What would make a 29-year veteran of a business up sticks and leave? At oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, Linda Cook, formerly head of gas and power, was passed over for the top job and is doing what one blogger calls the decent thing and leaving.
Speculation is that incoming CEO Peter Voser could be merging her division with production and exploration and cutting 30 per cent of senior management.
So staying on might not have been an option — although you can’t help thinking Voser could’ve done well to to keep such a safe pair of hands on the board, particularly in light of the roasting the business is currently taking.
Why was she passed over? Evidently, Voser was more known among the investment community and had gained valuable outside experience as a turnaround expert at Swedish engineering group ABB. Some didn’t even see Cook as a contender, according to Womenomics.
All of which bears out research published by talent strategy specialists DDI. While doing some global research, DDI stumbled across a corporate Bermuda Triangle into which talented working women seem to disappear.
But unlike Cook, most women don’t step off but fall off the career ladder long before they reach the top, says DDI’s “Holding Women Back”.
The problem’s that women are being excluded from fast-track talent development programme and are missing out on learning opportunities that they need to get to senior executive level.
So why aren’t they doing anything about it? According to DDI’s research, they don’t actually find out until it’s too late. Women “are not only less represented at the highest levels of an organisation, but processes are in place to ensure the situation doesn’t change”.
They aren’t being granted the same access to high-potential talent development opportunities, and although it’s not a case of deliberate exclusion, it shows the difficulty companies have in making board-level diversity a reality.
“There’s an expectation that women hit a glass ceiling, but it happens much earlier than that,” says DDI senior consultant Mary-Rose Lines.
The situation’s been allowed to continue because most high-potential programmes are “conducted in secrecy” — neither men nor women know they’re being groomed for stardom and so they don’t know what goals they are hitting or missing along the way.
The idea that women lack vision and this stymies their progress has already been quashed by BNET’s readers. But men in business schools may still believe it, says DDI’s report.
Then there’s women being their own worst enemies by losing heart and dropping out of the race. Lines’s advice: “Become more tuned in to how decisions are made and do not assume good work speaks for itself.”
From the corporate viewpoint, what’s needed is a dose of objectivity and more formal succession programme. Shell’s already better than many — although by July it’ll have just one woman on the board. But until most companies see the benefit of diversity, things aren’t likely to change.
But even if women were granted equal access to the ’star’ programmes tomorrow, there’d still be a problem that affects both sexes: if you’re the one who’s passed over, (which is bound to happen to a majority), is it really essential that you leave?
In a world of supposedly flattened organisational structures, why do sideways moves still look like a demotion?
