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Why Do More Women Resign than Men?

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Gender Gap

In the UK, now,

  • More women resign than men. More women are resigning now than ever.
  • Women get promoted younger than men.
  • Women are paid significantly less than men – and last year the gap widened.

These findings are from the Chartered Management Institute and Remuneration Economics.

What explains the high rate of resignations?

Is it the sense of injustice at the widening pay differentials as women take on more responsibility – younger – for less money than men?

Do women have more choices that they can exercise? They are more likely to take up self-employment than men. They may also be more ‘in-demand’ than men as their skill sets leave them better equipped to work in a modern economy. The ‘skill sets’ in which women generally outperform men include

  • better improvisational skills,
  • more relationship-focussed,
  • less rank-conscious,
  • more trust sensitive,
  • more intuitive,
  • more collaborative,
  • more comfortable with ambiguity,
  • better sharers of information
  • more able to balance rational thought with intuition and belief,
  • more articulate,
  • better at reading non-verbal clues,
  • better at multi-tasking, networking and negotiating to win/wins,
  • a preference to take the long view,
  • an ability to promote egalitarian team working and a
  • more naturally empowering management style

Or is it because many management hierarchies are still male dominated cultures in which more feminine values linked to the enhanced skill-sets listed above are under valued?

One trend is very clear. Women’s power in a modern economy is increasing. This is driven by their generally superior leadership skills and their influence over just about every major purchasing decision.

This means that organisations that cannot recruit and retain women will be at a significant disadvantage in the marketplace.

“When land was the productive asset, nations battled over it. The same is happening now for talented people.”

Stan Davis & Christopher Meyer, futureWEALTH

Managing People With Passion

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My working life has been spent working with a wide variety of organisations. But they all have one thing in common. Each is trying to make the world a better place. Whether operating in the private, public or third sector they have all been about making things better.

People join these organisations because they:

  1. Want to make a positive difference in the world
  2. Develop their own potential and capacity in making this difference
  3. Want to provide food, warmth and shelter for themselves and their loved ones.

They want to belong in an organisation where they can grow, make a difference and earn a living.

They need respectful and nurturing management. The salary to them is important – but in the long run it is personal growth and making a difference that they really value. They need management that focuses on helping them to make their contribution.

Many of the organisations I have worked with have struggled in this area. People lose their sense of purpose and identity as they become consumed by delivering ‘the service’ or ‘the contract’. They become more technically proficient at what they do – but their optimism and belief slowly fades away and performance slowly degrades.

This process is driven by an orthodox approach to management that focuses on tasks and fails to engage with dreams and aspirations. The noble goals are transformed into routine. There is a famous story about the floor sweeper at NASA who proudly told visitors that he was working to help put men on the moon. Well, in many organisations this process of ennobling a job is completely reversed. People doing great work, contributing to great goals, become reduced to ‘marketing co-ordinators’, ‘database administrators’ or ‘account managers’. They get absorbed into management systems, balanced scorecards, customer service standards and the other paraphernalia of modern management and they lose sight of what they are all about.

Managing people with passion has to be done differently. It has to keep the sense of purpose ‘up front’.

It has to keep the passion burning.

Appreciation, Affirming Feedback and Retention!

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According to the Department of Labor in the USA, 64% of working Americans leave their jobs because they don’t feel appreciated, while Gallup research shows that 70% of working Americans say they receive no praise or recognition on the job.

Is there any reason to suspect that things may be different or better here in the UK? I doubt it. We have a long history of management by exception (managers leaving the good stuff alone and focussing on the problems). Often work is designed so that managers really don’t get to see or hear the good stuff that goes on.

I have played my part in this.

I once helped a call centre to install a piece of software that allowed callers to rate the quality of service provided by the agent. Low scores generated e-mails to team leaders with attached MP3 recordings of the call and invited them to provide coaching to the agent involved where appropriate.

This helped to quickly reduce the number of problem calls.  But it also had the unwanted effect of damaging the perceptions that team leaders had of many of their agents – because the only stuff they saw and heard was bad. Likewise agents started to perceive team leaders as critical, picky and failing to appreciate the good work that was done. No wonder employee retention in the call centre business is low.

Once we changed the software so that team leaders got e-mailed about the great calls as well as the bad ones things in this call centre rapidly got better.

  • Is your job designed to help you to see, appreciate and feedback on the good stuff that your team members do?
  • Have you been trained in how to do this well?
  • Do you spend enough time and effort on it?

Why is Affirming Feedback so Hard?

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Thank You Sign

Photo by Miles Storey

I met up with some more Progressive Managers recently.

Good reports about success with 121s – which is very pleasing. But more mixed reports on success with Feedback. There are no problems reported with giving adjusting feedback; the model I teach keeps the emotional temperature low and makes this a relatively painless experience. However managers continue to find it hard to see behaviours around which they can give affirming feedback (designed to recognise and encourage more of the good stuff).

As I recommend that affirming feedback should be used almost exclusively in the first instance to strengthen relationships and then should continue to outnumber adjusting feedback in a ratio of something like 4 or 5:1 this is a pretty big problem!

If adjusting feedback dominates then you will be seen as negative, picky and demanding by their team. It will also promote a culture where failure is recognised and picked on as opposed to success. Nasty!

I have already given some guidance on ‘How to see the good stuff’ in a recent post.

  1. Force yourself to recognise, value and feedback on good work – reject the philosophy of management by exception.
  2. Recognise and celebrate employee success with affirming feedback. You may not feel that this is helping with the task at hand – but it will help to build a better relationship. And this will have a direct impact on achievement and culture in the longer term – so get comfortable with it!
  3. Look out for behaviours that bring mission, vision or values to life and provide affirming feedback – whenever you see them.

I would like to add a couple of further suggestions:

  1. Tell your team that you have been trained to give more feedback. (They might groan a bit – but deep down we we all want to know more about how we are doing) Tell them that you want to use feedback to recognise and encourage good work. Ask them to help you by telling you when they see a colleague do something well.
  2. At the end of every day this week, ask yourself:
  • Have I caught someone doing something right today?
  • How do I want to acknowledge this action?
  • When will I acknowledge that person?

And after you have acknowledged them:

  • What was their response?

You may also want to re-think the role of gratitude in building a stronger culture. This from Carmine Coyote’s Slow Leadership blog.

Gratitude isn’t just a pleasant trait, it’s also a very powerful one.
Thanking others and recognizing how much we all depend on support and co-operation makes it far more likely that help will be there when you need it. Those who help others most freely are most likely to be helped in their turn—provided that gratitude is recognized for what it is: a major constituent in the glue that holds together groups of all sizes, from a few friends to society as a whole.
A grateful customer is more likely to overlook future mistakes and stay loyal despite the temptations offered by competitors. A grateful employee is less likely to leave when times get tough. Grateful colleagues pull together. Grateful bosses trust their people more and are trusted more in return.
You cannot buy goodwill of that kind, no matter what incentives you offer. Today’s bonus may become tomorrow’s expectation, but genuine gratitude can last for a lifetime.

Perhaps appreciative management is harder to learn that I recognise?

For more tips on doing this have a look at this.

But I think perhaps this more than just a set of tips though. It is a way of engaging with the world – a way of being. If you go into a community looking for crime, drugs and teenage pregnancy – you can always find it. But if you go into the same community looking for hope, dreams and ambition you find that too.

Your findings usually follow your seekings.

Being Effective – Not Busy!

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Over worked!

Here are some interesting pieces from The Standard, a Hong Kong newspaper, reporting on a seminar for corporate executives held there last week.

“We believe long working hours are a sign of loss of productivity and efficiency,” said Ambrose Linn, Hong Kong manager at Dutch mail company TNT, which enforces a maximum 48-hour week on its employees with no more than 12 hours’ overtime.


. . . a survey by local non-profit organization Community Business found that employees work an average 51 hours a week – 25 percent higher than the maximum working hours set by the International Labour Organization. A third of respondents said their productivity was being affected by long hours while 31 percent said long hours were causing health problems.


“Senior management has to change its mind-set, especially with the new graduates coming out of university. They don’t want to work 60 hours a week, and companies won’t attract the talent,” Shalini Thakur, associate director of diversity at investment bank UBS, told the seminar.


BP says it has stopped making it mandatory for senior management to be supplied with smart phones and e-mail devices because constantly checking and responding to messages goes against the company’s philosophy of promoting work-life balance.

 

Does this sound familiar?

What about reflecting on these obvious – but frequently overlooked questions:

  • Do we have enough people to do the work required?
  • Do they all know, clearly, what they are expected to do?
  • Do they have the time, the tools, and the skills to do it?
  • Are they rewarded enough to make what they do seem attractive?
  • Do they enjoy what they do and give it their best efforts?
  • Are the working conditions suitable to a civilized community?

 High performing organisations focus on maximizing effectiveness in a pretty fixed working week.  They know that regular long hours, fire-fighting, lack of focus and attention are all symptoms of bad management.  And the only thing that you can manage is you!

By improving the way you delegate and prioritise it is always possible to start getting back to something more like a 40 hour productive and efficient week.