Women Know Your Place: The Boardroom

2085942 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:00:00 GMT

I feel like a Russian doll. I get smaller and smaller as the testosterone in the boardroom gets bigger and bigger. I tell myself I am a confident woman yet the environment I am in makes me feel I must change my persona and adapt to my 'male' surroundings. I must cut across people when they speak. I must hammer my point home with authority. I must emit an odour of superiority. I must show the world I am King.

So many women behave like men in the Boardroom. They feel they must emulate men to be successful. Many of the senior women I work with are not women I would aspire to be like. More like men in drag. This lack of appeal is one of the reasons why only 6% of women make up company board members. Cranfield's survey finds Alliance Trust, AMEC and Marks and Spencer as the companies with the most women on their boards.

I want to propose a new style of Boardroom where women can openly use the traits they have: femininity, intimacy and authenticity. To create an agenda that is open, transparent and supportive. The Boardroom should not be a place for corporate politics but a place for productive intimate business.

Gestalt talks about how boards of directors tend to operate in ways that seek to minimise ineffectiveness. Trevor J Bentley, in relation to Gestalt, says

“Relationships on boards are often tenuous, superficial and dishonest. They are quite often transitory subsytems of people who support each other out of personal interest. The best that most boards achieve often through share option schemes, is to align the self interest of individual directors with the interest of shareholders. This approach tends to create a short term price focus that is nearly always to the detriment of the long-term sustainable growth and well-being of the business.”

This pretty much sums up why we are in a financial crisis. A group of money hungry men had short term personal goals of becoming richer without thinking about the long term consequences of their actions.

I want a far more 'intimate' and 'authentic' environment: Bentley states that there are 2 parts to working in an intimate system.

The first is knowing what I am prepared to offer others is what they want.

The second is knowing that what I want is what others are prepared to offer me.

My experience is that most people in meetings are never clear or open about what they want. It takes a series of long pointless and frankly ineffective meetings before you start to find out the other party actually wants. You have to “play the game” (countless times I have been asked to “play the game”-each time I am told this, I feel myself revert back to my Russian doll).

Once you are finally clear about what the other parties want, the quality of contact increases and people relate to each other with a degree of authenticity. Its a bit like when you have the frank conversation with your new boyfriend about what you want from the relationship. Once the hazy fog of second guessing has been lifted and everything is so much simpler and more enjoyable.

Today in the boardroom, I watch women emulate men, leaving the men to dictate the rules of the boardroom. Women must be prepared to use their feminine skills in a productive way and men must be prepared to build cultures that thrive on diversity and tolerance not conformity.

A feminised boardroom is not one where you would pink up the environment and dumb down the agenda. A feminised boardroom is a supportive place where both women and men feel safe in revealing what their intentions are upfront and then get on with the job at hand. How refreshing.

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Women Know Your Place: The Boardroom