Breaking into the Men’s Room: Five Traits of Women Engineers with a Boardroom Seat
Publication: Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 10, Issue 4
Abstract
The engineering industry is welcoming more women into the ranks, but few have made it through the boardroom door. It is imperative that companies incorporate more women into all levels of employment, but especially upper leadership positions, for three reasons: the labor pool is shrinking, lack of women among leadership dampens an organization’s productivity, and bottom-line results are better for organizations with women on the board. This article discusses these reasons and then describes five traits women (and men) can develop in preparation for effective leadership: persuasively communicate, lead with heart, take care of yourself, see the big picture, and know yourself.
The boardroom of almost every engineering company remains a testosterone-filled room. The engineering industry is welcoming more women into the ranks, but few have made it through the boardroom door. As an example, last year’s Environmental Financial Consulting Group’s CEO conference boasted 251 attendees, of which only 11 were women (4%), and only 2 of these were owners. Sadly, these numbers are typical of companies across the country. The 2009 Catalyst Census showed that women’s share of board chair positions remained flat at 2.0 percent and that women held only 15.2 percent of all board seats, a number that reflects little growth over the past 5 years (Catalyst 2009).
Why Women Are Needed in Leadership Positions
It is imperative that companies incorporate more women into all levels of employment, but especially upper leadership positions, for three reasons: the labor pool is shrinking, lack of women among leadership dampens an organization’s productivity, and bottom-line results are better for organizations with women on the board.
Women make up approximately 50% of the labor pool and influence 70% of household spending in the United States (Catalyst 2009). Therefore, it makes business sense to include women in the decision-making process and to capitalize on this huge source of talent. To not do so allows a significant drain on the efficiency and effectiveness of com-panies. As market conditions align to make talent and skill shortages huge issues again, these shortages loom even larger in the engineering industry. Fewer students are entering college due to the lower birth rate following the baby boom era, and even fewer are choosing engineering as a career. Employers must change not only policies, but also the very atmosphere of the workplace to welcome and motivate women and to ensure that they maximize the pool of talent available for leadership.
The absence of women among the leadership ranks of a company limits and dampens their contribution and motivation, entailing a very real cost to every company. Unmotivated employees do not contribute their maximum capacity and negatively affect the productivity not only of themselves, but also of those they work with. If female employees choose to leave, as many do, the company loses its ability to amortize the training money and time invested in them. Finally, by expanding the pool a company draws from for leadership, all levels of the company benefit. Benefits result from the different ways of thinking and acting that the top candidates bring to the company. Inclusivity and diversity motivate and challenge all employees and ensure that the best decisions possible are made with the help of an increased pool of talent and an expanded set of role models.
A Catalyst study of 520 companies found improved bottom-line results for companies whose board of directors included women. Return on equity, return on sales, and return on invested capital were stronger across all industries for companies with three or more women directors (Joy et al. 2007). The study did not offer reasons for these stronger returns.
In preparation for writing this article, I interviewed many of the women who have made it through the boardroom door of engineering companies. These women represented companies across the spectrum from privately held niche firms in a limited market area to publicly traded international companies with thousands of employees. As a result of the interviews, I found that these women shared five traits that contributed to their success in what is still largely a man’s world. These traits are valuable for achieving success in today’s world and will become more so as we enter the Conceptual Age, as described by Pink (2005) in A Whole New Mind. As jobs that require linear thinking and analysis are rapidly shipped overseas, leaders in a new age must have the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new, to empathize with others, and to craft a satisfying narrative (Pink 2005). The aptitudes Pink described as being required for success in the Conceptual Age bear a striking resemblance to the traits shared by the women I interviewed.
The following sections describe the five traits and include comments and thoughts expressed by the women leaders I interviewed. Numerous studies have proved that leadership characteristics such as these can be learned, so following the discussion of each trait I provide tools and exercises synthesized from other research and readings to help you enhance and recognize your ability to lead. Whether you are a man or a woman, if the boardroom is on your desired career path, read on.
Traits for the Boardroom
Trait 1: Persuasively Communicate
The women leaders I interviewed were unanimous in their view that the ability to communicate in order to align and persuade was critical to their success. The era of command and direct leadership has passed. Leaders must now be comfortable with different thought processes and different ways of expressing thoughts. The world is indeed flat, as Friedman (2007) asserted, and to thrive, organizations must align people of different nationalities, cultures, generations, and perspectives as the world continues to flatten. Many of the women I interviewed stated that they initially underestimated the importance of communication but have come to realize that it is the most important skill to cultivate.
Pink’s (2005) research supports the critical need for persuasive communication. He cited the importance of story, or the ability to communicate ideas and information through stories. Stories encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion (Pink 2005). Stories sharpen our understanding and help us relate to concepts because they include context and are enriched by emotion.
To enhance your skill at persuasive communication, try the following exercises:
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Practice making up stories. Choose a headline, and make up a story about the people and places involved. Notice a person on the street, and make up a story about his or her career, where he or she is going, his or her family, and so forth.
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Make up excuses for people who are acting in undesirable ways. Focus on persuading others to accept this behavior.
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Practice persuading others. Try persuading others in a group where to have lunch or what activity to enjoy on the weekend. Note what techniques work best for you.
Trait 2: Lead with Heart
One of the women I interviewed commented, “Engineering gives us a good foundation for logical thought processes, but leadership decisions must include emotions as well as logic. Women are generally better able to do this than men.” A growing body of research supports her claim. Dozens of studies have shown that women are generally better at reading facial expressions and at detecting lies. When seeking empathy and understanding, both men and women usually turn to women (Pink 2005).
Engineers are trained in logic and have the natural ability to analyze logical data. Most of us are drawn to the profession because it requires linear thinking and logical decision matrices. As we move beyond the design cubicle and become managers and leaders, we find that we must also express and understand our own emotions and those of others that are often not expressed in words, much less numbers. Women are often viewed as weak for letting emotions come into decisions and actions. But leadership is about relating to people and connecting with them to inspire and empower their lives. According to Pink (2005), as we move into the Conceptual Age,
“work that can be reduced to rules … will largely disappear from countries like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. But the work that remains will demand a much deeper understanding of the subtleties of human interaction than ever before.”
Leading with your heart as well as your head is not only an ethical imperative; it is critical to the work of the Conceptual Age. To ensure you are leading with your heart and your head, do the following:
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Ask yourself what your heart says in addition to what your logical analysis says. Does the decision align with your personal values and company values? How does the decision make you feel? How does it sound when you explain the decision to others?
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Measure your EQ (empathy quotient) on one of the many available websites (not all are scientifically based). One good option is Baron-Cohen’s sixty-question instrument at tinyurl.com/dbsd8 (cited in Pink 2005).
Trait 3: Take Care of Yourself
To have the strength to lead with your heart, you must take care of yourself. As one interviewee stated, “Everyone needs to find a way to renew themselves and make time for yourself a priority.”
In addition to handling full-time jobs outside the home, most women still manage the majority of household tasks, such as meal preparation and child care or elder care. Time to commit to these work and home responsibilities is a finite commodity. The energy needed to accomplish everything, however, is another story. Energy can be replenished and expanded by rituals of self-care. Taking care of yourself is just as important for men as for women who find themselves stretched beyond their limits by competing demands. Maximizing the time you spend doing activities that energize you and minimizing activities that drain your energy are an important element of self-care. One way to minimize energy drains is to delegate or hire out activities that drain your energy whenever possible. Every person has different strengths and gifts; the very activities that drain your energy will replenish and energize someone else.
Not only you and your family will benefit when you take good care of you; research has shown that employees who take care of themselves are more productive and focused, which benefits the organization’s bottom line. Southwest Airlines, for example, is one of the most successful airlines today, earning a regular profit while its competitors are filing for bankruptcy and adding fees for every conceivable service associated with travel. (Fees for checked bags have become the norm, but Southwest still does not charge a fee for the first two checked bags.) Their mission statement says, “People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it.” Southwest employees are encouraged to laugh and have fun at work as one way of creating and renewing their energy. The Southwest flight attendants even have fun reciting the federally regulated wording of safety instructions, to the delight of the passengers.
In 2006, Harvard Business Review conducted a study with employees in 12 regional banks in New Jersey. They trained a group of employees to strengthen the four dimensions of energy—mind, body, spirit, and emotions. Using the banks’ own key performance metrics of loan revenues and deposit revenues, the participants significantly outperformed the control group for a full year after the study completion. The study participants also reported positive impacts on their relationships with clients and customers and on their productivity and performance (Schwartz & McCarthy 2007).
The women I interviewed had developed routines for caring for themselves that included the following:
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Hot yoga with husband as yoga partner;
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Reading;
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Learning something new every year—for example, laying new flooring, riding a motorcycle, playing the piano;
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Journal writing; and
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Daily exercise regimen.
To determine what specific areas you need to work on in caring for yourself, take the Energy Audit from Schwartz & McCarthy (2007). In addition, try some of these helpful tips to renew yourself throughout the day:
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Take a brief break every . Get up and walk around the building or the office, and think about something other than your current task.
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Spend more time on activities that you do best and enjoy the most.
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Eat smaller meals with healthy food throughout the day to maintain a constant level of blood sugar.
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Develop a healthy self-care regimen, such as yoga, tai chi, volunteer work, learning a new skill, or meditating, and make it a priority.
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Sing and dance at least once a day.
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Laugh out loud.
Trait 4: See the Big Picture
According to the often-told anecdote, if you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if you place the frog in room-temperature water and don’t scare him, he’ll stay put. Now, if the pot sits on a heat source and you gradually turn up the temperature, something very interesting happens. As the temperature rises from , the frog will do nothing. In fact, he will show every sign of enjoying himself. As the temperature gradually increases, the frog will become groggier and groggier, until he is unable to climb out of the pot. Though there is nothing restraining him, the frog will sit there and boil. Why? Because the frog’s internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes.
Peter Senge, developer of the concept of organizational learning, has used this anecdote to illustrate his point about seeing the big picture. Organizations have processes, hierarchies, procedures, and cultures to respond to crises, like the frog. Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threats (Senge 1994).
Pink (2005) labeled this ability symphony, or the ability to synthesize rather than to analyze, to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields, to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers, and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair. He observed, “Modern life’s glut of options and stimuli can be so overwhelming that those with the ability to see the big picture—to sort out what really matters—have a decided advantage in their pursuit of personal well-being” (Pink 2005). As the women I interviewed noted, understanding the world this way creates an advantage for the company as well.
Most corporations reward the people who excel in advocating their views and solving urgent problems. As a result, difficult questions about the policies and procedures that led to or allowed the creation of the urgent problem in the first place are pushed aside for later discussion and usually ignored as too complex to tackle. People raising those difficult questions about the big picture are often viewed as troublemakers or as not being part of the solution team. Dealing only with symptoms of problems and not with the causes is just one of the ways companies block their ability to excel and stand out from their competitors. Looking at the larger picture and seeing relationships between seemingly unrelated events will lead an organization to outstanding performance.
One of the women I interviewed stated, “I am less afraid to tackle difficult or long-term issues when I look at the big picture and see the long-term point of view.” The ability to see the big picture is an ability that can be enhanced and improved by everyone through practice and exercises such as the following:
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Learn to draw, or learn graphic recording (e.g., World Café, n.d.).
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Look for metaphors every day in the things that surround you.
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Create an inspiration board to see connections and patterns. Pin things that interest you or catch your attention onto a bulletin board, and look for themes or patterns in them.
Trait 5: Know Yourself
“Being self-aware is critical to being a good leader,” commented several of the women I interviewed. Being in a chair in the boardroom can be a lonely and exhausting position. You need to know why you want to be in that chair and do it for reasons that are right for you. To be effective in any position, you must know the unique strengths you bring to your organization and to the position you hold. In Western society, self-awareness has traditionally not been a focus of upbringing or leadership training. However, the women I interviewed all agreed it is critical to find a company that has values that align with your own personal values, and to find that alignment, you must first have deep knowledge of your core values and personal strengths.
Self-awareness and comfort with your own opinions and decision making will translate into confidence when making difficult decisions. Self-confidence will give you the ability to ask, What is it about the way that I am doing my job that results in the outcome we are getting? (Schwartz & McCarthy 2007). Deep self-knowledge will allow you to find your best application in your company and will also help you surround yourself with a team that complements each others’ strengths. When the quest for self-knowledge is part of your daily routine, you will continually learn how to see the current reality more clearly—critical to getting where you want to go (Senge 1994).
The following are practices to help you judge your level of and deepen your self-awareness:
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Compare your self-evaluation to an evaluation of you by others who work with you. The number of matching responses is an indication of your level of self-awareness.
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Discover your Enneagram type, and use the associated information to increase your awareness of the routines and ways of being you use to interact with the world (www.enneagraminstitute.com).
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Capture moments of self-awareness in quiet times and times of stress to strengthen your ability to see current reality clearly. Ask yourself, What do I want right now? What am I doing right now to prevent myself from getting what I want? Use the Moments of Awareness exercise from Senge (1994).
Conclusion
Including and embracing women in the workplace and at all levels of leadership help an organization capitalize fully on the shrinking talent pool. Incorporating women into upper leadership roles and, especially, the boardroom will challenge the thinking of all and ensure that the best possible decisions are made. Diversity of thought and perspective is critical to maximizing productivity and efficiency in these times of rapid change. Including women in the boardroom has been shown to have a dramatic positive impact on the financial measures of companies.
Women who have made it into the boardroom of engineering organizations attribute their success to five traits that are included among the traits Pink (2005) saw as imperative to successful adaptation to the seismic shift under way in the world. Pink believed that the world is “moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.” It follows that anyone with strong abilities in the identified traits will be a major asset to any company, especially in the boardroom.
The five traits these women leaders identified can be learned and enhanced by anyone willing to incorporate new tools and exercises to broaden and shift their ways of thinking. As the Conceptual Age dawns, those who have mastered these traits and abilities will be needed in boardrooms as well as at all levels of organizations. Companies that wish to seize the opportunities that abound in this new age must work to remove the restraints and atmosphere that discourage and block 50% of the talent pool.
References
Catalyst. (2009). “2009 Catalyst Census of the Fortune 500 reveals women missing from critical business leadership.” ⟨http://www.catalyst.org/press-release/161/2009-catalyst-census-of-the-500-reveals-women-missing-from-critical-business-leadership⟩ (Jan. 19, 2010).
Friedman, T. L. (2007). The world is flat: A brief history of the 21st century. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.
Joy, L., Carter, N. M., Wagner, H. M., and Narayanan, S. (2007, October), “The bottom line: Corporate performance and women’s representation on boards.” Catalyst Magazine. ⟨http://www.catalyst.org/file/139/bottom%20line%202.pdf⟩ (June 30, 2010).
Pink, D. H. (2005). A whole new mind. Riverhead Books, New York.
Schwartz, T., & McCarthy, C. (2007, October), “Manage your energy, not your time.” Harvard Business Review. ⟨http://hbr.org/2007/10/manage-your-energy-not-your-time/ar/1⟩ (June 30, 2010).
Senge, P. M. (1994). The fifth discipline. Currency Doubleday, New York.
World Café. (n.d.). Café graphics. ⟨http://www.theworldcafe.com/graphics.htm⟩ (July 6, 2010).
Biographies
Jeannine Wirth is a civil engineer with almost 30 years of experience working for private engineering companies. She is currently the owner and president of RiversQuest Consulting, providing career coaching and training for engineers and engineering organizations. She can be contacted via e-mail at: [email protected].
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 10 • Issue 4 • October 2010
Pages: 162 - 166
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Jul 6, 2010
Accepted: Jul 6, 2010
Published online: Sep 15, 2010
Published in print: Oct 2010
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