A CLW SPECIAL FORUM
This section begins with profiling the research and work of Professor Deborah Kolb from the Simmons School of Management in Boston, Massachusetts. Professor Kolb's article "It Pays to Ask: Negotiating Conditions for Leadership Success" presents some very interesting insights into what women should negotiate for if they aspire leadership roles in a workplace. My interview with Professor Kolb follows her findings and conclusions as stated in her article, It Pays to Ask: Negotiating Conditions for Leadership Success "Contrary to popular belief—that women fail to seize leadership opportunities or position themselves to succeed as leaders—the women in our study were savvy about what they needed to succeed and then asked for these things." You are invited to pose any questions/comments/feedback you may wish to raise about women and leadership. Please Email me your questions before 16 January 2008. Professor Kolb's responses will be published at CLW in this section on 1 March 2008 together with your writing. You can ask as many questions as you wish. Your questions may be about the resource article below, your personal experiences and concerns about your own leadership development or career development issues. I hope that you will make the most of this interactive section which promises to feature other practitioners of leadership in the future. Diann Rodgers-Healey
Introducing Professor Deborah Kolb
Deborah M. Kolb is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel
Professor for Women and Leadership and a faculty affiliate at the Center
for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons School of Management.
From 1991-1994, Kolb was Executive Director
of the Program on Negotiation at
Professor Kolb is an authority on gender issues in
negotiation
and leadership,
especially how women can negotiate the
conditions for their own success at the same time as they contribute to
the effectiveness of their organizations.
Kolb has co-authored several books on this
subject.
Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden
Agendas of Bargaining (Jossey-Bass/John Wiley, 2003) shows women (and
men) how they can become more effective in their everyday negotiations
by attending to the dual requirements of the shadow negotiation –
advocacy for oneself and connection with others.
Originally titled, The Shadow Negotiation,
Harvard Business Review named it one of the ten best business books of
2000 and it received the best book award from the International
Association of Conflict Management at its meetings in
Kolb publishes extensively on these topics and
regularly presents her work to national and international audiences.
Among other firms, Kolb has recently done
work with:
Campbell Soup, Credit Suisse First Boston,
Deutschebank; Deloitte and Touche; Eli Lilly; EMC, W.L. Gore,
IBM, JP Morgan-Chase,
Nationalgrid; Phillips Medical,
Pricewaterhouse/Coopers; Time, Inc., and Verizon.
Non profit organizations she has worked
with include: The Ford Foundation, The Consultative Group in
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), Girl Scouts, USA, The
Society for Human Resource Management, Financial Executives
International, Financial Women’s Association, the Mayo Clinic, Network
of Executive Women, Women in Technology International, among many
others.
Dr. Kolb is a principal in Negotiating
Women, LLC., a company that provides negotiation training and
consultation especially designed for women.
Kolb has been affiliated with the Girl
Scouts, Patriot’s Trail Council, as a board member, vice president and
president (2001-2005).
In 2006, she was awarded their Leading
Woman Award.
Professor Kolb is also the author of The Mediators
(MIT Press, 1983), an in-depth study of labor mediation.
She is co-editor of Hidden Conflict In
Organizations:
Uncovering Behind-The-Scenes Disputes
(Sage, 1992), a collection of field studies about how conflicts are
handled in a variety of business and not-for-profit organizations.
She the editor of
a study of the practice of successful
mediators, Making Talk Work:
Profiles of Mediators (Jossey-Bass, 1994)
and of
Negotiation Eclectics:
Essays in Memory of Jeffrey Z. Rubin
(Program on Negotiation, 1999).
She has authored over 100 articles on the
subjects of gender, negotiation, conflict in organizations, and
mediation.
Kolb is on the editorial boards of the
Negotiation Journal, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Harvard
Negotiation Newsletter.
Deborah Kolb received her Ph.D. from MIT’s Sloan
School of Management, where her dissertation won the Zannetos Prize for
outstanding doctoral scholarship.
She has a BA from
Interview with Professor Deborah Kolb What would you advise women to focus on when developing a progressive, strategic path if they would like a career trajectory leading to executive leadership? I want to preface all my responses by saying that when I talk about women—, I am not talking about all women. There is much diversity among women and the situations they face are different. I am talking about tendencies. One always needs to pay attention to context and how that shapes opportunities, the likelihood of a glass ceiling and what women can do to succeed if they find themselves in these circumstances. Having said that, women, often, but not always need to create opportunities for themselves. This can happen for several reasons. First, women may not be given assignments that are as valued as others—not the choice clients, human resource types of assignments. One needs to understand what kinds of assignments lead to success and seek these out. Second, some jobs are gendered in that men may be offered them more frequently than women. If a woman sees such a role as important—she may have to engage a hiring person in rethinking the requirements or skill set for such roles. Finally, there is anecdotal evidence that women often have more lateral moves than their male colleagues to be seen as equally ready for more responsibility. So a woman may have to push back on these assumptions.
Second generation gender
issues are accepted cultural norms and work practices that look like
they are natural and neutral but can have differential impacts on
different groups of men and women.
For example, if a parent wants to negotiate
a flexible work arrangements, s/he does so against an assumption that an
ideal worker is one who is totally committed to the organization.
Or if a woman performs what we call
invisible work, being available to other women to help and support them,
or being asked to sit on diversity task forces—these activities are not
likely to be rewarded in the same way that taking on a strategic client
might—therefore the person doing this work needs to negotiate value for
that work—or else it does not count.
That is correct.
We tend to think about negotiating
primarily in terms of salary and
compensation and we know that women, for a host of reasons, do not do as
well in these negotiations.
When negotiations are framed solely in
terms of self advancement, women can experience backlash when they ask.
But what we have found is that to the
degree that a woman ties what she needs to succeed to what is good for
her organization or group, that backlash dissipates.
It is also the case that if you get what you need
to succeed it is more likely that other things—such as compensation—will
follow.
That is a great question that
gets asked frequently.
Let’s start with the experience piece.
You need to be quite clear as to why you
think you will succeed—just thinking that working hard and giving 200%
will do it are not good reasons why somebody would hire you.
Everybody claims that they work hard. You
need to figure out what your value proposition is to the employer.
What specifically do you bring/
If you are clear about that, and that is crucial,
then you might be able t negotiate a trial for yourself with clear
metrics on how the employer would judge your success. You would also
want to negotiate for the support you might need to help ensure that you
can deliver those results.
This is a situation where
knowing about the other person and context is critical.
Is this a person who says yes but then
doesn’t follow through.
Then I would send an email following up the
meeting specifying your understanding about what was agreed to. The
other person may still renege but at least it creates a record.
That can be especially important if the
person who made the agreement leaves and you are dealing with somebody
new.
On the other hand, if the person you are
negotiating with honors their commitments, I don’t see any reason to
follow up.
Organizations need to recognize how second generation gender issues may be hampering women. So some of the things they could consider are—looking at assignment patterns—are women and men being channeled into different paths? They could consider the kinds of mentoring and support they give to men and women so that they can understand how informal networks may be functioning to make it easier for men to succeed—they might get feedback from these networks in ways that women don’t. The more transparent policies and practices are the more likely it is that the playing field might level. Of course, one of the most critical is how the boundaries between work and personal life are managed and the degree to which notions about ideal workers drive decisions about leadership. Women who have disproportionate responsibility for this will be hurt. Finally, they can develop programs for women to help them understand how gender operates in their organizations and the skills they can develop to negotiate for what they need to succeed. In the process, it helps the organization learn as well. How do you see what you say about women and leadership in relation to the prevalence of the glass ceiling? Do you believe that women can break through the glass ceiling if they negotiate through out their career and in their negotiations ask for opportunities that translate into leadership experience?
Yes, I do believe this.
But I believe not just because I think it
is up to individual women to challenge the glass ceiling.
But because what we know from demographic
studies, the more women in leadership, the more likely it is that other
women will see these as role models and see that they too can succeed.
I also think that to negotiate about these
second generation gender issues (and I do think women need to think
about how they engage these issues so that they don’t foment backlash)
they are pushing back on organizational practices and policies.
I believe that this can foster learning which is
good for individuals and good for their organizations.
I became interested in these
issues because of my students—both MBA students and executives.
Companies come to the Simmons School of
Management because they are committed to moving women into leadership.
But what I found was that commitment was
not enough.
We know new leaders fail at high rates—I
found that the women executives I was working with were not being set up
for success.
Their companies were not doing it and
neither were they—so I used these stories to help women and their
companies develop strategies to help women succeed.
These are in both my books—Everyday
Negotiation—which gives women (and men) strategies to negotiate the
hidden agendas that accompany all negotiations and Her Place at the
Table—which helps women(and men) figure out what they need to negotiate
about.
All negotiations occur in the
context of gender schemas and stereotypes—some more powerful than
others.
Women need to pay attention to how these
schemas may be operating.
One of the things I find is that when women
take one of my workshops, they feel empowered to negotiate.
Sometimes that empowerment can translate in
to very aggressive stances and that often does not sit well with people
on the receiving end.
Women need to learn how to effectively
mange some of the double binds that accompany their negotiations—they
need to negotiate what they need but do so in a way that fits who they
are.
Successful women negotiators have discovered how
to do this effectively.
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