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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.

Communication: Companies need less . . . not more!

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This is the title of a great post on the Slow Leadership blog. Dave Woods says:

‘I work with a large variety of CEOs, senior managers and key employees. If I ask about the needs and issues within the company, I almost always get the same response: “We need more communication.”

My reaction to that is that it is simply, WRONG!

Companies don’t need more communication. They need more clarity.

  • Clarity of the vision of the company.
  • Clarity of where the company is going (long term and short term).
  • Clarity of HOW the company will get there.
  • Clarity of individual roles and how those roles create value toward the vision.
  • Clarity of how roles must intertwine in order to achieve extraordinary results.
  • Clarity of how the company will hold itself and each individual accountable.’

Dave then goes on to argue that if you look at a great sports team they actually need very little communication from the coach. They know all the plays and they know what they have to do. In short they have clarity. Dave argues that it is not communication that we should be increasing – but clarity.

Amen to that!

However clarity only comes with communication that is frequent, 2 way and relevant to both player and coach; employee and manager. Surely there can be no clarity without communication?

When you watch a great team play what you are seeing is the result of dozens of hours of communication, practice, feedback, delegation and coaching. Typically tens of hours of this ‘management’ go into every hour of play.

Life in most businesses is not like that. There is no practice ground. It is always ‘game time’. And most managers find it incredibly difficult to pull players out of the game to them at all whether to clarify, give feedback, coach or delegate. It is all they can do to keep playing the game – never mind improve.

So I disagree with Dave – and agree with his clients. Most organisations do need more communication. But it has to be effective. It has to focus on performance and improvement. It has to be constructive. It has to keep both vision and values in the front of people minds. And it has to be frequent.

Sounds just like a recipe for 121s to me!

You Are a Superstar: 90% of Managers Are In the Top 10%

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This from the ‘business pundit‘ blog recently:

″A new study shows that 90% of managers think they are in the top 10% at their workplace.

Believe you’re among the top performers in your office? You’re not alone.

According to a new survey, an impossible 90 percent of managers think they’re among the top 10 percent of performers at their workplace.

The number is highest among executives, 97 percent of whom consider themselves shining stars, according to a recent survey in BusinessWeek magazine.”

Read More

The sad truth is just how easy it is for most people to get into the top 10% of managers in just about any organisation.

By consistently doing some management basics such as:

  • communicating well (that’s listening as well as telling),
  • providing feedback,
  • coaching every team member – every week,
  • running effective (as opposed to frequent) meetings
  • delegating, and
  • keeping mission, vision and values in the front of every team members thoughts…

the vast majority of managers can massively improve their effectiveness and really stand out as high performers.

It is not about charisma, vision or flair.  It not about MBAs, strategy, long hours and inspiration.

It is about consistently doing the basics well.

Feedback – Making it Work in the Real World

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I recently had a meeting with a member of the Progressive Managers’ Network and he was asking me about a challenge he was facing in putting feedback into practice. I train people to use both affirming and adjusting feedback.

  • Affirming feedback is given when an employee exhibits a good behaviour at work and the manager wants to show that it has been noticed, recognised and appreciated.
  • Adjusting feedback is used when the work behaviour or product is not up to organisational standards and the manager wants the employee to consider ‘what they could differently next time’.

Providing more affirming feedback than adjusting feedback works in most organisations to build a culture that is open to feedback and builds relationships that means adjusting feedback, when given, is more likely to be accepted constructively and acted upon.

The manager I met was fine on spotting opportunities to give adjusting feedback but was finding it much harder to find opportunities to give affirming feedback.  He was rightly worried that if he did not keep a healthy balance then his feedback would become ineffective.

There are several reasons why some managers struggle with affirming feedback:

Many, perhaps most, managers are ‘tuned’ to look for and sort out problems. Good performance is taken for granted (indeed barely noticed) while any performance issues are recognised and corrected. This ‘management by exception‘ can be effective and efficient in the short term. However in the long term it leads to an unhealthy focus on performance problems and a culture where employees feel under-valued and taken for granted.  Force yourself to recognise, value and feedback on good work – reject the philosophy of management by exception.

Managers who are very task oriented and dominant tend to undervalue the power of affirming feedback in building relationships.  Force yourself to 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, if done well, to build a better relationship.  And this will have a direct impact on achievement in the longer term.

Some managers find it hard to recognise the kind of behaviours that should trigger affirming feedback because they have lost touch with the values, vision and mission of the organisation and their role in supporting them in practice.   If the organisation ‘values’ innovation and risk taking then it is vital that managers give affirming feedback when employee behaviours support these values.   Using affirming feedback to recognise employees who are supporting mission, vision and values and letting them know that their work is recognised and valued is important in building a performance culture and ensuring that those desired behaviours are repeated and spread.  This style of ‘appreciative management’  is incredibly effective in engendering a positive culture of performance and ensuring that organisational mission, vision and values are brought to live in day to day work. Look out for behaviours that bring mission, vision or values to life and provide affirming feedback. 

Some managers have become detached from the people management aspects of their role.  They manage task lists and performance metrics – but they don’t invest the time in seeing what their employees and team members actually do.   Tom Peters popularised the term ‘Managing by Wandering About’ – or MBWA.  If you are struggling to find examples of employee behaviour to provide the foundation for affirming feedback perhaps a little more time out of the office and working with the team might help.

There are no rigid rules on this – but most managers give way too little feedback.  Many give none at all outside of the formal performance review process.   For each report that you have you should be aiming to give on average at least 4 pieces of feedback each and every day.  Affirming feedback should outnumber adjusting feedback  in a ratio of 3 or 4:1.  If you can develop the volume of feedback that you give to this sort of level I guarantee that team performance will develop rapidly.

If you want to learn more about using feedback to improve performance check out this page.