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The Female FTSE Board Report 2016
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Our target philosophy for EMEIA is ‘fair representation, no dilution and no regression’ at every
rank for all elements of the talent cycle – recruitment, retention, promotion, performance
rankings and scheduling of assignments. So if 30% of your manager pool is female, we
would expect the number of women to be promoted to the next rank to be at least 30%.
How can you argue with this approach? If the number of men promoted in any year exceeds
the supply pool they are coming from, you are saying that the men, in general, are stronger
performers than their female counterparts – this is unlikely to be the case.
From the early days of our diversity and inclusive leadership journey in EMEIA we set gender
targets for the number of women we wanted to see promoted to partner over a three year
period. Initially we asked the business to identify their high-potential women and make sure
that they were sponsored, they had detailed development plans and they attended at least
one of our leadership development programmes, i.e., we wanted them to be proactively
managed.
We started to see progress in our promotion rates, but that progress was slow. In 2014, we
asked our global analytics team to look at all of our data from the last five years and predict
the number of female partners we would have by 2020 if we carried on doing what we had
been doing to date. Despite the great work that we saw in every geography, the prediction
told us that by 2020, we would be flat on our current number. The team then modelled five
different target scenarios for both recruitment and promotion and asked us how ambitious
we wanted to be.
Our Executive chose to be ambitious and set a target for reaching 20% female Partners
by 2020. A year later we reported to them on progress and it was good, but still slow
moving. By now our Executive were totally engaged and getting impatient and they decided
to send a strong signal out to the business by mandating the targets and linking them to
performance. Over that time period we moved from 15% female promotions to partner
to 28%. The secret to success is simple – articulating what you are trying to achieve and
holding people responsible.
Of course the targets need to be realistic to engage the business and there will be times,
such as when we are making acquisitions, when some moving pieces are out of our control.
What we have found to be most effective is when the targets are cascaded through the
business and accountability is established on multiple levels. We feel that for this approach
to be effective, you have to have the right culture – one that is committed to your agenda
with people who want to drive progress and feel like a key stakeholder. If you just impose
something on your business you will cause distrust and unrest with both your talented
women and men and targets will be divisive.
Case Studies