The brightly colored Google logo, re-formed as a halo over the head of CEO Larry Page, caught my eye in an airport recently. Under Page’s picture, the cover of Fortune magazine promised a list of the 100 best workplaces, with Google at the head of the pack. My interest was piqued not only by the story of how Google became a great place to work, but even more so by the promise of a discussion about why it matters.

When I saw that cover, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is there any chance, any hope, any dream, that somewhere on that list, I might find a university? Surely some institution of higher education has what it takes to be considered a great workplace, a model of research based education. Surely there are universities with leaders who think being a great workplace matters.

Google is a research organization and in that sense a potential role model for universities. In fact, Google has one of the largest research budgets in the world. They will spend over $5 billion on research in 2012. For comparison, the National Science Foundation in the United States had a budget of $6.8 billion for 2011, while the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission had a 2011 budget of EUR 8.6 billion ($11.25 billion). Perhaps Google has the largest single research budget in the world.

With that kind of money at stake, it’s no wonder that having a great workplace is very important at Google. Great workplaces, after all, increase productivity. No one makes an investment of $5 billion without expecting productivity and significant returns.

Google is famous for its Innovation Time Off program, whereby employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on whatever projects they come up with. Marissa Mayer, a Google VP, has said that 50% of Google’s new products are a result of this program.

Innovation is the buzzword of the day, at least in Europe, where the European Commission recently changed the name of it’s Directorate-General for Research to Directorate-General for Research & Innovation. Google’s success at innovation is indisputable. How do they do it?

Larry Page highlights just a few things beyond Innovation Time Off, which of course is comparable to research time for university faculty members.

They have their well-known perks list, starting with gourmet cafes and well-stocked snack bars. But they also offer on-site gyms, laundry rooms, commuting buses, oil change and car wash services, dry cleaning, massage therapy, hair stylist, fitness classes and bike repair. Why is this smart? It lets people work more, it makes them like to be at work, and some of these benefits help men and women parents balance the workload at home. Could universities create better research environments by offering different perks?

A second important issue comes out of Page’s characterization of leadership priorities. Leadership at Google, he says, is about staying out of the way, supporting the staff and matching people and opportunities.

University leadership should definitely be about staying out of the way — letting people do what they’re good at and respecting the expertise of individual employees. And it should also support the staff, providing what they need to use their professional qualifications best. Those things we at least aspire to, and in many cases we do them well.

But I’m less sure we spend much time thinking about matching people and opportunities. Career development is the concept behind that phrase and I believe universities could better achieve their goals through a greater investment in career development. Larry Page sums this up by stating, “my job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities.” I wonder if we at universities are so focused on staying out of the way, that we leave those who are mismatched alone, unnecessarily destined to suboptimal careers.

Not everyone uses their time equally successfully, and Page notes that Google has become “kinder about tolerating underperformers” — a third point that requires reflection among university leadership. For us, though, it’s not a lack of tolerance, but rather a lack of engagement.

Getting underperformers back on track offers tremendous promise. Extrapolating from a couple of studies, I speculate that about 15% of the faculty of most universities are in a prolonged period of not publishing; it also seems that the top 20% of publishers are responsible for at least half the output of an institution. As far as I can see, we do very little to match our low performers with opportunities at which they would excel. We do very little to get them back on track.

The Fortune article raises many points we should be thinking about. Of course universities are not companies, and in that sense Google is on a completely different planet than we are. But even if we’re not companies, we are employers. People work at universities. And part of the job of leadership at all levels in a university is to create the circumstances for its people to do their best possible work.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. From that simple mission, they create a workplace in which people feel they’re having a meaningful impact, where they are contributing to the good of society, where their CEO can claim that his goal is for Google to lead, not follow. If those aren’t goals universities can sign off on, we aren’t thinking clearly.

If they are, then we need to think about our employees, about staying out of their way, about supporting them. We need to think about making their daily lives easier where we can, and about keeping them nimble and matched with great opportunities.

I want my university to be a great place to work, and I think it matters. I think it’s a vision that can lead us to greater results.

The challenge of becoming a great workplace should pervade any university; leadership at all levels, from research groups, to departments, to faculties, should care about treating people right. It’s the best way to get the best results.

I understand why Google received two million applications last year. It’s hard to read the Fortune article and not want to work for them.

What could they write that would make people want to work at your university?

It could be the CEO of your company, the president of your university, or the director of your institute. Whoever is at the top has to care and has to support action. If we can’t get our top leadership engaged, we probably won’t succeed.

But people who have made it to the top are creative. They might have different ideas about achieving diversity — ideas that sound good, but that probably won’t work. How would that happen? What could we do in that situation?

To get CEOs on board, they need to believe in the cause themselves; they need to believe that gender diversity matters. We must provide the best arguments we can so the people at the top will care.

Read these arguments and the entirety of this article on TheGlassHammer.com.

Women matter.  Women in leadership matter. Women in leadership make companies better. And it isn’t that hard to get more women into leadership positions.

These statements convey the core message of four reports, all called Women matter, that were produced by McKinsey & co. between 2007 and 2010. These reports have become extremely influential, providing basic research for pushing the discussion about gender balance forward. The research results in Woman matter help us argue that creating the circumstances for women to advance is not just right, it’s also smart.

This is how I started a guest blog last week over at 3plusinternational.com. The entry gives a very brief synopsis of the four Women matter reports with links to my original blog entries, the original reports, and other related matters.

I also highlight in this guest entry the single most important factor for succeeding with enhanced gender equality work in your organization.

You can read the rest of my Women matter: why gender balance is smart guest posting at 3plusinternation.com.

Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has become one of the clearest and most articulate voices on corporate gender diversity. In a popular TED talk, Why we have too few women leaders, she offers women three steps they should take for career advancement. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, she talks about what corporations must do, too.

The context that she eloquently articulates is the lack of women at the top of organizations. There are more and more at the bottom and more in the middle. But for the last 10 years in the U.S., Sandberg notes, the numbers of women in C-level positions (CEO, etc.) has been stagnant or declining.

Yet her facts, arguments, and eloquence, haven’t reached Sandberg’s closest colleague. It seems that even a woman at the top can’t convince the man she works side-by-side with.

How many women has Mark Zuckerberg put on Facebook’s board?

There are none. This foolhardy approach to building appropriate expertise puts women in the good company of Afro-Americans, Hispanics, and pretty much every conceivable diversity-relevant group: Facebook is run by white men.

This shows both a lack of confidence in Sandberg and an apparent disinterest in the relevant research. As if that weren’t enough, Zuckerberg’s board is arguably sub-optimal for the company.

Catalyst compares Fortune 500 companies having no women on their boards to those having at least three. For Return on Equity, the companies with at least three women on the board outperform those with none by 46%; for Return on Invested Capital, it’s 60%, and for Return on Sales, those companies exceed the others by 84%.

These are hard numbers to ignore. But Sheryl Sandberg’s boss has succeeded in doing so.

This blog is full of arguments for why it’s right to hire women and for why it’s smart, too. Among other gender equality entries, the four Woman matter reports are presented in a recent series. There are many compelling arguments. Have a look, Mark.

Facebook’s social mission, as Bloomberg recently reported, is to “make the world more open and connected” and to “give everyone a voice.”

The board Mark Zuckerberg has assembled makes a farce of this vision.

Sheryl Sandberg now has the opportunity to call him on it.

As Facebook becomes a public company, its responsibilities increase. One of those responsibilities is economic. And we know there’s a relationship between diversity in the leadership of a company and its economic performance.

Another responsibility is social; it’s important to identify women who are both the best person for a job and those who can also be good role models.

Dear Sheryl Sandberg: You have shown remarkable leadership on the issues of gender equality and the importance of gender diversity in corporations. Today you have another opportunity. Tell Mark Zuckerberg to diversify Facebook’s board. Tell him that his choice is simple: Commit to the business-savvy decision of adding women to the board, or lose the business-savvy woman who has made Facebook worth billions.

Photo: jurvetson

The manifesto is the result of a public consultation carried out by the genSET leadership; it builds on the recommendations of that project and others.

The European Commission invited the scientific community to recommend specific actions that could strengthen the role of women in science and innovation in its new research program, Horizon 2020. Our answer is presented in this manifesto.

The core points are given below. If you’re intrigued, read the complete manifesto and, please, sign it.

We, the undersigned European scientists, scholars and researchers call for integrated and coordinated action on the gender dimension in research and innovation. Striving to enhance the European Research Area and Innovation Union, we wish to:

1 Recognize that past EU Framework Programmes have failed to engage, benefit, and promote women to the same extent as men.

2 Ensure that explicit requirements to address gender issues are included when the priorities of HORIZON 2020 are translated into specific research Calls.

3 Move towards more gender balanced, collective and cooperative systems that: a) welcome diverse leadership styles; b) facilitate more distributed problem solving; c) adopt fair assessment criteria that equally value the inputs of all involved; and d) improve opportunities for different members of society to benefit from science.

4 Consider “whether, and in what sense, sex and gender are relevant in the objectives and methodology of the project” to ensure excellence in research.

5 Assess the merit of women and men fairly.

6 Ensure that the evidence of how gender shapes and is shaped by science is embedded in the science curriculum across all levels.

7 Create research cultures that provide flexible working environments that equally support the careers of women and men by improving the way gender and diversity are managed in universities and research organizations.

8 Ensure that the plans to modernise European universities include opportunities “to enhance the recruitment of women researchers, including women research leaders.”

9 Promote closer collaborations between schools and universities to support efforts to recruit more women into research by creating: a) positive images of women scientists; and b) appreciation of the benefits of science in a multi-cultural, and multi-lingual Europe.

The fourth and final Women Matter report from McKinsey, Women at the top of corporations: making it happen (WM4), gives us good research and a strengthened foundation on which to expand policies and practices.

WM4 quantifies the results of WM3, Women leaders, a competitive edge in and after the crisis. There we read about the relationship between how companies prioritize gender diversity work and the initiatives they deploy. In WM4, the effectiveness of those initiatives gets measured, leading to identification of the best practices.

355 companies provided information facilitating the measurement process. For each of the 13 initiatives identified in WM3, companies were divided into two groups: those that implemented that specific initiative and those that didn’t.

In each group, the percentage of companies with over 15% women among its top leadership is specified. The difference between these gives an index, allowing us to rank the effectiveness of the thirteen initiatives.

I can only offer a hypothetical illustration, since WM4 includes the individual indices but not the numbers behind them. One of the actions is support programs and facilities to help reconcile work and family life. This action get an index of 12. This follows if 30% of the companies that do provide child care have over 15% women among their top leadership and only 18% of the companies that do not provide childcare have over 15% women in leadership. The difference is 12 percentage points; hence, the index.

The highest index is earned by CEO commitment:

• Visible monitoring by the CEO of the progress in gender-diversity programs, which gets an index of 22.

The next two highest indices focus on women’s individual development programs.

• Skill-building programs aimed specifically at women, 19,
• Encouragement or mandates for senior executives to mentor junior women, 18,

The remaining five indices showing differences between the companies that implemented some action and those that didn’t highlight collective enablers, i.e. initiatives requiring the action of the organization rather requiring something of the targeted individuals:

• Performance evluation systems that neutralize the impact of parental leaves and/or flexible work arrangements, 17,
• Options for flexible working conditions or locations, 13,
• Support programs and facilities to help reconcile work and family life (e.g. childcare, spouse relocation), 12,
• Assessing indicators of the company’s performance in hiring, retaining, promoting, and developing women, 11,
• Gender specific hiring goals and programs, 10.

Of the 13 actions studied in WM4, five of them made no difference; there was no significant correlation between use of that action and the percentage of women in the leadership of the company:

• Systematic requirement that at least one female candidate be in each promotion pool,
• Inclusion of gender-diversity indicators in executives’ performance reviews,
• Programs to encourage female networking and role models,
• Programs to smooth transitions before, during and after parental leaves,
• Gender quotas in hiring, retaining, promoting, or developing women.

There is only one action that appears frequently alone, namely options for flexibility. This makes it difficult to gain a deep understanding of the five insignificant initiatives. Perhaps there were very few companies using them; we don’t know. When we have the opportunity for a closer look at McKinsey’s data, we should be able to tease this apart.

WM4 rounds off with a vision of the ideal gender-diversity ecosystem. It’s a rich and inspiring vision — certainly worth a read.

But there’s a more important vision for your organization, and that’s yours. What is it? How will you get the attention of your top leadership? How will you implement development programs and institutionalize the work of gender diversity? Find your answers to these questions. Your organization’s success depends on it!

Related posts: Women matter: gender diversity, a corporate performance driver, Women matter 2: Female leadership, a competitive edge for the future

Photo courtesy of Dave Wilson Photography.

An organization’s capacity to lead through and beyond a crisis can be nurtured and enhanced. Increasing gender diversity in the organizations’ leadership team can help. Diversity gives a greater variety of leadership styles. And that variety, especially in a crisis, will contribute to survival.

To find out what happens to gender diversity work in times of crisis, McKinsey & Co. surveyed 800 companies and published the results in Women matter 3: women leaders, a competitive edge in and after the crisis (WM3). They refer to the recession that began in 2008, but the conclusions apply in any crisis.

Part of the results are encouraging. 60% of the top leadership in the surveyed companies are convinced that gender diversity has a positive impact on company performance.

But implementation is slow: only one-third of the companies have enhanced gender diversity as a priority.

Perhaps implementation is slow because companies don’t know what works or even what to do. Most of the companies that do anything at all, do just one thing: they introduce an option for flexible working conditions. More than flexibility alone, however, is necessary to make progress on gender diversity.

What works? WM3 offers insights on additional measures and it demonstrates the role of leadership priorities in making these happen.

Companies that put the enhancement of gender diversity among their top ten goals widely use four measures beyond flexibility.

1. They actively gather information about their current situation.
2. They facilitate networking and mentoring relationships for women.
3. They include gender diversity indicators in the performance reviews of middle management.
4. And the CEO visibly monitors progress.

If a company includes enhanced gender diversity among its top three goals, they often implement more steps.

1. They neutralize the effects of leaves-of-absence in performance evaluations.
2. They have skill-building programs aimed specifically at women.
3. Finally, these organizations often use gender-specific hiring goals, e.g. requiring that every pool of candidates considered for promotion includes women.

All of these ‘best practices’ contribute to improvement only when increased gender diversity is a highly prioritized goal. And as the goal becomes more highly prioritized, more actions are deployed.

Why should gender diversity be a goal? Its value to an organization is made clear in WM1 (Gender diversity: a corporate performance driver) and WM2 (Female leadership: a competitive edge for the future).

Once a decision is made to engage in gender diversity work, there are three basic procedures that encompass all of the best practices. First, companies must know where they’re at; they must use indicators to identify the areas to be improved.

Second, they must develop systems for promotion and hiring that avoid punishing or rewarding situations predominately found in one gender or the other. For example, career breaks are more common among women than men, so promotion procedures should not punish employees simply because they’ve had a break.

And third, they should take steps to modify attitudes. This can include coaching, mentoring and building awareness of stereotypes — for everyone.

Perhaps top down processes are more common in the private sector than at universities. Professors are independent and they resist leadership. Those traits give universities breadth and lead to breakthroughs.

But universities are also organizations, and in some areas they should show leadership for the societies they want to influence. I believe gender diversity is one such area. If you want to affect gender balance work at your university, the only place to start is at the top.

Related post: 6 steps towards gender balance in 2012

Gender diversity feeds organizational excellence because men and women differ in how they use leadership behaviors.

Evidence for these claims is presented in Women matter 2: female leadership, a competitive edge for the future (WM2). McKinsey’s second Women matter publication focuses on the relationship between leadership behaviors and organizational excellence.

As I discussed in Woman matter: gender diversity, a corporate performance driver (WM1), the first report establishes a correlation between organizational excellence and having a minimum of 30% women among top leadership.

This second study tries to find out why. Why would the presence of women in leadership positions yield enhanced organizational performance? In WM2, focus is placed on one possible answer, namely variation in leadership behaviors.

Drawing from independent research, WM2 identifies nine leadership behaviors that enhance organizational performance.

Five of these are used more often by women: people development, expectation & rewards, role models, inspiration, and participative decision making.

Two are used by men and women with equal frequency: intellectual stimulation, and efficient communication.

And two are used more by men: control & corrective action, and individualistic decision making.

While all nine of these enhance corporate performance, they naturally affect different components of the organizational performance measures that were identified in WM1.

With more women in leadership positions, companies will be rated higher on those components of organizational excellence that are positively influenced by the leadership behaviors that women favor.

For example, work environment and values is an excellence factor that is positively influenced by two leadership behaviors, namely people development and participative decision making. Since women leaders use these two behaviors more than their male colleagues, the presence of women will positively affect work environment and values scores.

By connecting particular leadership behaviors to specific aspects of organizational excellence, we are given deeper insight into the findings from WM1. WM1 established a correlation between the presence of women in leadership and organizational excellence. But there was no basis for suggesting a causal relationship.

When we understand that individual leadership behaviors are a source of influence on organizational excellence and when we tease apart gender differences in the use of the various behaviors, we begin to see a relationship that looks more like causation.

The presence of women in leadership positions causes enhanced organizational excellence because some leadership behaviors are used more often by women than men. Those behaviors yield higher scores for some components used to measure organizational excellence. Hence, they produce an overall increased evaluation of the excellence of a particular organization.

The nine leadership behaviors, however, are not of equal value in facing the biggest challenges upon us. 1000 business executives were asked to rank the importance of certain long-term global trends for their companies. Then they were asked what kinds of leadership behaviors were necessary to tackle the challenges represented by those trends.

The executives consistently identified four leadership behaviors as crucial for their future performance: intellectual stimulation, inspiration, participative decision making and expectations & rewards. Intellectual stimulation is used equally often by men and women leaders, but the other three are used more by women.

Pulling it all together, the report offers a significant conclusion.

Gender diversity has all the key attributes of a competitive advantage: it is difficult to create, it is strongly conducive to current performance, and it is critical for future achievement.

Of course, what is true of a group need not be true of every individual in that group. For that reason, we need comprehensive leadership development programs for both men and women.

This is true at universities, too. We do scandalously little to prepare people for leadership positions. Only once have I heard a PhD student talk about a career path that included first research and teaching, and then leadership. Young academics simply don’t consider this option, and we do nothing to encourage them.

Many universities, however, have at least reached the point where we work with those who have landed in leadership positions to help them do their jobs well. When we train colleagues in leadership, we must create the opportunity for enhanced self-awareness about individual leadership behaviors, as well as the opportunity to learn new ones.

What about organizational excellence? How is that concept relevant for universities? We all care about excellence in education and excellence in research. But do we care about whether or not our university is excellent as an organization?

When I study the research, I conclude that the daily pursuit of excellence in our universities as organizations will enhance the quality of our teaching and research. I believe that increased diversity will be crucial to that pursuit. Do you?

These are the central conclusions from Women matter: gender diversity, a corporate performance driver. In the five years since its appearance, McKinsey & Company’s report has become one of the most visible works on the value of gender diversity.

As we work together to develop the best arguments for enhanced gender balance in academia, we can look to Women Matter for inspiration. (There are in fact a total of four Women Matter reports; I’ll write about the others in subsequent posts.)

It’s true, of course, that arguments for increased gender balance in universities will vary some from those relevant to the private sector; university life and corporate life, after all, differ in some crucial ways, such as the focus on profitability. But we should study McKinsey’s research and ask if the conclusions might be relevant for us.

The argument for the conclusions above has two crucial parts.

Organizational excellence enhances financial performance. Nine criteria for organizational excellence are identified: leadership, direction, accountability, coordination and control, innovation, external orientation, capability, motivation, work environment and values. Employees are asked to evaluate their companies on these criteria.

After studying over 200 companies and over 115,000 individual evaluations, McKinsey demonstrates that the best companies on these criteria are also the most profitable. The top quartile on organizational excellence is more than twice as profitable as the bottom quartile.

Women in leadership enhance organizational excellence. How do we add gender diversity to the story? About 100 of the companies studied provided information on the gender make-up of their management teams. These were winnowed down to two groups: 45 companies with no women in the top leadership and 13 companies with 30% women at the top. This distinction acknowledges that one must reach a tipping point to move beyond tokenism and to reap the benefits of diversity.

How did these two groups compare on the nine criteria for organizational excellence? The 13 companies with women in leadership outperformed the 45 other companies on every single criterion!

The premises of the argument are now clear: women in leadership enhance organizational excellence and organizational excellence enhances financial performance. The principles of logic tell us the conclusion: women in leadership enhance financial performance.

But this research identifies correlations, not causations. To strengthen the story, Women matter reports on a supplemental study.

89 large companies with significant gender diversity in leadership were identified. The financial performance of each company was assessed against the average for its sector. On three different criteria for financial success, they companies with gender diversity in leadership were above average.

The authors of Women matter conclude as follows.

Companies with a  higher proportion of women on their management committees are also the companies that have the best performance.

Women matter reports research results on a number of other topics, including the slow thaw for women, the double-burden syndrome, gender differences on self-promotion, and variation in family structures among successful women and men (raising the spectre of a motherhood penalty).

What does Women matter mean for academia? How do you think we rank on organizational excellence? What measurable benefits might we discover if we invested even more in enhancing our gender balance?

I think improving gender balance will make universities better workplaces. And I think improving the quality of our workplaces will lead to better work. Do you share those views? Why, or why not?

“Gender equality work at the University of Tromsø is clearly a prestige project for the university leadership, which sees gender balance as a prerequisite for success. This is how things should be at every university and college,” said Minister for Research and Higher Education Tora Aasland as she awarded the prize.

This is the fifth time The Ministry of Education and Research has awarded its Gender Equality Prize. The prize is intended to strengthen and motivate universities, colleges and research institutes in their work for gender equality.

The accomplishments of candidate institutions have been evaluated and ranked by the organization Gender Balance in Research - Norway.

“To change the culture of higher education and research requires long term and focused work. Women have entered higher education and research and they compete on equal terms with men. We have shown that we are capable. Yet there is still a significant imbalance in favor of men among the ranks of professors. This is also true among associate professors. This will change over time, but I am impatient. I expect to see increased efforts on the part of institutions in this sector, such that positive developments happen more rapidly,” said Minister Tora Aasland.

[This is my translation of the press release from the Ministry of Education and Research.]

Regarding the Minister’s impatience, see also A slow thaw for women.

Photo courtesy of Gilderic.