there were no longer any all-male FTSE-100 boards. The next biggest 250 companies had achieved even more progress from their weaker starting position: nearly 20% female directors (over 27% today) and just 15 all-male boards (now down to five).
This wasn’t an extrapolation of the past, it was a big leap forward.
It was very exciting to see this jump in the numbers – but even more exciting to see a change in the thinking. The issue was now being seen through a different lens. And success led to more success, increasing the acceptability of what we were aiming for so that eventually it just became expected.
(From Professional Boards Forum BoardWatch, data provided by BoardEx and The Female FTSE Board Report)
In November 2011, I interviewed Sir Philip Hampton for the 30% Club website. At the time of our interview he was chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, having taken that role after the bank had been bailed out. One of his immediate tasks was to appoint a new board. It is unusual for the chairman of a big company to have carte blanche and Sir Philip talked me through his thought-process. The previous 18-member board was far too big, as well as homogeneous. Sir Philip set about creating a 12-member board, with at least three women, some international experience relevant to RBS, and also, as he put it to me, a blend of experienced directors with fresher faces. He wanted diversity of character and background: 12 former CEOs would not make for a good boardroom dynamic.
As we were talking, he said he wanted to tell me something that he thought I would find encouraging. Every year, a group of FTSE-100 chairmen gathered for lunch. They had met almost exactly a year before, when the 30% Club had just formally launched. The conversation turned to the initiative, and there was a very brief discussion about whether this was something that should be supported – Sir Philip said that it was quickly closed down as ‘not really for us’. The same annual lunch had taken place just the week before Sir Philip and I were meeting. This time, the topic had been extensively discussed and there was no question over whether to support the initiative. Instead, the chairmen were asking each other what they were doing to actually meet the target. What a difference a year can make.
But it wasn’t just the zeitgeist or the combination of voices that made an impact. The 30% Club’s tactics were different from anything that had been tried before – in some respects deliberately so, in others more a stroke of luck.
Through both the campaign’s successes and failures, I learned a lot about how to effect change. I believe it’s a replicable formula that can help us reach our bigger ambition of gender equality.
There were seven success factors. I’ve mentioned five:
seizing the opportunity created by dislocation
focusing on the business aspects, rather than ‘merely’ the fairness issue
having a measurable goal with a deadline to create urgency
involving men with the ability to change things, and
being open to new ideas.
The sixth was something of a ‘fake it till we make it’ approach. The 30% Club took one step forward but we would act as if we had taken two. We talked up the progress, we celebrated good stories, we were confident. This did not always come easily. But I could see that people wanted to become part of a successful movement and that there was a circularity to that success. The more progress we made, the more progress we were likely to continue making.
The intriguing aspect was, the bolder I became in my requests, the more likely the response was to be ‘yes’. One particularly ambitious event was a Washington DC breakfast, generously hosted by KPMG, and deliberately planned to coincide with the 2014 IMF conference. The US chapter of the 30% Club had just been launched and while Peter Grauer, the dedicated and energetic founding chairman supporter, would be on the West Coast at the time talking to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about the campaign, we saw an opportunity to raise the 30% Club’s global profile just before the IMF’s official business got under way in DC. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and father of four girls, would be attending the conference so I asked Sir Roger (who was then serving as a non-executive director on the Bank’s Court – this is a tight-knit community) if he could see whether the Governor might be prepared to speak at our breakfast. The answer was encouraging but not definite. The Governor’s office explained they could not ‘mark-up’ his diary but said that Mr Carney was minded to accept if he was free. This left me in something of a bind. I wanted to encourage global bank chiefs to come to the breakfast, but they were much more likely to do so if the Governor was speaking. I spent a week of our family summer holiday hand-writing notes (which kept flying into the hotel pool) to invite CEOs and policy-makers to the event, indicating that we expected the Governor to be our speaker. Meanwhile I kept the Governor’s office up to date with the list of expected influential attendees, as that would surely increase the chances of his attendance. Brenda Trenowden of ANZ Bank, who later took on the mantle of leading the 30% Club, worked tirelessly to round up those acceptances. Finally, it was confirmed that the Governor would speak. Unlikely as it seems, this whole precarious plan, infused with a dose of bravado, paid off. The room was full of influential men and women and the Governor spoke openly and eloquently about the Bank’s 300-year traditions and the importance of diversity in creating a modern culture. The bank CEOs, seated at tables at the front, took turns with the microphone to contribute their own thoughts and ideas about how to accelerate progress around the globe. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
The 30% Club’s final key success factor was taking a feminine approach to solving a business problem.
The word ‘feminine’ divides people. Some object to the very idea that there are characteristics more generally associated with girls and women. Of course, there can be as much (or more) difference between individuals of the same gender as between the genders. That is, in my view, perfectly compatible with using the words ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ to describe traits more commonly found in either girls or boys. It certainly doesn’t mean that those words apply to every individual girl or boy.
I’ve also encountered the anxiety that by using the term we may perpetuate gender inequalities. In fact, I believe the opposite may be true. If we understand each other’s (average) differences better, we can develop more ‘gender intelligent’ strategies to encourage both men and women to thrive, rather than try to force everyone into a system that tends to motivate one or the other. It’s important to recognise that we can be equal but different if we’re really going to achieve progress.
To become equal, but to stay different.
Punch Magazine, August 1971
(© Punch Limited)
It’s a contentious topic, and we’ll explore it more fully in the next chapter. For now, let’s use ‘feminine’ as perhaps imperfect shorthand for the approach that defined the 30% Club. We were not looking to assume the traits of the group that we were aiming to join – not trying to simply replace a few men with a few women who were just the same. The goal was, and remains, more diversity of thought, of approach, of behaviours. The 30% Club’s approach therefore emphasised, not downplayed, difference and in particular the qualities associated with women and girls: empathy, social sensitivity, collaboration, kindness and gentleness.
Encouraging voluntary action rather than legislation or quotas to achieve our goal of more women on boards was the most obvious manifestation of this feminine approach. Forcing people to do something would have completely undermined what we were trying to do. Quotas are very much command-and-control, a confrontational rather than an empathetic approach. Few people seemed to understand this, focusing on the speed of attaining results, not what those results really signified. The 30% Club’s ambitious goal was that men and women would become unified in desiring boards with a better gender balance, and that this would help improve culture throughout their organisations, as well as increasing the numbers of women on boards. We wanted to ensure not only that the very best people serve on boards, but to open up the definition of ‘best’ so it did not mean ‘just like the existing directors’.
Another symptom of our feminine approach was to be open source, to partner not only with the Davies Committee but with many others who were already doing great work in this area. There was no sense of competition, helped by the fact that the 30% Club was not a diversity business, simply a group of business leaders focused on achieving results. Members of the Steering Committee included leaders of successful initiatives like the Professional Boards Forum, which introduces chairmen to women with the ‘undiscovered’ potential to be non-executive directors. The Forum stages events where candidates solve fictitious boardroom problems: its success rate (attendees appointed to boards) is impressive, with more than 50 alumnae appointed as non-executive directors to date. We had no desire to reinvent the wheel but looked to provide cohesion to fragmented efforts, as well as fill in any gaps.
Through this joined-up approach we created a ripple effect, gradually widening out our radius of influence. Importantly, that included the media, which got firmly and consistently behind the campaign, amplifying our voice. Heather McGregor, now Professor McGregor, Dean of Edinburgh Business School, then Mrs Moneypenny, Financial Times columnist and one of our brilliant 30% Club Steering Committee members, was instrumental in keeping the story on the front pages. Everyone involved was generous with their time and expertise; numerous intensive research projects were conducted on a ‘pro bono’ basis, as was the broader publicity campaign, masterminded by Gay Collins, another stalwart member of the Steering Committee. It was incredible really seeing how determination and dedication could achieve so much, with no money changing hands.
Without being especially conscious of it at the start, we were drawing towards us people with the ability and authority to change things, to the point where they believed in the desirability of the goal. If they came to think of it as their own idea, so much the better. I discovered a new power of persuasion in myself, intensified by strong allies. Sir Win Bischoff spoke about my tactics onstage at a dinner some years later in New York: ‘Without us realising what Helena was doing, she was getting us to do the work,’ he said, with a broad smile. Several of the chairmen and I became good friends; it was fun making progress in such a positive, harmonious way. The chairmen came up with many of the specific ideas: Sir Win made an impromptu announcement onstage at one 30% Club event that we would now set a 30% target for women in executive roles and, in front of the bemused audience, asked me, as I sat in the front row, what timescale we should set for that. Sir Roger suggested that chairmen deliberately instruct search firms to look beyond their comfort zones and specifically at least one level below their normal seniority levels for boardroom candidates. Robert Swannell, then chairman of Marks and Spencer, kept up the pressure by stating frequently that he would rather have joined a 50% Club.
I soon saw just how much more could be achieved once those on the inside campaigned for those on the outside to join them. I firmly believe that male champions of change are important if we are to see real progress. For a start, men saying they wanted more women to join them were so much more convincing than if I’d said we should have the opportunity. Stated by a woman, the message can seem self-serving or become blurred with the fairness argument; stated by a man, the business case is – for now – heard more clearly.