The unconscious sealing Women in leadership

In partnership with

TA LEN T B E H AV I O R P ERFO RMA N C E

IM P L I C I T

EXP LIC IT

WOMAN SENIOR WHITE BLA C K GEN Y MA N

A growing number umber of CEOs have gen gender diversity as one of their top 10 priorities. The business case is there there: gender diversity more generally represents a vast, t, untapped potential. But after countless programs, millions spent in training, ning, hours spent co convincing colleagues of the importance of doing the e right thing, frustra frustration is creeping in. The statistics for female participation pation in the workfor workforce for exampleare not moving. Recent progress in mind sciences offer offers clues as to why this is the case. More importantly, they point to effective solutions. Judgment about ut people is a complex process. Most people believe they are as objective ctive as can be, and certainly certain do not differentiate based on gender. We think we know what we think. th But unbeknown to us, our brain makes different decisions. This is b make because we only have access to a small share of the information that it processes. pr The brain directs a number of actions that we execute autom omatically, such as driving, walking, eating, etc. While driving, we are no not conscious of our movements and some of us are even able to come eb back home without paying attention to the road. To judge a person, son, we w consciously gather and treat information from his or her er appearan appearance and past behaviors. But we are also signicantly inuenced by automatic brain processes, unconscious biases which seal our judgment of others and ourselves. The unconscious sealing is a lock preventing us from discovering people in front of us. More particularly, this process seals our perception of women in companies. Though most managers are aware of female leadership skills, they unconsciously exclude them from top positions inuenced by cultural a priori. It is now possible to measure the impact of these unconscious processes, and the results are striking. For example, we recently took an international sample of 800 business managers across various industries, levels of experience and functions. The vast majority of men and women explicitly believe men and women are equally effective leaders. However, when it comes to their implicit or automatic associations, they tend to recognize leadership more easily in unknown men than in well-known female leaders such as the Presidents of Brazil or Argentina, the Prime Minister of Australia or the Managing Director of the IMF. Diversity action plans have most of the time focused on conscious processes and disregarded the powerful impact of unconscious biases against women. We all need to act. The point is not to x the women through leadership seminars for them to become effective leaders. The changes required are much deeper. And they are worth it, not only because they are the right thing to do but also because they simply make business sense. And now, for the rst time, the recent progress in social mind sciences allows us to actually change the automatic perceptions we develop about others. Since 2006, Diverseo has worked with eminent researchers to develop effective business approaches to this issue. We help organizations-businesses but also governments- grab the potential of effective diversity management. In 2012, we partnered with the Womens Forum for the Economy and Society to expand our research and share our ideas. Nathalie Malige CEO

ITS TIME FOR CHANGE!

Most CEOs see the ability to leverage a wider pool of talents as a key strategic gic advantage. More and more, the best performing corporations consider gender diversity (and diversity at large) as a core performance driver, and many have made signicant investments to capture it. Yet actual progress in the demographics of gender diversity is extremely limited. This is true even in corporations with a relatively high number of women at the top, which are often regarded as benchmarks in diversity management. To better understand these disappointing results, Diverseo conducted a global study on perceptions of gender and leadership, measuring attitudes towards women and leadership both on the explicit (i.e. conscious) and the implicit (i.e. unconscious) level. Opening the door to the implicit level, we used a test based on very recent advances in mind sciences to ask male and female business managers how they relate notions of leadership with two sets of characters: well-known female leaders (such as Julia Gillard, Cristina Kirchner, Chanda Kochhar, Christine Lagarde, Irene Rosenfeld, Dilma Rousseff, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Zhang Xin)1 and unknown men.

While most people explicitly believe men and women are equally effective leaders, they tend to associate leadership more strongly with unknown men than with recognized female leaders.
At the explicit or conscious level, most respondents believe men and women are equally good leaders; most of them believe that when it comes to it, they themselves make objective career related decisions about women. At the implicit level, the picture could not be more different: the same respondents tend to associate leadership much more strongly with unknown men than with world-famous and recognized female leaders. It is as if the brain was on autopilot. A growing body of scientic evidence suggests that such automatic, unconscious associations strongly shape our actual attitudes and behaviors. Thus, when it comes to choosing between a man and a woman for a leadership position, even if the woman has actually demonstrated better leadership skills, the man will still probably be promoted. Non-promoted female leaders will often adjust and tend to opt out as a result.
1

Julia Gillard: Prime minister of Australia; Cristina Kirchner: President of Argentina; Chanda Kocchar: Managing director and CEO of ICICI Bank; Christine Lagarde: Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund; Irene Rosenfeld: Chairman and CEO of Kraft Foods; Dilma Rousseff: President of Brazil; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: President of Liberia and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient; Zhang Xin: CEO of SOHO China Diverseo SAS 2012

Interestingly, results are not signicantly different betwee between younger and older respondents. This belies a classic argument in this eld: that time will solve the issue ssue as younger men are more open and stronger female leaders are in their formative years. Our research therefore there suggests that, i f in fact, action is needed. This study helps explain why even some of the best st diversity initiatives have very limited impact: they often focus on wome mens leadership skills with various actions such as leadership seminars rs for women. Such initiatives can sometimes be useful. But they often rei reinforce the prevailing automatic association of female with subordinate eb by evidencing that women need additional training to become effective ive leaders. They also usually completely fail to address the male leaders ers automatic or unconscious perceptions of women.

For the rst time, recent progress in mind sciences provides an opportunity to effectively change mindsets and truly leverage gender diversity.
For the rst time, it puts this massively signicant and untapped performance lever within reach. For the rst time, integrating business consulting and mind sciences provides us with an effective way forward. Lets collectively begin acting to create a more inclusive world for all: its the right thing to do, and it makes business sense! Organizations that want to begin tapping this potential should thus take actions on the basis of scientically backed approaches. Some innovative companies have used such breakthrough approaches to change: Create responsibility for change, Build awareness for implicit associations which can potentially hamper womens professional progression, Collect numbers: measure the potential and understand what the organization could gain by better leveraging all talents and proportionally promoting women throughout the ranks, Ensure that HR processes support and favor objective decisions, Shape the environment with organizational changes that will sustain long term attitude and behavioral change. For example, one of these companies has recently increased the number of women among expatriate general managers from 15 to 35% in only 36 months.

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DOES IT TAKE A GENDER G TO BE A LEADE ADER?

What should a good leader be? Reassuring, smart, experienced, calm, serious-looking and male!

While most people consciously believe that men and women are equally good leaders, in fact, they tend to recognize any random well-dressed grey-haired serious-looking man as a leader more than famous female leaders such as Julia Gillard, Dilma Roussef or Christine Lagarde.
While most people explicitly believe men and women are equally effective leaders, they implicitly tend to associate men with leadership Explicit versus implicit answers in the general population (%)
N = 762

Explicit

Implicit

Stronger association between men and leadership Neutral association Stronger association between women and leadership

20 69 11 20 25

55

Source: Diverseo Womens Forum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Explicit data Which sentence best reflects your option?; Implicit IAT leadership Diverseo analysis

Why does this matter? It does because research shows that the unconscious drives our behaviors. When making a decision about a promotion to a leadership role, implicit associations will lead the majority of business executives to appoint a man instead of a woman, even when the woman is actually a more effective leader. This also matters because it results in women checking out: several studies show that women tend to adapt to environments where they are most often not expected to play a leadership role, and that they adapt their behaviors to prevailing stereotypes. While many people are convinced women have inherently different leadership styles, the latest longitudinal research shows that women adapt their leadership style to their job requirement. Women are often encouraged to take jobs where so called female values are required for success, therefore fullling (and reinforcing) the prevailing stereotype. However, when women take roles that require an assertive, so called masculine style, they adapt their leadership style and act as expected and required to succeed on the job2 . Moreover, while men and women have the same types of associations both at the explicit or implicit levels, men tend to have an even stronger association of men with leadership at the implicit level. 6
2

Through the Labyrinth, Alice Eagly and Linda Carly, the truth about women who become leaders, Harvard Business School.

Diverseo SAS 2012

At the explicit level, people believe men and women are equally effective leaders. At the implicit level, men and women associate men with leadership (even more for male respondents) Explicit versus implicit answers in the male and female populations (%)
Men N = 249

Explicit

Implicit

Stronger association between men and leadership Neutral association Stronger association between women and leadership
Women N = 472

26 69 5
Explicit Implicit

64 20 16

Stronger association between men and leadership Neutral association Stronger association between women and leadership

17 68 5 15 21 30

49

Source: Diverseo Womens Forum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Explicit data Which sentence best reflects your option?; Implicit IAT leadership Diverseo analysis.

Time will not solve the issue.

Our study shows that age and number of years of experience have very limited impact on implicit perceptions.
Age has no significant impact on implicit perceptions Implicit perceptions of women versus men leadership across age groups (%)
N = 762

Implicit

58
Stronger association between men and leadership

56 50 53 18

26-35 36-50 51+

Neutral association

23 19 17 24

Stronger association between women and leadership

21 31 30

Source: Diverseo Womens Forum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Implicit IAT leadership Diverseo analysis.

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Our analysis evidences that respondents from different functions (e.g. marketing, human resources, engineering and operations) or sectors (e.g. consulting, nancial services, media, IT and telco) have different implicit associations of gender and leadership.
Marketing and HR have almost neutral implicit association of gender and leadership while engineering and operations have a stronger association of men with leadership Explicit versus implicit answers Functional analysis (%)
N MKT + HR = 119 N ENG + OPS = 59

Explicit

Implicit

Marketing + HR Engineering + Ops

Men extremely more leaders than women

2 3 4

13 19 18 12 17 13 24 20 78 56 7 8 9 13 8 6 2 29 25

Moderately

Slightly

Women and men equally effective leaders

Slightly

3
Moderately

2 2

Women extremely more 1 leaders than men 0

Source: Diverseo Womens Forum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Explicit data Whic ich sentence best reflects your option?; Implicit IAT leadership Diverseo analysis

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Some sectors have a stronger association of men with leadership Explicit versus implicit answers Sectorial analysis (%)
N Consulting = 114 N Financial Services = 86 N IT,TelCO, Media = 143

Consulting Explicit Implicit Financial services

Men extremely more leaders than women

2 3 1 7 20 20 18

26

Media, IT, Telco

Moderately

7 6 11 10

23 20

Slightly

9 12 67

19 20 25 15 19 11 9

Women and men equally effective leaders

73 69 5

Slightly

6 9 5

6 5 13 11 4 1 4

Moderately

1 2 3

Women extreme mely more leaders than an men

1 1

Source: Diverseo Womens For orum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Explicit data Which sentence best reflects your option?; Implicit IAT leadership Diverse eo analysis.

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Surprisingly, in the Roussef, Lagarde and others vs. unknown men test, identifying the female leaders does not seem to have much impact on the strength of the association of women with leadership.

Identifying the female leaders in the test did not increase participants association of women with leadership.
Recognizing female leaders has very limited impact on respondents implicit perceptions Implicit perceptions and number of women leaders pictures recognized (%)
0 N = 103 1 N = 206 2 N = 157

Men extremely more leaders than women Moderately Slightly Women and men equally effective leaders Slightly Moderately Women extremely more leaders than men

24 20 12 20 13 6 5
3 N = 139

22 19 16 22 12 5 4
4 N = 68

21 18 18 20 7 13 3
More than 5 N = 89

Men extremely more leaders than women Moderately Slightly Women and men equally effective leaders Slightly Moderately Women extremely more leaders than men

17 19 18 15 12 14 5 6

15 2 22 12 22 6 13 10

10 19 20 22

15 8

Number of women leaders pictures reco ognized

Source: Diverseo Womens Forum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Picture number Do you recognize any of these individuals ?; Implicit IAT le eadership Divers seo analysis

Identifying the female leaders in the study y has however howeve ver had an unexpected, slightly surprising impact. When respondents dents recognized recognize ized more than 5 female leaders, they also tended to recognize ize the unknown wn men included in the research (halo effect). 10
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Illustration of the halo effect: when people recognize more female leaders pictures, they also recognize more unknown mens pictures Number of unknown men and women leaders recognized (%)
NUMBER OF MEN PICTURES RECOGNIZED BY PEOPLE WHO RECOGNIZED 0 WOMAN N = 103 NUMBER OF MEN PICTURES RECOGNIZED BY PEOPLE WHO RECOGNIZED MORE THAN 5 WOMEN N = 89

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

97 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 6 6 6 6 7 10 20

37

Source: Diverseo Womens Forum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Picture number Do you recognize any of these individuals?

More signicantly, the study conrms one very interesting fact: role models could be effective.
In line with research on the malleability of implicit bias, men wih female managers have a lower association of men with leadership. Direct, frequent professional interactions with female role models within the organization should be encouraged.
Role models could be effective: manager gender has a significant impact on leadership perception by men Explicit versus implicit answers for male population with male or female manager (%)
N Male with male manager = 140 N Male with female manager = 50

Explicit Men extremely more leaders than women

Implicit

5 4 10 6 13 16 12 13

24

Male with Male manager Male with Female manager

Moderetely

29

Slightly

20 18 66 70 16 27 4 20 4 5 3 4

Women and men equally effective leaders

Slightly

2 2 1 4 0 2

Moderetely

Women extremely more leaders than men

Source: Diverseo Womens Forum leadership IAT June-October 2012; Explicit data Which sentence best reflects your option?; Implicit IAT leadership Diverseo analysis

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WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP: SHIP: ER A CLEAR PROFIT DRIVER

Gender diversity is a signicant, yet massively untapped, performance lever.
Companies with more women at the top are more protable. For example, a Catalyst study demonstrated that gender diversity at the top is correlated with higher shareholder returns 3 . Companies with 20% of women in executive committees generate 34% higher shareholder return than companies with 2% of female leaders. Well-managed diversity does improve performance. In fact, beyond gender, well-managed diversity has a positive impact along the entire value chain (including diversity of thoughts, nationalities, social groups...).
Well-managed diversity has a positive impact on the entire value chain

Source: Diverseo analysis

Catalyst study, The bottom line 2010

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Research also demonstrates that diverse teams generate more ideas than homogeneous teams (by 13% over a 17-week period 4). They also make better decisions than homogeneous ones, making fewer mistakes (7,28 mistakes in reporting facts made by homogeneous teams of jurors versus 4,14 by diverse teams of jurors 5).

However, capturing the potential and additional performance from diversity is not straightforward.
Enhanced managerial skills are required: newly created diverse teams are often initially unstable and quite less effective than homogeneous teams. When assembling a team to reach a quick decision, for example in a crisis situation, a homogeneous team is therefore a better option. Over time, diverse teams will tend to adjust and mimic homogeneous teams, setting or using similar operating processes. After a few weeks, some diverse teams will transcend themselves and leverage differences to capture the performance potential behind diversity.

Many corporations have made signicant investments to attract and include a diverse workforce.
Each year, American corporations spend $9bn just on diversity training6. Yet the vast majority of diversity and talent management initiatives have limited impact in increasing the diversity of senior executive teams. For example, while women earn 60% of masters degrees, at the current pace, it will take 90 years to reach parity in boards7.

Cultural Diversitys Impact on Interaction Process and Performance: Comparing Homogeneous and Diverse Task Groups. Warren E. Watson; Kamalesh Kumar; Larry K. Michaelsen. The Academy of Management Journal, 1993. Sommers, S. R. (2006). On racial diversity and group decision-making: Identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 597-612. 6 Kalev, Dobbin and Kelly study, Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efcacy of Corporate Afrmative Action and Diversity Policies, 2006. 7 Catalyst study, US Women in Management, 2011
5

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LOOK ME IN TH THE BRAIN

Why cant we tap the t potential of women in leadership? Its in our minds! mi
Research in social mind sciences has shown that our brain operates very much like a computer with two processors: Our explicit processor. We call it level 1 of mental operation. It is the one we are familiar with: rational, deliberate, thoughtful. We can explain what we think to others. Our implicit processor. We call it level 2: automatic, impulsive, unthinking. Level 2 performs familiar motor tasks (driving, tying shoes, walking). But it also processes massive amounts of information, and impacts, without us being aware, the functioning of the Level 1 processor.
Our mind: a computer with two processors

To put things simply, we control level 1 but we do not control level 2. And level 2 processes much more information than level 1. In particular, social interactions are always initially level 2 operations. Each time we see someone, we automatically and instantly attribute certain characteristics to this individual, without even being aware of this process. Such attributes will be drawn from our culture or previous experiences with people from the same social group. Sometimes these attributes will

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not correspond to the specic individual in front of us. And these attributes will shape our behaviors. Mistakes we make by attributing the wrong characteristics to one specic individual or situation because of general perceptions of the group to which this individual or situation belongs are called implicit biases. Our social perceptions are very much impacted by implicit biases.

Implicit perceptions, i.e. level 2 mechanisms, are strong barriers when it comes to womens representation in top jobs.
Research shows that implicit expectations of a manager will drive his/her actual behaviors with his team members. In return, they will tend to adjust their behaviors to their managers perceived implicit stereotypes. For example, if we live in a culture with a strong prevailing association of math with men, the differences in performance in math between boys and girls at the age of 13 will be stronger than in countries where prevailing associations between math and men are less strong. This is because, unconsciously, teachers will focus more effort on boys in the former culture than the latter. Similarly, our experience shows that if a manager unconsciously believes that women are poor leaders, chances are that the women reporting to him will indeed be poor leaders.

Most diversity and talent management initiatives focus on level 1 and on women. Recent progress in mind sciences makes it clear that level 2 mechanisms minimize our ability to leverage all talents. We all need to act to create a new paradigm in talent and diversity management.
Many gender specic programs such as womens leadership seminars can help their participants; however, they often reinforce the perception that women are poorer leaders than men, since these programs consider women need extra help to become good leaders. This activates stereotypes and quite often makes things more difcult for women. Telling managers to change through traditional diversity training can have the same effect: at best does not help; often it reinforces stereotypes as categorization mechanisms are impulsive and automatic 8 . Implicit biases have a high impact on our ability to identify, assess and manage talents on a daily basis. We do actually evaluate two peoples potential or performance differently based on our own implicit perceptions of who they are 9. Decision making biases have a substantial impact on performance: not only do they limit our ability to select the most competent candidate for a position, but as expectations drive results they also actually reduce the performance of subordinates about whom we are biased.

Kalev, Dobbin and Kelly study, Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efcacy of Corporate Afrmative Action and Diversity Policies, 2006. Implicit Discrimination in Hiring: Real World Evidence. Dan-Olof Rooth. Discussion paperseries. Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit. Institute for the Study of Labor. April 2007.

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The integration of recent progress in mind sciences with business consulting provides a novel opportunity to boost performance by reducing the impact of automatic mind mechanisms on our decision making processes.
Automatic mental processes are highly powerful and cannot be overridden. Identifying them and developing HR processes that reduce their negative impact is probably one of the most effective levers to develop more diverse leadership groups. Implicit biases have massive impact across all performance levers within organizations; it is very important to address them in a systematic and disciplined way in order to capture the potential value from diversity: At the top executive level: if top executives implicitly associate women with family instead of career, they will not consider bringing women into leadership as a performance lever (on average, 75% of the people we tested show a stronger implicit association between women and family), At the employees and middle management level: if managers unconsciously associate performance with presence, most work-life balance initiatives will tend to fail and the value potential of many women will not be captured within the organization, At the client level: if employees are biased against specic regions, markets or categories of clients due to cultural or racial issues, organizations will not be able to capture these clients. For example, activating stereotypes within teams reduces performance by more than 20% for quantitative tasks.

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WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE TO HELP WOMEN TAKE LEADERSHIP ROLES?

Organizations can follow a three-stage approach to help women grow in the workforce and thus capture incremental value: 1. First and foremost, build awareness and shape the business case 2. Second, collect numbers to target the actions 3. Third, transform the environment

Build awareness and shape the business case

Generate senior management buy-in and instigate behavioral change for top executives to lead by example.
A diversity management initiative is a deep and long-term corporate change management program. In our experience, starting with an awareness seminar for the Executive Committee is the most effective approach to shape such major programs. The seminar needs to be carefully prepared with the CEO, after an initial analysis that often includes a mix of interviews, document reviews and some quantitative analysis to measure the magnitude of change needed. The preparation is essential, because the CEO must be seen as committed already during the executive committee seminar. As part of the preparation, we have found that it is essential to coach the CEO so he/she can share a genuine commitment and lead by example. Indeed, he/she should convince the top team of the relevance and importance of managing diversity well, but also be ready to set clear expectations to all. In our recent experience, the impact of such sessions is generally strong and generates decisions that are as diverse as the organizations that undertake them.

Set diversity as a strategic enabler to capture all talents and clients.

The business case for diversity should be surfaced and discussed, possibly embedded in a compelling statement. Most people tend to limit the business case for diversity to the need to attract and retain the best talents. 17
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With several of our clients, we have identied and shaped much more complete business cases that are clear value drivers. A general roadmap with key priorities to shape the environment and engage behavior evolution should be agreed upon during the session, with a clear assignment of responsibilities among executive team members. The integration of strategy analysis and frameworks with tools derived from high level research on how the mind operates provides very powerful contents to shape a tailored change management program. It helps to put in perspective how managing diversity in general and more specically how reducing the impact of implicit biases can contribute to the achievement of strategic objectives. Successfully demonstrating the impact of diversity on performance and building the diversity business case is key to obtain senior executive buy-in. This will ensure diversity is integrated in company management with a level of priority adapted to its expected impact on performance. The diversity business case should demonstrate how managing diversity can help identify and capture all potential clients. For instance, some market segments may not be considered as potential markets due to employees implicit biases (e.g. relatively poor areas in some countries). Implicit biases are specic to each organization. Actions to reduce their impact should therefore be well adapted to each organizations strategic priorities and business case.

Client insights
For one of our clients in the consumer goods industry, an individual session for the CEO immediately led to massive changes in the gender diversity policy. The CEO asked the Human Resources and Diversity Directors to develop an action plan to increase the number of women in top jobs, especially among expatriates. The organization also reshaped its 10-year strategic plan to better capture a diversity of consumers and create altogether new market segments, including targeting the previously neglected bottom of the pyramid. This led to creating new specic R&D teams, redesigning client segmentation approaches and adjusting product development processes. At another of our clients in the industry sector, a session for the executive committee instigated behavioral change in key succession planning decisions made by the Executive Committee. It also led to a major change in their high-potential identication process and subsequently in most of their human capital processes and criteria. In the nancial services industry, a session with the CEO resulted in workshops with the top 300. Senior executives in all business lines started systematically integrating diversity in their day to day operations. Signicant value was generated. In the private banking division alone, it led to a review of their analytical approach to prioritize clients, a training of private bankers to reduce implicit biases when dealing with female clients and the redesign of some of their key products after recognizing that women had a different approach to managing their wealth. This program led to a substantial increase of female client satisfaction as measured by that clients longstanding barometer and a clear market share in that segment.

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Collect numbers to target the actions

Collect demographic data.
Companies often do not have a precise idea of how diversity fails to take hold. Thus, when designing diversity programs, they often are reduced to one size ts-all approaches. However, to be successful, targeted actions need to be designed on the basis of rigorous, scientic data analysis. Quantitative analysis should be performed based on demographic and human resources data in order to better capitalize on all talent and identify the potential value that the organization should strive to capture. Quantitative analyses are useful to understand the actual root causes for the organizations inability to fully leverage its talent pool. They also enable to surface the gap between the assumptions that organizations make about root causes for the lower probability of hiring, promoting or retaining women and the actual patterns. When conducting such analyses, we found that the wider and deeper the data, the more accurate and relevant the action plan. Most people believe women decide to opt out to take care of their families. This is sometimes true. However, our client work has evidenced several other patterns: in some organizations, few women are hired but once employed, are equally developed and promoted. In others, women get promoted in relatively large numbers to middle management but do not progress beyond (the glass ceiling). This not only contributes to a misleading perception that more women make it as the number of women grows steadily, but also leads many women to decide to opt out, as they realize that opportunities are not forthcoming.
Few women hired but equally promoted Pattern 1
Disguised client example

Share of women dropping at Senior Manager level Pattern 2

Women Analyst Associate Manager VP GM

Men

Women

Men

21 20 17 15 14

79 80 83 85 86 19 13

48 49 42

52 51 58 81 87

Source: Diverseo analysis

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Organizations should also go beyond drop-out points. We found that commonly observed patterns of middle management behavior often had their roots at entry level. Typical questions, such as do women benet from the same development opportunities? should be addressed. Additional dynamic analysis should also be considered both to understand the root causes of the problems but also to set achievable targets, in line with human capital business needs.
Example of fact-based demographic analysis: women do not leave more than men but are less promoted Total* company headcount movements to team leader, from 2007 to 2011
Total headcount
Disguised client example

Male

412

81 53 28
(35%)

852

220 141 166

Female

280 557 132 358

Headcount: men (% women) 224
(32%)

79
(36%)

134 32
(19%)

35

501

311

295
Headcount: 134 women (% women) (38%) Number in level at start of 2007 Promotions into level between 2007-2011 Experienced hires to level 2007-2011
(35%)

190
(38%)

2007 +total intake 2007-2011

Leavers from level 2007-2011

Promotions out of level 2007-2011

Other

Number in level at start of 2011

Source: Diverseo analysis

Client insights
For example, one of our clients believed that women were leaving to have a baby. Our analysis showed that women were less likely to be promoted beyond middle management, and that, as a result, even very promising women opted out. This nding completely changed the approach: retention of young mothers had no impact; the client moved to an approach more focused on the promotion of female middle managers. A wider data set also enables to evidence the subtle impact of implicit biases in human capital management. For example, the high-potential pool of a Fortune 500 company had very few non Anglo-Saxon women and no Chinese or German high potentials. While the senior executive team believed a major overhaul of the complete process was needed, we found that most of these proles were disregarded as a result of a compulsory cognitive test. This test was presented by the vendor as diversity compliant. However, its compliance had been validated in the US. As cognitive patterns differ according to education styles, people with diverse non Anglo-Saxon proles had much lower probability of succeeding at the test. They scored very poorly on the derailers.

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Collect attitudinal data with a focus on implicit attitudes.

A mix of interviews and business IATs (Implicit Associations Tests) can help identify positive and negative associations about women within organizations. Corporate culture shapes attitudes and implicit biases on specic social groups, sometimes even more than the culture of the country in which one lives. We have found that for each social group, some of these associations can positively contribute to professional advancement; others can actually hamper it. Identifying those positive and negative associations has allowed some of our clients to develop much more effective diversity initiatives. Implicit associations about women are sometimes in complete contradiction with implicit associations about performance. Mind mapping can be used to represent specic attitudes that need to evolve for an inclusive environment.
Comparison between implicit associations about women and implicit associations about performance

Disguised client example

Physical appearance

Family

NA

Career

Women

Performance as a senior executive Flexible work Client coverage Technical expertise Availability

Client coverage Technical expertise

Source: Diverseo analysis

Identifying implicit biases can be extremely tricky. Diverseo has developed an innovative interviewing approach to surface automatic associations about specic social groups. While most people genuinely believe they are fair and objective, many have unconscious associations that are in direct opposition with their explicit values. Such associations can represent a clear barrier to leveraging a diverse workforce. They are the result of a combination of factors such as culture, whether corporate, functional or country culture, and immediate personal experiences. After a number of interviews (typically between 30 and 150 depending on project scope), general patterns can be identied within each organization. Biases based on corporate culture (e.g. implicit associations related to what it takes to succeed, but also engineers versus marketers, front versus back ofce, etc.) may be stronger than automatic associations about social groups, nationality or gender. The same implicit associations can thus be relevant in very different regions within organizations.

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Use customized Implicit Association Tests to quantify and prioritize implicit associations.
Research shows the IATs can be effective to instigate the process of behavioral change. 80% of people who take relevant and related IATs before making a decision are more objective than people who do not take the test. IATs need to be carefully selected as people are not biased in general but have specic implicit associations about specic social groups.

Client insights
Business IATs are an open door to level 2 in business as illustrated by several client examples. For instance, one company had focused for many years all its diversity initiatives on improving women leadership skills mainly with leadership seminars for women. The numbers were not moving at all. The results of the customized tests we developed and other ndings in the diagnosis showed that most people in this company had no issues associating women with leadership. However, they did have a strong association of women with family and men with career. The company refocused its efforts on addressing this prevailing association.

Overall, performing a cultural scan is therefore necessary to understand each specic context. One need to surface conscious and unconscious corporate values and attitudes with face to face interviews, analysis of key messages but also small cues that employees perceive in their work environments, workshops and document/process review.

Transform the environment

Reducing the impact of implicit biases in talent management requires a comprehensive program, whose various elements reinforce each other and are aligned to: Foster more objective decision making, Address organizational and structural barriers, Shape the environment through corporate culture: communication, values and role models, Develop effective training programs with sustainable impact over time, Set the right KPIs.

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Foster more objective decision making.

One of our proprietary tools called the HR Process scan aims at identifying how to create, rene or adapt HR processes (from the general to the specic) to increase their objectiveness and efciency. Research and our years of experience with organizations have evidenced that even HR processes which are perceived as best practices often reinforce the impact of implicit biases instead of reducing it. As identifying the best competence is even more important in the current context of economic crisis in mature economies and high turnover in some emerging economies, setting up decision making processes that reduce the impact of implicit biases should be a clear priority: we all tend to unconsciously apply automatic patterns when assessing someones performance or deciding about a promotion, outside of the guidelines of HR processes. These automatic mental processes are highly powerful and cannot be overridden just by deciding to be more objective. Identifying them in light of prevailing implicit biases and developing HR processes that effectively help decision makers reduce their impact is probably one of the most effective levers to develop a more diverse leadership group. While there is no one size ts all solution, some principles apply when reducing the impact of implicit biases in human capital processes. The rst step consists in surfacing potential differentiated treatments in HR processes: do some people have lower performance ratings, potential ratings? Do specic training programs have differentiated impacts? Do people on part time or exible work benet from career schemes that are similar (while being proportional to their working schedule)? In many cases, these differentiated treatments result from a succession of small cues, which, taken in isolation, would still allow objective decision making, but whose accumulation, compounded by decision makers implicit biases, most often leads to a signicantly lower ability to leverage all talents. Some of the frequent factors we have identied in our work include: An overall process structure that does not facilitate the gathering and transmission of fact based performance information such as actual results obtained across different groups of decision makers, thereby opening the door for judgmental assessment of performance, Unclear criteria for decisions such as competencies framework with rather broad descriptions. These tend to induce different types of understanding across different cultures, functions or genders, thereby opening the door to differentiated ratings or career prospects for the same performance across various social groups, Supporting documents that tend to reinforce inferences. We have mainly observed three patterns: documents that provide upfront information that 23
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unconsciously triggers stereotypes or inuences judgment such as previous performance or potential ratings, education, photos or age (outside the US/UK/Australia), etc.; documents that provide too much information, swamping decision makers and leading them to rely on their own informal, subjective appreciation of the individual; documents that provide too little information, thereby requiring open judgment to make decisions. Multiple cues in various elements of the process that tend to inuence decision makers outside of their own awareness such as quantity of text in self-assessments, the assertiveness of words used by evaluees Decisions makers competencies and attitudes: - explicitly favoring their own social group in talent reviews - providing comments on people they have never worked with, still inuencing the relevant decision makers - allocating too little time to talent management, whereas the impact of implicit biases tends to be strongest in fast decision-making processes Quite often, the differences between men and women but also across social groups are striking. Shaping the solutions requires a mix of analytical and behavioral approaches. Beyond just shaping structures and documents, testing the end products with real users by observing the impact of the target process ensures signicant impact. Beyond systematically addressing the issues identied in the diagnostic, the most effective process redesigns have led to the development of simpler, more transparent processes. The criteria for decisions are also much more descriptive and provide much less room for interpretation. They are also much more focused on actual performance thereby directly contributing to value creation.

Address organizational and structural barriers.

Most women manage a dual agenda. Despite a trend of increased participation by men in household and family tasks, women still carry most of the burden of raising a family. Helping women manage this dual agenda is therefore a key lever to enable them to develop as effective leaders. Designing an effective work life balance scheme, one that fosters a high level of performance while allowing employees to better accommodate their individual needs is highly complex. It goes way beyond concierge services in head ofce. Some best in class organizations have designed exible work schemes that have simultaneously increased employee engagement while increasing the total number of productive hours. The success of such schemes comes from a structured analysis of how time is being used, taking a broad view of an individuals time. Far from focusing on time spent in the ofce, this analysis must encompass all activities carried out throughout the day: its a 24-hour approach. Most often, people tend to equate work-life balance with part-time. Best-in-class, effective exible working time policies use a much wider mix of levers such as better leveraging working hours by eliminating some tasks, increasing total working hours by reducing commuting time, allowing people to work remotely. And very importantly, they have adapted their performance evaluation systems. One important area is to dissociate performance from presence, thereby providing employees more autonomy in managing their agendas. In addition, the most innovative companies have surfaced implicit associations about performance and helped managers acknowledge their propensity to evaluate someones performance based on physical presence in the ofce. This last element has proved highly helpful in fostering behavioral change.

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Client insights
One of our clients, a Fortune 500 company, was falling behind its growth targets in emerging markets. Local competitors were grabbing local consumers and resources. Despite our clients superior technologies, these competitors simply understood the local market needs better. When we looked at the talent pool at the local level, we identied that in many countries, the best and brightest of our clients local employees especially women left after a few years to join local companies, primarily because they did not see positive career opportunities and did not feel adequately rewarded. We saw that our clients high-potential pool did not reect its global footprint. Most executive committees were led by expatriates. A rst employee survey showed that our client value proposition was not attractive due to lack of transparency in key expectations and career evolutions, along with a lower nancial offer for top performers than key competitors. A more detailed analysis evidenced that HR processes did not allow objective identication and reward of all talents within the company. They actually increased bias in decision making. We created clusters of countries with homogeneous talent management skills and systems, and identied how decision makers were actually making decisions in each cluster. Some clusters were unexpected: we found that Egypt, the UK and the US had very similar tools; Australia and China used the same forced ranking process. Leveraging our proprietary toolbox, we uncovered explicit and implicit assumptions about various social groups within the company (nationalities, men/women, generations). We designed tools to offset the impact of such assumptions. We set up working groups with a signicant number of managers in most key locations to ensure buy-in, and coordinated the redesign of new bias-free decision-making processes. Such processes included various elements to allow more bias-free understanding of key job contents, performance and potential. We helped our client dene a more transparent HR strategy, positioning its value proposition vs. that of key competitors in both mature and emerging countries and enabling more objective decisionmaking on key elements such as compensation. We also reviewed all remaining existing HR tools and talent management processes to remove elements that could specically increase the impact of implicit bias. A new, user-friendly IT system was designed. It integrated several specic elements to induce and accelerate change, such as allowing users to save signicant time on administrative tasks and sharing appropriate information across different locations. The implementation of the program started with in person training sessions for key decision makers senior management, HR and mandatory online training for all. As a result of this project, the share of local talent in key countries increased from 22 to 29% in 24 months and the number of women among expatriate general managers from 12 to 19% in 24 months.

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Shape the environment through corporate culture: communication, values and role models.
Corporate culture should be adapted to foster expected behaviors. It is often difcult, even for the most senior executives, to precisely pinpoint the attributes of their corporate culture. Moreover, we have found that people often tend to develop opposite explicit and implicit attitudes about specic and key cultural traits. In a number of cases, we saw that surfacing such implicit associations is highly useful to identify actual corporate values and their impact on behaviors. Our approach to manage corporate culture generally consists in setting new explicit corporate values, improving corporate communication both internal and external and improving decision-making processes. Ensuring the visibility of diverse role models, communicating on the positive openness to different leadership styles and coaching executives to become more inclusive is often needed. Perceptions can evolve with a structured communication strategy and clear rules to ensure the visibility of counter stereotypical women. Integrating open-mindedness and diversity in the companys core values and leveraging role models is directly correlated with the successful promotion of diverse proles at the top of the company. Role models are key levers as female managers can act as counter stereotypes for both men and women.

Develop effective training programs with sustainable impact over time.

Organizations need to make decision makers aware of their implicit biases through training. Implicit bias training alone or fact-based decision-making processes are not sufcient to cause perceptions to evolve. Once key implicit associations have been surfaced, and awareness around the question of diversity has been instigated among senior executives, the best training scheme to maintain behavioral change combines in-person training sessions with a structured follow-up stretching in time after the session. The main challenge for global companies when it comes to diversity training is to generate behavioral change for thousands of employees at a reasonable cost. The recent progress in mind sciences provides a new opportunity to address such a challenge by integrating implicit bias awareness tools in large group sessions.

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Leveraging high level research on how the mind operates, we have designed an online, self-paced, seven to eight-week5 comprehensive training program: the Diverseo Implicit Bias Reduction Program. The programs objective is to build awareness of implicit biases and then encourage training participants to apply specic techniques to help them reduce the impact of implicit biases on their behaviour and decision-making. Over the seven to eight weeks, various activities are suggested to participants. Some of the activities are very short (e.g. taking a customized IAT, thinking of a counter-stereotypical individual). Others can take longer and consist in practicing new behaviours such as taking out for coffee (or having lunch with) a colleague about whom they might wish to engage in a more inclusive behavior. In total, over the duration of the program, the time investment in online activities is relatively small (60-90 minutes); participants can (and often do) decide to undertake further diversity enhancing activities beyond the program if they wish. Recent research conrms that the activities included in the Implicit Bias Reduction Program are effective to reduce the negative impact of automatic behaviors and decisions and change attitudes. The impact of our approach has been measured. To our knowledge, it is one of the most effective approaches to transform behaviors and decision making. It ensures improved managerial and collaborative skills and enhances team management and performance over time with online tools. The tools used in our training session instigated behavioral change for 80% of our training participants as they learn techniques to better leverage diversity and reduce the negative impacts of implicit biases. For example, investment banking Managing Directors who have attended our training have increased the percentage of women recruited at Harvard from 10% to 50%, all else being equal.

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Client insights
A global industrial player has decided to generate awareness of implicit biases and provide its workforce with practical strategies to reduce their impact on a daily basis. The program was initiated by a session with 120 global HR directors, followed by a well-prepared workshop with the Executive Committee. This workshop enabled to identify the need for more inclusive leadership, starting with globalized sales and R&D teams, and for improving the odds of promotions for women and international experts and managers. A global training program roll-out was designed. For each of the 9 global Regions, a 3-hour executive committee workshop was prepared to instigate behavioral change within the local executive team and adapt the global strategy to the local context. This session was then followed by a one-day training scheme for each country: in the morning, a 3-hour session for the top team; in the afternoon, a town-hall meeting comprising up to 700 people with customized Group Implicit Association Tests. After attending the in-person training sessions, all participants had access to the Implicit Bias Reduction Program to sustain implicit bias awareness and practice more inclusive behaviors on a daily basis. This scheme allowed the company to train 45,000 employees in less than 6 months, generating signicant momentum for change.

Set the right KPIs.

Measuring progress is important as one should expect what one inspects. But the choice of indicators is important. Women participation at the top should be the result of actions. Measuring demographics as a target makes little sense, as it is not directly actionable. It often leads to unwanted results: to reach the often recommended 30% target, senior executives tend to grab the low-hanging fruit: communication, HR and legal thus tend to be led by women while line management functions remain all-male. Worse, setting gender-related targets can reinforce stereotypes and further reduce womens legitimacy when reaching leadership roles. It is therefore much preferable to set action-related targets such as the participation in training sessions or the pace of implementation of objective decision-making processes. Women representation at the top still needs to be tracked as a result, in order to check the effectiveness of the transformation program, rather than as an end in itself. Each company should develop the right action plan to improve the efciency of talent management, with relevant targets and KPIs. Dashboards involving top executives across businesses and regions are often appropriate tools to foster change.

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Effective change for diversity: from vision to reality

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Diverseo is the preeminent consultancy leveraging the latest advances in cognitive sciences to help global rms enhance quality of decision-making and capitalize on all talents. We generate impactful change in organization structure and individual behaviors for performance. Our clients have obtained signicant results in increasing diversity. We are the exclusive partner of Project Implicit researchers (Harvard, University of Washington and University of Virginia) who invented the Implicit Associations Test. Nathalie Malige CEO Nathalie focuses on counseling senior executives, often CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to leverage a wider range of talents and markets by combining expertise on unconscious bias, strategy and diversity management. Many of the projects she leads contribute improving quality of decision making by reducing the impact of cognitive bias to increase nancial performance. A sought-after speaker, she delivers conferences and executive committees seminars across the globe. A graduate of the American University of Beirut and ESCP-Europe, she held international roles in marketing and strategy consulting at P&G, Diageo and McKinsey prior to founding Diverseo. Hugo Catherine Director Hugo is in charge of business development, client delivery and team management, with a strong focus on Asia. He leads world-wide projects in strategy and human resources, leveraging his cross-cultural experience. He previously managed HR transformation initiatives at Credit Agricole (addressing governance, organization & talent issues) and consulting projects at Oliver Wyman (Paris, New York). Hugo holds degrees in management (HEC) and international law (Panthon Assas). Maxime Legendre Senior Talent Analytics Expert Maxime is a quantitative expert in charge of data analysis. Combining his knowledge of fundamental and applied sciences, he manipulates complex statistical environments providing clients with highly effective insights directly impacting diversity. At the interface of economic and cognitive elds, he designs innovative and business efcient IT solutions, with a focus on mind mapping. Maxime graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and holds a Master in innovation design & management.

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 Diverseo SAS - www.diverseo.com - October 2012 - Photos: Shutterstock