Planning, Startups, Stories

Gender Bias is Bad for Business. Period.

What? Is gender bias still an issue? Is there anybody out there who wouldn't argue that it's basically stupid? Apparently.

Over the weekend I picked up on Is Gender Bias Undermining Your Company? on the Harvard Business Online's HBR Editors' Blog. Aside from the fact that it's a good post, and an important topic, I followed some of the links, which lead to some pretty amazing -- and disturbing -- opinions.

One led me to Your Comments on Women and Technology, posted last week by Sylvia Ann Hewett, also on the Harvard Business Review site; which is a follow-up on her post in May titled Women and Technology: the Ugly Truth. Her truth is ugly enough ...

A new study—which I co-authored—to be published next month by the Harvard Business Review (see “The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology”) demonstrates that over 40% of highly qualified scientists, engineers and technologists on the lower rungs of corporate career ladders are now female. In pharmaceuticals, high tech, petro-chemicals, and aerospace, young women are making impressive strides – and garnering rave performance reviews.

This rosy picture is spoiled by one calamitous fact. A little ways down the road, more than half of these women drop out—pushed and shoved by macho work environments, serious isolation, and extreme job pressures.

... but the comments, the subject of the second post, are startling:

The many comments responding to my piece of May 16th read like postcards from the 1970s – from the early bitter edge of the gender wars. I was beginning to absorb this material, figuring out how to respond when I was hit by another deluge—200 comments that came in over a 24 period in reaction to a Q&A in Computerworld.

Both waves of reaction provide deep confirmation of my main finding—that the problems faced by female scientists, engineers, and technologists are enormously serious. These blogs and posts show that women around the country see SET workplace cultures as hostile, predatory and demeaning. They can hardly contain their disillusionment and despair. Take Jessica, Diane, and Anonymous:

“I work with ten forty-something men who work 12 hours a day, read tech magazines for fun, and bond at Hooters….If I counted the number of times I have been sexually harassed, you’d gasp.”
- Jessica

“I am the only woman in a technical position in my company. Many of [our clients] think I’m in the meetings to take notes for the men. Some even apologize for boring me with technical discussions, assuming I have no idea what they’re talking about. Imagine if men had to put up with this on top of the stress and pressures of an IT career!
- Diane

As a female in IT for over 10 years and managed to work my way to the executive level, I‘ve experienced sexual harassment on a quarterly basis. At all levels of the corporate ladder I was propositioned. Me, a married, never “fooled around” on my husband, Brooks Brother suit executive had to fight off male employees at every turn. A male superior even went so far as to place a bet with a male subordinate who would sleep with me first.
- Anonymous

Wow. I'm sorry, I would have thought this stuff was, as she suggests, from the distant past (I know, I'm naive on this respect, perhaps wildly optimistic), but, damn!

So, turning back to the original question is gender bias undermining your company? Here are some suggestions, from Is Gender Bias Undermining Your Company? on the Harvard Business Online's HBR Editors' Blog.

If you’re a male manager, here are a few small, but important, ways to acknowledge your female colleagues' contributions to your organization:

Notice how you interact. When you’re in a small group, do you tend to exchange more eye contact with the men in it? Do you speak more often to men than to women? If you do notice a bias toward men, try shifting your attention slightly. Shake the woman’s hand, and exchange eye contact with her even if she's not talking. If she's being quiet, ask for her thoughts. (Don’t overdo all this, though, as you could raise the discomfort level.)

Actively listen. It’s easy to ‘hear past’ someone who is talking. (Our minds work about five times the speed of our mouths. In our rush to finish the speaker’s thought and put our own two cents in, we shut the other person down.) If you have a bias, it’s even easier to want to interrupt. Slow down and listen. If your response demonstrates that you've heard what she's said, she'll feel more enabled to contribute more fully to your organization.

Do you notice unspoken gender biases in your company? What are you doing, on a personal level, to help address them?

The Business Email Problem of Unanswered Emails

Yesterday I had a not-entirely-comfortable conversation with somebody I very much respect about my email habits. There are emails left unanswered in my email account, and she was suggesting that there shouldn't be. People who write an email to a company address should be answered, she said. You can choose not to with a personal email address, but this is business email.

Hmmm, that's awkward. I find I frequently leave emails in the main inbox because I intend to answer them. Time passes. They get a week old, and then two weeks.

"But I leave them there because I intend to answer them," I said.

"No, that's not right. People are offended when they send an email and it goes into blank space. It doesn't speak well for the company. It's like unanswered phone calls, with the phone just ringing. It makes us look bad."

"But surely you don't mean all the emails I get," I answered, "even unsolicited emails?"

"Well of course not spam," she said, "but yes, I do mean unsolicited email when it's an individual, a person. You can't just leave it like dead air."

This I admit was kind of a new thought to me. I've been thinking that I can leave emails, try to answer them, and if time passes and they fall down below view in the inbox, oh well. I mean I'm not rude or impolite to people I know -- I would answer your email for sure -- but these are just strangers.

"But that's just rude," she said, as I was beginning to waver. "All you have to do is send an email -- you can use a template -- something like "'Thanks for your email, I'm swamped right now, but I want you to know I did receive it and I intend to look into it.'"

"And besides, you can have so-and-so manage that for you, send quick responses to some and alert you to others."

"After all," she said, finally, "that's one of the main reasons we developed Email Center Pro. Business email is about the business, and it reflects on the business. So use the templates facility, have so-and-so help if you have too many to manage, but don't leave emails completely unanswered."

And then she had me.

And, for the record, if you read this blog regularly you know I don't do plugs and promotions in it, but the new management team of Palo Alto Software released Email Center Pro earlier this year, and I'm proud of this new Web app, and proud of the team. Every business should do something -- and I think that something is with Email Center Pro -- to manage its business emails.

Quicksand Problems

It's common knowledge. The best thing to do when you're stuck in quicksand is nothing. Don't struggle. Anything you do except nothing makes it worse. You sink deeper and faster.

This I know because somebody told me, and then somebody else, and then it was in a movie. Like I said, common knowledge.

But seriously, do nothing? What are we hoping for? Rescue. I guess it's obvious, but seriously, we're supposed to sink gradually into the quicksand without struggling. What discipline that would take.

Maybe you touch bottom while you can still breathe. Maybe you're rescued. And maybe not.

Quicksand isn't the only quicksand problem. You find quicksand problems in business, in family, in relationships, in life.

Definition of a quicksand problem: you can make it worse, but not better. You have to have the presence of mind to not struggle, hope for rescue, or maybe touching bottom before you drown.

Examples?  Yeah, that would make sense, make this post easier. It's tough, though, because some of the examples are hard to put into writing.

I think I see personal examples around the problems of giving and taking advice. What do you do when you see someone you care about making (what you think is) a serious mistake? That's especially dangerous quicksand when it's contentious. Can you give advice like a gift, and not take offense if it isn't followed? 

There's a line in an Emmylou Harris song, Boulder to Birmingham, that references standing on a mountain while the canyon is burning. "And I watched it burn." Can you do that? And do you have a choice?

In a business context, there are a lot of quicksand problems related to dealing with people as employees. Misunderstandings. Do you tell her (whatever), or does it make it worse? Do you try to explain, or does that make it worse? Do you clarify an error and make it that much more glaring?

And how about the angry customer who's actually mistaken? Say it wasn't your software, they actually bought a pirated copy with a bad serial number that can't be activated; but they're mad at you, not the pirate. Do you help them out, which validates the pirate business? Or politely decline, which leaves them blaming you? Or the unanswered email that prompted the scathing review which had been sent to a bad return email address, and so, never received? Add a new comment on the review site and you only look worse.

The quicksand problems are there waiting. You just hope you recognize them when you find yourself immersed in them.

Customer Service

It's hard to write about customer service. Most of the blog posts I see talk about what it isn't, not what it is. Most of my posts on the topic are bad examples. Negative examples are more fun. And easier to come by.

Paul Brown's Toolkit column, a regular in The New York Times' Small Business webpage, focuses on For Customer Service this week.

This one caught my attention this morning because it actually includes, of all outrageous things, a definition of what customer service is:

Writing on sbinfocanada.about.com, which offers resources for small-business owners, Doug Howardell of ACA Group, an alliance of consultants, says his group defines customer service as “the ability of an organization to constantly and consistently give the customer what they want and need.”

He also cites some additional positive suggestions from allbusiness.com about how to do it.

Dealing with Idea Ghost Images

I find this fascinating:

"Yes, I think it's a really good idea, and everybody around here really likes it, but what I'm worried about is that when I talk about it everybody I'm talking to sees what they think I'm saying, what they want to be the idea, rather than the real idea."

I'm not going to cite the author of that quote, because it could embarrass him with the others on his team, but it was in a phone call last week.

It reminded me that what he's talking about is a common phenomenon. Until I find a better description, I'm referring to the misunderstood images of the original idea as Idea Ghost Images, a reference to the shadow images you get on television when you have problems with the antenna. They are a reflection of the original images, but they're off. And the more of them you have, the greater the problem.

Have you seen this happen in your business world? Where there's an idea being discussed but each person imagines something slightly (or maybe more than slightly) different? And sometimes companies will move forward and commit to budgets and tasks and strategy without realizing that each person is agreeing to something different. That can cause a whole lot of problems.

It's closely related to what we  call getting everybody on the same page. Maybe we should call it asynchronous idea management, but that's probably getting too techie with the language.

The solution, I think, is completely obvious. It's part of the normal planning process. Define the idea in a concrete way -- document, email, presentation, something that can be recorded and referred to later -- and manage it through that idea definition.

It's amazing, though, easy solution or not, how far we get sometimes without really dealing with those ghost images.  I think it's a common problem.

7 Rules for Email Etiquette

When I was a boy, back in the 1950s, my mother would read to us from Emily Post. She was the etiquette lady of those times. And that was really boring (a 3- or 4-syllable boring, which might be spelled BORING) and seemed useless at the time, but I can't say that it didn't help me once or twice at awkward moments, later in life, to know which fork was which.

Sometimes manners matter. Particularly when they're about making things easier for somebody else.

I'm still working on my cellphone etiquette, which I think is sorely needed these days.

And thanks to Joel Falconer for these simple rules for email etiquette. He posted them as Following Email Etiquette on Lifehack.org.

1. Use Descriptive Subject Lines

Joel points out that people scan subject lines. 

make sure it is concise, clear and scannable. Don’t use awkward phrasing or unusual words, because they take more time to re-read and understand, hence increasing the amount of time it takes your recipient to process the message.

2. Be Brief

He has an interesting insight on this one:

In 90% of cases, email that is more than a page long is too long. Unless you’re explaining complicated concepts or providing detailed instructions (because they’ve been asked for or need to be communicated for a reason), then get back to the core of your message and communicate it quickly. 

In my experience the kind of person who sends an opus for each email is the kind of person who assumes everyone is less intelligent than themselves or feels the need to explain completely irrelevant things. For instance, if you’re a graphic artist, you don’t need to explain the techniques used to create an image for a client when you hand over the work. They don’t care; that’s why they hired you instead of figuring it out for themselves.

3. But Don’t Be Too Brief

Hmm, that seems contradictory, but ...

Context is important.

When replying to messages, clip off as much of the previous email as you can while keeping key sentences quoted in your reply. Ensure you provide contextual details that may seem self-evident to you, but not to the recipient - this is especially true when you’re emailing lecturers. Your course is not the only one they teach, most of the time!

4. Don’t CC if You Don’t Have a Reason

“Just keeping you in the loop” is a frequent reason given for doing this, and while there are sometimes cases where this is a good idea, for the most part you shouldn’t send someone an email unless you want them to take action on it.

5. Reply-All Isn’t Always Necessary

No explanation needed on that one.

6. Use BCC for Bulk Mail

If you absolutely must send a bulk mail to your address book, always, always use the BCC field. It’s a basic privacy measure and not only prevents your recipients from receiving endless spam as a result of your carelessness (who doesn’t already?), but shows your recipient you have respect for their privacy and some intellect.

7. Don’t Use The Forward Button

don’t bother unless someone requires the specific information in the forwarded message to complete their job.

Joel's conclusion: "Email can be a massive waste of time. Help others cut their email time down and you’ll inevitably spend less time on it yourself." 

Reminder: Good Retailing Still Works

We were walking around Granada last week, enjoying some free time, waiting an hour or so for it to be supper time, when we came across a store selling beautifully wrapped and packaged and classified and marketed and displayed chocolates. Here's an iPhone picture:

And I apologize, it's not a great picture but it was a bit on the sly since the owner (I can't image why) was nervous about this strange man taking pictures with his cellphone. I'm not adding name or address or much detail, out of respect for his wishes.

It was a reminder to me about how important design and presentation are in retail sales. You wanted to grab and hold the very well wrapped and categorized packages. The chocolates were segmented very well into types, styles, tastes, and, in a way that seemed to work very well, gift and occasion types.

Well done!

Remembering Fundamentals: Who Owns What

I was talking with somebody yesterday, a man I respect, who was disappointed with his management (not my company, by the way) because he'd been told he was taking "too much ownership."

I laughed. I thought that was a joke. How can too much ownership be bad?

"No, really," he said. "I make decisions on my own. I give people freebies." His upper management doesn't like that. I don't get it. In seminars I talk about how good planning process generates ownership. To me, having managers "own" their areas is the only way to grow a company.

What?! Do you want to have every micromanaged manager in the company coming to you all the time, asking you to validate every decision? That's just plain crazy.

My experience was that Palo Alto Software grew by having other people take over and own parts of the business that I had done originally. Product development, documentation, and (what a relief!) marketing, and accounting, tech support; one by one we found people to own these areas.

I assume as you read this you're thinking something like "well yes, of course, and everybody knows that ... why waste my time with it?" However, this story I heard yesterday was a reminder. People forget those fundamentals that "everybody knows." Do they get jealous of good managers.

The person accused of "too much ownership" had more than doubled his group's revenue in two years. But, apparently, he wasn't checking in often enough with his superiors. What ever happened to "just do it?"  I also liked the image of a bunch of mice, each finding a place to eat on the cheese.

Am I wrong on this? Is it possible for a manager to have "too much ownership?"

But What Have You Done for Leadership Lately?

Today I listened to a 15-minute Harvard Business Review IdeaCast interview featuring executive coaching guru, teacher, and author Marshall Goldsmith, author of the Ask the Coach blog on HarvardBusiness.org and the recent book What Got You Here Won't Get You There.

In the interview, Goldsmith answers some questions that have come up on his blog.

One of the issues he covers is how to influence your boss. The assumption is that the challenge here is not related to managing a team, but rather dealing with the boss and upper management in general. Goldsmith says one important concept that is "incredibly simple" is nonetheless very poorly understood. Everything, he says, revolves around one variable: who has the power to make the decision. It's not about  who is right or better looking or anything else, but who has the power to decide. "As obvious as that sounds, it's amazing how few people get this." When you're dealing with your boss, or bosses, you have to sell the idea. They have the power. "The first thing to do when selling to upper management is think like a salesperson."

In another part of this same interview, Goldsmith addresses the changing nature of leadership. He describes a study of qualities of leadership past and future. Some of the elements were the same -- integrity, for example, and communicating a vision. But they found five new qualities of leaders in the future:

1. Thinking globally. Even leaders in the domestic market need to look globally at workers, suppliers, support staff, and so forth. Even small business is often global. 
2. Appreciating cross cultural diversity. Business in the last century learned to accept gender and ethnicity. For the future, it goes beyond that, towards a much wider sense of what it means to work with different cultures, different religions, and different people.
3. Technological savvy. You have to be technically competent enough to navigate in the new world. Sorry, no way around this one. It's the future.
4. Building alliances and partnerships. Companies don't go it alone anymore.
5. Sharing leadership. Historically the leader knew more than direct reports, in an apprentice model. Today, most leaders manage knowledge workers, who frequently know more than the boss. So leaders have to ask, listen, and learn.

A blog reader suggested that another quality of leadership is "learning agility." Given that the world we live in seems to change more quickly than ever, leaders have to be able to adapt more quickly, and that means learning fast and well. Goldsmith adds also that asking -- as in asking people for input, listening to opinions and suggestions of others -- is a critical factor in leadership in today's world. Leaders who ask for input, listen, respond, and follow up are the new leaders. They don't just communicate down,they listen up.

Employee Satisfaction as a Metric

I was with Oregon Small Business Development Center counselors and directors yesterday doing a workshop on "The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan", talking about metrics, when an interesting question arose.

Joe Austin, an SBDC counselor who (I'm told) has been very successful as an entrepreneur in cable businesses, asked about making employee satisfaction one of the key metrics for a company's business plan. I was taken aback, frankly, because I think of that as a measure of a company's health, something that should always be a major factor, but not, to be honest, something that comes up as a major priority in the heart of a plan.

Still, Joe has a very interesting point. Isn't the general mood of the employees one of, if not the, most important measure of a company's health. I've posted previously on this issue several times, but I was nonetheless taken by surprise with his emphasis.

Later, during a break, I discovered the rest of the story. I'm trying to contact Joe to fill it in even more, but in the meantime, for today's post, what I'm told is that Joe had purchased several companies and made them work very well, after acquiring them. And -- here's where it gets interesting -- his main measure of the value of the company was the employee satisfaction.

This is one of those things that make me say, yes, of course, it should be obvious. But sometimes they take pointing out.