Made it to the top - but the view's not what we expected...

I know I've banged on quite a bit about women on boards, but here's a health warning. 

It seems that when women do get to the top many are faced with a glass cliff and left dangling over a dangerous company precipice.

Women are more likely to be appointed to leadership positions
when an organisation is in crisis.

By 2015 Lord Davies wants 25% female representation on boards (yes, one in four – an odd way of construing equality I know). And this year’s figures suggest everything’s on target to achieve it. In the FTSE100 women now account for 15.6% of all directorships, up from 12.5% last year. And although there are still 11 all-male boards, at least that’s down from last year’s staggering 21.

But last week, when talking to Ernst and Young about diversity, a lovely lady there alerted me to the notion of the glass cliff. 

Yes, we’ve heard of the glass ceiling – that invisible put impenetrable barrier that hinders female advancement in the workplace -  and even the glass escalator that gives men a smooth ride to the top, but the glass cliff? 

It comes from research by Ryan and Haslam at the University of Exeter who, in a systematic study of the performance of FTSE 100 companies before and after appointing a board member, found that companies who appointed a woman were more likely to have experienced consistently poor performance in the months preceding the appointment.

This is both good and bad news. It demonstrates that companies are willing to do something different in times of crisis. In fact there's more recent evidence that  a crisis disrupts traditional stereotypes of what makes a good leader, favouring female attributes over male. But it's a bit like taking over the controls after the car has been wrecked and Ryan and Haslam  include a note of caution in their paper, saying:

Positions on glass cliffs can be seen as being exceedingly dangerous for the women who hold them. Companies that have experienced consistently bad performance are bound to attract attention to themselves and to those on their boards of directors … In this way, compared to men, women who assume leadership offices may be differentially exposed to criticism and in greater danger of being apportioned blame for negative outcomes that were set in train well before they assumed their new roles.

Ryan & Haslam (2005),The Glass Cliff: Evidence that Women Are Over-Represented in Precarious Leadership Positions, British Journal of Management.

Number of women, not IQ, determines how smart a group is.

I know I've discussed this before but the evidence just gets more and more fascinating.

What makes a group (such as a board) really smart?

It’s not their collective intelligence but a high level of emotional intelligence. 

Studies show that:

• Groups that are really effective listen to each other.
• They share constructive criticism.
• They have open minds.
• They’re not autocratic.
• They have an equal distribution of conversational turn-taking.

When I reported to the Financial Services Research Forum last year that having three women on a company board tripled profitability, I didn’t realise what a huge topic this would become. Since my paper on the topic was published in Significance, more research has come to light that’s even more fascinating.

Imagine that you have a really smart bunch of people in the room. 
How would you measure their collective intelligence? The straightforward answer might to be measure the IQ of each individual, then work out the average to obtain the group IQ.

Not just small and smug-looking....

It turns out that IQ scores tell us nothing about the intelligence of the group.

One other factor does. 

The number of women in the group. 

No kidding.

Professor Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon gave subjects aged 18 to 60 IQ tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team completed several tasks, like brainstorming, decision making, visual puzzles—and had to solve one complex problem. The intelligence scores of the groups were calculated, based on their performance.

You might expect teams whose members had higher IQs to have scored highest. 

They didn’t.

The teams with more women did.

An amazing finding. When Anita Woolley published this in Science* and was interviewed for the Harvard Business Review she said:

You realize you’re saying that groups of women are smarter than groups of men.

Woolley: Yes… part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance. Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.

As I said in my previous posts, it's diversity not expertise that makes the group effective. I'll shut up now. Perhaps ;)

*Science 29 October 2010: Vol. 330 no. 6004 pp. 686-688