Janina Kugel and other prominent women have reignited the justified debate about quotas for women. Rightly so, in my opinion – an initiative by the German Chancellor on voluntary quotas about 10 years ago failed miserably.
Is now the time for a quota?
And what is still needed?
Should a man take a stand in this discussion at all, or is it better to keep quiet? I have decided on the former. Not only because I have two daughters (and a son) myself, as well as a woman in a management position. In my professional career, I have had mostly women as superiors and was able to accompany the first woman on a German Dax board (Barbara Kux) as a personnel officer.
And over the past almost 30 years, I have been involved in several hundred appointments to management positions in a large corporation. In the process, I was able to observe the emergence of diversity and, above all, discrimination as if through a magnifying glass. Perhaps I have also contributed to this. At the very least, I think there are some valuable insights to share. Above all, however, it leads me to a clear position: we need quotas now! And above all, we need another important measure: the promotion of leadership tandems.
Diversity has long been a goal
As early as the mid-1990s, my employer at the time, a German corporation, had recognized that the management structure was too homogeneous in terms of gender (male) and cultural background (German). At the time, I worked in a department that reported directly to the CEO. Our boss was a woman. Among other things, our unit was tasked with filling the 300 most important management positions. This gave us the opportunity to identify and promote our own candidates. Our explicit mandate was to ensure diversity in the development of young talent. Although the lack of non-German candidates played an important role, because even then 80% of the business was abroad, only a fraction of the managers were from Germany. The lack of female managers in this group was also evident from the low percentage of women in management positions. This led to a significant competitive disadvantage in the labor markets. Later, when I worked for Barbara Kux, I noticed the pull effect a woman at the top had on female executives applying for jobs. Even then, there were fewer women than men among the talent, but more than 30% of the younger talent were women. What happened then? Why have these women not made their way to the top in equal percentages 20 years later? What has become of them?
The decisive moment: the appointment decision
The decisive moment in a career was the staffing meeting, which always took place with the participation of the board members. The discussions there revealed a variety of mechanisms that are important for effectively breaking through the problem of discrimination. We usually had three candidates to propose: one candidate was usually the successor preferred by the business unit – I don’t remember a single case of a woman here! We were able to contribute two further candidates from the pool. In many cases, we deliberately included diverse candidates – at times we always tried to put a non-German candidate and a woman on the list. In some cases, external candidates were also added. The candidates were usually presented on a form – similar to a CV – and we had the opportunity to describe our impressions of potential and qualities – in writing and sometimes orally. The scene resembled a tribunal. For a long time, there were also assessments by external recruitment consultants to ensure greater objectivity. In this round, an exciting discussion often developed about the requirements for a position and various discussions about the candidates and their suitability. The company management, the HR director and our management usually paid particular attention to the various candidates, while the business managers increasingly focused on their own succession candidates. In the rarest of cases, the various candidates prevailed in these recruitment rounds – I can only remember a maximum of two women who made the running in ‚my‘ recruitment decisions. Why?
There was one decisive factor that unspokenly drove the hiring decision – and that was loyalty. Matrix organizations are complex to manage. To successfully implement a strategy, you need political alliances. And those require loyalty. Loyalty arises among successor candidates through years of trusting relationships and networks, as well as through self-similarity in the selection and promotion of their own subordinate leaders. Every candidate who brings diverse aspects to the table (this applies to gender as well as to a diverse cultural background) always represents a risk from the point of view of the decision-maker making the appointment. As mentioned earlier, diversity in management teams was already recognized as an important factor for long-term success – but only in the long term and strategically. In an urgent staffing decision and in the possibly critical company situation in which it often arises, diversity and potential are always the weaker arguments compared to the obvious ones of familiarity and loyalty.
Quotas help to encourage a willingness to take risks when it comes to diversity
What is needed here is an authority that argues for diverse candidates with great assertiveness and strong facts. In the pressure situation, no one in the company management usually dared to do just that – they were too far removed from the business and the role. This role is also a very thankless one for the women at the decision-making table. It exposes them to several potential risks – which is why I have often found it difficult to show solidarity with my female colleagues: Who wants to be suspected of discriminating against male candidates? Don’t you actually need to have grown up in the organization to be taken seriously there? If I stick my neck out here, it’s my fault later if it doesn’t work. Can the candidate do the 60-80 hour job alongside the family?
A hiring process like this is a tense situation in which all subtle and overt mechanisms of risk avoidance – which I cannot repeat all here but which are generally known – come into play. In addition to the many prejudices and distortions of perception among the decision-makers, the fact that diversity always requires a willingness to take risks in the decision between diversity and trust/familiarity also plays a role. In both political setups and corporations, this is always tied to personalities who stand up for diversity and, above all, have the foresight to recognize diversity as a fundamental advantage in a VUCA world.
Committees tend not to be willing to take risks.
This is exactly where a quota helps in any case. It doesn’t have to start at 50% right from the beginning, but can be built up in 5-year increments from 30%. And yes, it will also result in isolated bad appointments – especially where ‚only‘ token diverse candidates have been developed in recent years and no attractive conditions for external candidates have been created. But in the medium term, the quota will lead to a standard that will become established and no longer be questioned. This has been the case with the Green Party for decades, for example. The Greens are now also benefiting from this. In the long term, diversity creates a competitive advantage.
Structural disadvantages for women in management
There is still a ‚but‘: when women were put on the list of candidates, the other side had an important argument: “She’s not ready yet”. And there was often something to that. Many young women’s leadership biographies start very promisingly. They get better grades than men, are very disciplined, and willing to take on responsibility. And then there is usually a break when a family phase occurs. Especially when the first children arrive (in their early thirties). Male biographies usually include very important experiences as team leaders in project management roles, etc., during this phase. Women return to work part-time – often in positions undervalued – and never catch up on this backlog. Only a few women have a care situation that puts them on an equal footing with the majority of male colleagues – including a willingness to travel. Should we wait until social conditions and family roles have equalized? The Corona crisis has shown that this is utopian. We are currently taking steps backwards in terms of gender equality in child care.
Dual leadership as a decisive lever
There is a very effective measure for young women to pave the way to a leadership career that is low-threshold and corresponds to their biographical situation: the division of leadership roles and the admission of dual leadership. A number of organizations have already had many years of positive experience with such a personnel policy model. If introduced correctly, it can be the decisive instrument to make it easier for women to enter a leadership role and, above all, to keep women in leadership roles in education.
To do this, the following is needed:
- Leadership roles must, in principle, be divisible like other qualified tasks – or require a justification and approval as to why this is not the case.
- The double application of candidates is explicitly encouraged.
- Candidates receive extensive professional preparation and supportThis enables not only women to try out a first leadership role. Which is a barrier to entry for many young women – because there are not enough female role models.
Here, a tandem offers many opportunities. There are also enormous advantages for the employer – to name just a few:
- ‚double‘ leadership potential is developed
- Performance peaks can be absorbed more easily by 2 people than by one person
- Availability during vacations and illnesses
- Management spans can be handled more flexibly and on a larger scale
- Modern (flat) management cultures and agile, role-flexible organizational formats are particularly suitable
- It not only suits women, but also the life model of many Generation Y employees (regardless of gender)
- At the same time, a leadership tandem offers older managers an attractive exit model, and such a tandem is a great learning opportunity
- In a VUCA world, a tandem represents a resource for cushioning the ever-increasing complexity and dynamics
- We also need creative minds in partial leadership roles and as individual contributors. So why not a split role in a full-time position?
Experience shows that such leadership tandems are more in line with the cooperative and conflict behavior of women than of men. But they should also be explicitly reserved for men and promoted in the same way.
A task for politics and human resources
This opens up a broad field for future advisory and supportive human resources work:
- How can such suitable leadership tandems be found in organizations (and projects)
- How do you support willing managers both structurally and individually?
- How do you recognize and resolve conflicts?
- How do you supervise and train such tandems?
- How do you discover your leadership style in cooperation with a partner?
- How do you use collegial advice?
- How do managers in leadership tandems learn to lead them properly?
- What operational framework do such leadership tandems need?
For all doubters who consider shared leadership a contradiction in terms – there are countless examples, even in many years of practice:
partnerships in management consultancies, joint medical practices or joint law firms are – incidentally preferred by women – tandem models that have been tried and tested over many years, and from which operational management work can learn a lot. The city of Munich successfully introduced such models years ago – my wife benefited from them, lived in such a tandem model for many years and maintained a management career despite having three children. There are start-ups that professionally support such models (www.tandemploy.de).
And of course, we at Breitenstein have been supporting management tandems in various constellations for years with the help of coaching, workshops, etc., and we ourselves are a management tandem (male) at Breitenstein.
Dual leadership is a contemporary form of organizational culture and talent development. In addition to a gender quota, we need the appropriate legal framework and, above all, coordinated human resources work and collectively agreed employment conditions. Maintaining dual leadership is a very suitable development tool for supporting gender quota obligations.
