By Elaine Maddison, CEO, Brightsolid
FOR the uninitiated, today is International Woman’s Day.
The theme for many events taking place around the world today promotes “Balance for Better”.
Balance is not a women’s issue, it’s a business issue. I’m a great believer in the power that balance – in its widest context – brings in terms of delivering performance.
As the CEO of Brightsolid, my primary responsibility is to deliver value to our shareholders. With diversity and long-term value so clearly linked, bringing balance must be a priority of mine, otherwise I’m missing out on a vital opportunity for the company I lead.
Unfortunately, a female CEO is still seen as a “novelty”, and at times, opportunities to have a voice arise solely because I am female. This brings an inner conflict for me at times as I often feel a responsibility to take advantage of those opportunities.
There is an irony, though, as many opportunities are biased towards talking about gender and I would rather be a voice that promotes diversity and inclusion for all.
No one feels valued or included in an organisation if they feel they have only achieved their success because of their gender, ethnicity or culture; they want to be recognised and valued for what they bring to the table.
One of the problems with a gender-led approach is that humans aren’t only one thing. “Intersectionality”, as coined by Kimberley Crenshaw in 2014, reflects the idea that we must hold in our minds “all of who someone is, simultaneously”. That’s quite a complicated thing to do, not only because we must think that someone is a mix of their race, gender, class, ethnicity, age, among other attributes, while at the same time, combine all of that with values, experience and personality traits such as intro or extraversion. You can’t simply focus on recruiting more people of a specific gender, race or ethnic group to fix the problem – you must concentrate on making the whole complex individual person feel valued.
As leaders, we’re encouraged to be our “authentic selves”, but welcoming and accepting true authenticity in our teams is key.
Organisations that will succeed in this will concentrate on making all employees feel “welcomed, valued, respected and heard” , because when they feel this way, they contribute all their ideas, thoughts, energy and heart.
Worldwide analysis shows that total engagement in the workplace has been steadily falling, with only 13 per cent of employees saying they are engaged in work. Authenticity is vital; letting people be themselves and not trying to make them conform to a perceived stereotype.
It is extremely important that we don’t undermine encouraging people to be authentic by creating barriers to authenticity. Bias that leads to unequal pay, inequality in recruitment, disparity in voice or decision making needs to be scourged from our organisations and we should continue to do everything to make such issues, especially trends, more visible. However, we need to ensure that resolutions truly lead everyone concerned to feel that they can be authentic in their workplaces rather than simply produce broad-stroke solutions.
We need to be celebrating the individuality of everyone we work with and actively look at how we welcome, value, respect and hear every single person in all their complexity. That’s a significant investment in our time but perhaps a start is simply with each of us asking who did I welcome, value, respect and hear today?
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