Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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very effective power strategy to praise individuals who have made valuable contributions after the meeting and in private.

Finally, make sure that everyone is equally involved, including the quieter members of the team. If men dominate your team, ensure that any women present are fully involved. In male-dominated groups, they are often ignored and will also be interrupted twice as often as men when they are talking (Manning and Haddock, 1995; Tannen, 1995).

One example of an organization that solved some difficulties with team meetings, by creating a ‘Team Charter’, is presented in Table 5.1.

Table 5.1 Team rules

Always attend team meetings or

•let your team leader know in advance

•send a replacement or brief other team members

During team meetings

•be punctual

•one person at a time speaks

•respect other people’s views

•use interactive management skills

•look for objective evidence – don’t rely on ‘gut’ feelings

•the team must agree on appropriate courses of action

•only team leaders liaise with other teams

Source: Western Mining Company (Kwinana Nickel Refinery), Perth, Western Australia, ‘Team Rules Charter’ (February 1999)

By way of contrast, here are a few tips for ruining meetings for other people:

•Be late. This shows how important you are and that you don’t give a damn about anyone else.

•Don’t bother to read the agenda before the meeting. Then you can waste everyone else’s valuable time by asking unnecessary questions about items on the agenda.

•Ramble on for as long as you like, particularly about topics that have nothing to do with those being discussed. Make sure you get your say on every topic, even if you know nothing about the issue being discussed.

•Don’t bother listening to the contributions made by other people. Interrupt and contradict them at every opportunity, particularly if they are younger than you, or further down the organizational pecking order.

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•Be as obstructive as you can if new ideas or innovations are suggested, because you are an ‘experienced’, ‘practical’, ‘commonsense’ manager who hasn’t got time to listen to airy-fairy ideas – particularly from junior staff.

•Make disparaging comparisons with all the fantastic things that you have done in previous jobs, or in other organizations, whenever you can. This will show the people you now work with how wonderful you are and what a sad bunch of losers they are.

•Try to force your ideas through at every opportunity because you are always right and, after all, you can’t make decisions by committee can you?

•Leave your mobile phone/pager on throughout the meeting, and don’t forget to bring some food to munch on while you are not hogging the limelight.

We’ve all met characters who do these things, but they only get away with it because everyone else lets them. Hence, in common with many other organizational activities, effective meetings are only possible if their structure and processes are well managed, and there are clear and well-established norms and protocols governing how people behave in meetings. Ineffective meetings are often dominated by windbags, characterized by time wasting and point scoring, and are unable to convert discussions and decisions into concrete action plans. However, the practical suggestions for managing meetings outlined in this section do work. We know this because it is not possible to find a single example of a team that uses these techniques that does not also enjoy useful and productive meetings. If you have problems with ineffective meetings in your organization or business, why not give these a try?

Attendance required – on time; no substitutions without prior approval; no gossip; no sidebar conversations or secondary tasks; really listen; stick to the subject; comments limited to three minutes each; jokes and fun are okay.

(The Team Meeting Rules of Jim Kilts, CEO of Gillette, 2003)

Attend all meetings. Start on time – end on time. Leave your stripes at the door. Listen constructively. Respect each person. Keep an open mind. Criticize ideas, not people. Question and participate. Make decisions by consensus. Remember what’s said here, stays here. Encourage laughter.

(Boston Bank USA, Team Rules, 1994)

Conclusion: leading successful work teams

High-performing and successful work teams don’t just happen. Leading these well requires the effective use of most of the leadership, motivation and communication skills identified in Chapters 1, 3 and 4, as well as those covered in this chapter. To recap, these include:

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•an awareness that building a team from scratch requires time and energy being devoted to team building, identifying the skills, competencies and personal attributes that are needed, and recruiting a suitably diverse group of team-members;

•wherever possible, keeping the number of employees in any team to between six and eight, with the ideal number being seven. If you are in charge of very large groups of employees, organize them into smaller sub-groups of seven if you can;

•focusing on empowering the team, rather than trying to ‘manage’ it and using inclusive language such as, ‘We’, ‘Our’ and ‘Us’ whenever you can, not the exclusive, ‘I’, ‘Me’ and ‘You’;

•being consistent and positive, staying calm and always setting a good example. Your followers will imitate your actions, particularly if the group is under pressure or underperforming;

•not making promises to your team members that you can’t deliver on;

•agreeing and establishing individual roles and tasks with each member of the team and ensuring that these are clearly communicated and understood;

•creating a team climate where people feel comfortable with open, frank discussions, where differences of opinion can be freely aired, without recrimination or fear of ridicule;

•establishing a team culture that fosters a sense of pride and emphasizes the special nature of your team/group, by referring to its traditions and achievements in the past;

•involving all members of the team in discussions, even if you ultimately make the important decisions;

•giving all of your team’s members some personal attention, providing appropriate feedback to individuals on their work performance, and rewarding team members fairly and equitably for both their individual and collective efforts;

•preparing for and managing team meetings effectively, by making use of the practical strategies described in the preceding section.

Because team-based working is now so commonplace in organizations, and almost all employees in medium and large enterprises now work in teams of some kind, it is important that leader/managers have some proficiency in team participation, team leadership and team management. As we have seen, merely putting people together, without thought and planning, and calling them a team, will not produce desirable results. Teams only work well when they are engaged in tasks that really matter to them, when there are clear rules about how the team should work together and a shared understanding of the roles of each member of the team. There are many examples of organizations that have introduced effective team-working practices. Equally, there are

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organizations that have not been successful, usually because they have not thought through the consequences of these changes before implementing them (in particular, the impact that team-working practices have on traditional hierarchy-based command-and-control styles of management). Team working is going to continue to revolutionize organizational processes and the challenge for leader/managers, now and in the future, is to create effective and successful teams that people want to join and contribute their best efforts.3

‘Together Everyone Achieves More With Organization, Recognition and Knowledge.’

(Old acronym)

‘There is no “I” in team.’

‘A champion team will always beat a team of champions.’ (Slogans in sports clubs all over the world)

Exercise 5.3

Having read through this chapter, think about how you can apply any new insights you have acquired in your team leadership practices, and the way you manage meetings in the future.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Notes

1If you would like more information on the process of team formation and leadership in newly formed teams, please refer to Carlopio et al. (2001: 471–99).

2A few researchers have suggested a fifth stage: ‘adjourning/exiting’, when the team’s life cycle is at an end and its members disband.

3Managing teams of employees in virtual organizations is reviewed in Chapter 10.

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Until the 1980s, almost all commentators on leadership and management ignored the simple fact that organizations employed both men and women. As Amanda Sinclair has observed, ‘although there has been passing attention given to men leading women, it has been men leading men that has captured the imagination of researchers and biographers and spawned their fascination with military and sporting exemplars’. She suggests that there are two reasons for this oversight. The first is absence: there were not enough women in senior positions to warrant serious research on female leadership styles. The second is invisibility: there was only one style of leadership and management that merited serious investigation and that was the male style (Sinclair, 1998: 15, 17–26). A third reason is that, until the 1980s, there were hardly any women academics working in the disciplines of organizational leadership and people management. Consequently, women, either as colleagues or as subjects of research, were effectively irrelevant to most male academics in business schools before this time.

Despite this invisibility, women have always been an essential labour resource throughout history, and it has been very much the exception, rather than the rule, when women have not been engaged in work outside the home. However, as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, there were almost no suitable professional careers open to women, although many working-class women did work on the land, in factories and in domestic service. A middle-class woman had almost no chance of becoming an engineer, an architect, a politician, a financier or a newspaper journalist. Why? Because it was widely believed that women were, by nature, either unfit for or incapable of working in most occupations. It was not until after World War II, when large numbers of women had been conscripted into many traditionally male jobs and occupations, while their menfolk were away fighting, that things began to change. By the 1970s, increasing numbers of women had started to compete with men in professional career streams, particularly in Australasia, some European countries and North America. Today, there are female doctors, engineers, accountants, architects, politicians, financiers, newspaper journalists, academics, police officers, fire fighters, astronauts and chief executives, as well as a rapidly growing number of successful women entrepreneurs.

There are now many more women in the workforce in middle-manage- ment positions and an increasing number are entering previously male-dominated professions such as engineering and science. Women have also made huge advances in winning many of the new jobs created in the past 20 years. They are earning more money than ever before, their presence is growing in every profession and they are

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making inroads into occupations that have until very recent times excluded women. These include front-line combat troops, astronauts, fighter pilots, boxers, wrestlers and extreme sports athletes, and there are even a few Mafia godmothers. In certain sectors, such as finance and banking, women have made remarkable advances. For example, in the mid-1980s, women made up 60 per cent of the workforce of the (then) Abbey National Building Society in the UK. However, only 2.5 per cent of their female employees were branch managers. By the late 1990s, the figures were 60 per cent and 50 per cent respectively, a twenty-fold increase (Parker et al., 1998: 56). Between 1995 and 2000, the annual Cosmopolitan awards for the most ‘women friendly’ companies in the UK went to organizations in the finance sector on four occasions. The odd one out was The Body Shop, which, as everyone is aware, was led by a woman at that time.

A small number of women have become CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world. When Carly Fiorina was appointed as the first female CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2000, she received a one million dollar ‘signing-on’ fee, a minimum annual bonus of $US1 250 000, and stock options worth about $US20 million (approximate value after the company’s merger with Compaq in April 2002. Forster, 2002: 16). In the USA, 71 per cent of companies have at least one woman member on the board and in the UK the figure is 48 per cent. In Australia one-third of the top 200 companies had a female member on the board in 2002. In 2000, 9.7 per cent of non-executive directors were women, but this had fallen to 8.2 per cent by the end of 2002 (Harris, 2002; Harvey, 2001). A growing number are entering politics, many have reached senior political office and some have become heads of state. For example, on 15 November 2002, Californian Congresswoman Nancy Pelos became the first woman to be elected as the leader of the US Democrats on Capitol Hill, replacing outgoing house minority leader Richard Gephardt (Reid, 2002).

Many more women are now opting for self-employment. In the USA, the number of female-owned small companies quadrupled from two million to eight million between 1982 and 1997, and women established 75 per cent of all new companies set up in the USA in the 1990s. In 1997, for the first time, women-owned businesses employed more people than the Fortune 500 companies (Gollan, 1997). During the 1990s, women started new businesses at a faster rate than men in North America, the UK and Australia. Approximately 1.2 million small businesses in Australia are operated by women – about one-third of all businesses in the country. They also initiate around 70 per cent of all new business start-ups each year, a remarkable statistic. Women under 30 are now the fastest-growing demographic entity in the small business

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sector. This trend is likely to accelerate over the next few years, with 38 per cent of women in Australia planning to establish their own businesses within the next five years (Harcourt, 2003; Blanch and Switzer, 2003; Fox, 2001).

This social transformation has been driven, not only by economic and social change and universal education, but also by an irreversible revolution in women’s aspirations, driven in large measure by the ‘first wave’ of feminist thinking in the 20th century. This revolution has led to the emergence of workforces that would be unrecognizable to men working in organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. In western industrialized countries, we may also be witnessing what might be the start of a fundamental power shift from men to women, particularly in the under-30 age group and, perhaps, an historic change in the relationships between men and women. This change may represent a shift in power relations and values that could unravel many of the assumptions of 200 years of industrial and social organization, and millennia of traditions and beliefs about the ‘correct’ roles of men and women in society and the workplace.

However, while some women have made major inroads into all professions and occupations, many continue to be employed at the lower levels of organizational hierarchies, and many still encounter discrimination at work. In OECD countries, around 40 per cent of women still work part-time, with little job security and no access to sick pay, superannuation entitlements or holiday pay. They are often concentrated in certain sectors of the labour market, with many still working in ‘caring’ jobs such as human resource management, nursing and childcare, or as secretaries and personal assistants. Very few women have made it into senior management positions in organizations. In the USA, for example, women occupy 11.9 per cent of CEO positions in the private sector. In the UK the figure is 10.6 per cent and, in Australia, a paltry 1 per cent

– down from 2.9 per cent in 2000. Fifty-three per cent of Australia’s top 200 companies had no women in executive positions in 2002, compared to just 14 per cent of US companies (Butterfly, 2002; Casella, 2001). Men still occupy most of the top leadership positions throughout the world, in industry, business, politics, trade unions and in public sector organizations. In western industrialized societies, it is still almost entirely white, Caucasian, able-bodied males who occupy these. As recently as 1995, the US Glass Ceiling Commission commented that ‘America’s vast human resources are not being fully utilized because of glassceiling barriers. Over half of all Masters degrees are now awarded to women, yet 95 percent of senior level managers of the top Fortune 1000 and 500 service companies are men. Of them, 97 percent are white’ (Glass Ceiling Commission, 1995: 6).

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In occupations such as academia, inequalities persist, particularly in the UK and Australia (Forster, 2000e). In engineering, only 5.7 per cent of 65 000 Australian engineers are women, although the number of engineering graduates increased from 4 to 13 per cent during the 1990s (cited in The Australian, 21 February 1999). Women still earn less than men. One-third of all working women earn two-thirds of average male earnings, in North America, the UK and Australia. On average, even professional women are still paid less than men, even if they are doing the same job. For all professional occupations in the USA, UK and Australia, women earn about 80–85 per cent of male earnings. In Australia, there were more than one hundred male executives or CEOs who were earning more than one million dollars a year in the late 1990s. There was not a single woman who fell into this category (Sinclair, 1998).

In an international context, women also continue to encounter structural, attitudinal and cultural barriers. While there are growing opportunities for women in international careers they are still concentrated largely in junior and some middle management positions. They also work in a narrower range of professions when compared to their male colleagues. They are still less likely to be selected for international assignments (often because of ‘family commitments’), face greater problems with adaptation in traditionally patriarchal cultures and – with the noticeable exception of some US companies – are unlikely to receive company support for their male trailing partners. While there is very little evidence that companies actively discriminate against women, there are indications that women are not considered for postings to what can be broadly described as traditional patriarchal societies in, for example, the Middle East. This is evidence of a solid glass ceiling in an international context at the present time. Women are rarely entrusted with major projects in new markets and they face greater restrictions in terms of the range of countries to which they are posted, although they do seem to have an advantage over their male colleagues in terms of European postings. However, all the evidence from graduate careers advisers in the USA and the UK indicates that growing numbers of well-educated and highly motivated younger women are looking for international job experience as a route to fast-track promotions and senior positions in organizations. In other words, these women want international assignments and all the available research shows that women are as motivated as men to seek international career opportunities, and they will be as successful as their male colleagues if selected for these. As increasing numbers of bright younger women seek international career opportunities, those companies which do address these issues are more likely to attract the very best global female managerial and professional talent over the next few years (Forster, 1999a, 2000c).

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What all this indicates is that, while women have made substantial progress over the last 20 years, they still have some way to go before they achieve true equality of opportunity with men. In 2000, the Australian Affirmative Action Agency estimated that it would take until 2175 for women to achieve full equality with men in all occupations and professions (Stevens, 2000: 18). The same is true if we look at the international status of women, where they still have a very, very long way to go in many countries. A 2001 UN survey of gender equality in 100 countries highlighted huge disparities in equality of opportunity for women. The top five countries were Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and the USA, with the UK at 13 and Australia coming in at number 18. The bottom 30 consisted entirely of African, Middle-Eastern and Asian countries (cited in Harvey, 2001). As Amanda Sinclair has suggested:

A vast management development industry has devoted itself to honing leadership skills. Yet there is little evidence that our notions of corporate leadership are changing to reflect or align with the shifting imperatives of a global marketplace. We are repeatedly told that in these times of unprecedented change only those who innovate will survive. But our conceptions of leadership are locked in a time warp, constrained by lingering archetypes of heroic warriors and wise but distant fathers.

(Sinclair, 1998: 2).

The business case for promoting the interests of women employees

For the moment, we are going to ignore legal, moral or ethical arguments for promoting equal opportunities in the workplace, and evaluate the business case for promoting the interests of women employees. As a number of commentators have pointed out, there is a fundamental paradox between the economic rationalism that governs the management of almost all businesses and public sector organizations, and the continuing existence of irrational beliefs and practices that discriminate against some sections of their workforces (Thomas, 1996; Cox and Blake, 1991). While there are marked variations between countries, discrimination usually has a direct effect on a company’s bottom line, with payouts to claimants in the millions of dollars in recent times (discussed below). There can be other direct effects, including the following:

•talented and ambitious women will avoid applying for jobs at companies that have a reputation for discrimination;

•if organizations do not employ women, they may be less responsive to the needs of women consumers in the markets they operate in;