Surprising findings of the latest women in leadership research — an interview with Isabelle Lescent-Giles
In our interview series with leaders, the GUILD interviewed a wide variety of women with remarkable stories, insights and points of view in order to bring their stories to you.
In this interview we are highlighting Isabelle Lescent-Giles and her latest research including surprising findings about women in leadership roles from all around the world.
Learn about Isabelle’s background, her work in research as the Professor of Strategy and Family Business at International Business School of Hult and the interesting early take aways from her research.
My passion for women’s leadership began when I first started work at McKinsey and had conversations around the gender gap in the workplace.
But it took me a long time to acknowledge how hard it was to move the needle.
As many European women of my generation, I walked into the breach opened by independent and confident women who broke so many barriers from the 1960s to the 1990s, from business to politics.
As a child, I watched the first generation of women enter France’s most prestigious engineering school (l’X) and Simone Veil inducted as the first President of the EU Parliament. I joined the Sorbonne as an assistant professor as Claudie Haigneré took off as France’s first female astronaut.
My mother had a fulfilling career, so I had a good role model.
And my husband and I both worked under inspirational female leaders who ran businesses and families.
I personally thrived juggling priorities between a fulfilling consulting and academic career and a busy family life with three young children and several relocations. I didn’t think of myself as a “female” consultant or a “female” professor.
It took me twenty years to take a step back and acknowledge the complexity of the challenges women face as they grow into business and thought leadership positions.
I joined Hult International Business School in 2016 as a Professor of Strategy and Family Business, and as I answered questions from driven, bright and curious international students (we have 160 nationalities on campus) about career choices, I started wondering why this new generation was still fighting the same battles as their grandmothers.
The numbers around gender diversity paint a depressing story of stagnation and even regression. The number of women founders who receive VC funding in the US had hardly changed in 25 years and remained at an abysmal 2.7% of the total funding going to female only founding teams; the number of women CEOs and board directors in Europe and the US is still ridiculously low; a recent book highlighted that women are invisible in collected data sets.
It often feels as we are even regressing. The number of women graduating with computer science college degrees in the US, far from reaching parity, has halved since the 1980s to less than 20% today. And new coalitions are emerging everywhere to limit and control our career and life choices.
What inspired me to start a study about women’s leadership was this personal journey of rediscovery and increasing frustration with stereotypes, glass ceilings and missed opportunities. McKinsey estimates that advancing women’s equality would add $12 trillion to the world’s GDP by 2025. But how do we move this needle?
The catalyst to this new study of women in leadership positions was an impromptu conversation I had with my Hult colleague and fellow consultant Elisabetta Ghisini. Neither of us, it turned out, recognized ourselves in the existing models of leadership.
As both women and first-generation immigrants to the US, we felt an important piece of our career challenges, struggles and successes was missing from the existing academic and practitioner literature.
So, we decided to document women’s stories in their own voices.
So far, we have recorded 25 powerful stories and are continuing to grow our sample, reaching out through the Hult network to women not just in the US and continental Europe, but to regions where women leaders have not received enough attention, like Latin America, MENA and Asia.
Rather than trying to fit women’s experience as square pegs into round holes calibrated for North American male leaders, we are trying to capture, explore and understand the complexity, shared experiences but also the diversity of women’s perceptions, mindsets, decisions and actions as leaders, and their career paths.
Here are the top three surprising early findings from the research
(1) the extent of “role playing” and the psychological stress it generates for female executives. Many of our female leaders have adopted “career personas” that differ radically from the behavior, mindsets and sometimes even values that they display in family and social settings. For some of these women, the “career persona” is closest to the person they always wanted to be.
They grew up in countries where women are expected to be quiet, submissive, malleable and agreeable to fathers, husbands and sons. In their work position as decision-maker, they can be decisive, bold, sometimes transactional and even confrontational.
One of our interviewee describes a childhood where she learnt respect and deference for male elders and confesses never imagining herself as a division head for a large conglomerate. But in the next sentence discloses that she always yearned to be in charge and as a child had sought total control over school projects and home tasks. Today, she is a respected and decisive business leader in a male-dominated industry. Yet, outside of the office, she still reverts to dominant gender rules that favor discretion and invisibility.
For other interviewees, the “career persona” is a mask behind which self-doubt, empathy and emotions are carefully hidden for fear of being labeled weak and emotional.
Of course, men role play too, but the gap between what is expected of a leader, based on male role models, and what is expected of a woman in her socially-normed private and social life is particularly pronounced and perceived as a major source of angst and stress.
Our executives often feel at home in one persona (work or society) and struggle to cope with, and reconcile, the opposite set of norms and behavior required by their other persona. Only a few of the women in our sample confidently assert their own personality in the workplace.
Our early hypothesis is that business ownership and a diverse C-suite may reduce the need to embrace opposite persona at work and at home.
One interviewee felt empowered to be herself once she left the corporate world and became an entrepreneur. She built the business around her personal set of values and priorities. In the process though, she alienated her spouse and in-laws, shocked to see her blossom into a career woman putting in long hours and hiring professional help for family duties in defiance of powerful societal expectations.
Another executive stressed how much freedom she felt in shaping leadership norms and behavior in her current position as VP in a consumer goods company with a diverse C-suite, compared to an earlier leadership position in a high-tech company, where she was one of a kind both within her team, and as a team leader.
(2) Our second surprise was how often we heard the story of accidental leadership. We were shocked to discover how many of our interviewees had been promoted by default.
We found three variations around this theme: Lack of male heir in the family business, the death or withdrawal of a current leader or successor, and high-risk, potentially career-ending positions that male candidates shied away from.
Three examples: the CEO of a very successful European company explains that she is one of three sisters and was groomed for the top job by default; another CEO stepped in when all her male relatives declined to abandon established professional careers to lead a family business operating in a remote location in a low-margin sector. A third stepped in when her husband died, leaving her with two young children.
Sadly, so far, only the US-based and a few of the European leaders in our sample actively sought leadership positions from an early age, and perceived themselves as fully worthy of the opportunity.
Most of the others had to overcome the burden of promotion by default and surprised their entourage and themselves by turning less-than-ideal beginnings into major business and leadership successes, with the familiar stories of longer hours, more prep and resilience.
Many saw their position as temporary but found that they were good at it and enjoyed it and turned into advocates that challenge gendered-perceptions of women as primarily wives and mothers.
(3) The final surprise came from realizing that in most countries, including the US, family businesses are a major path to leadership positions, yet have been largely ignored at the policy and advocacy level.
While the focus has been on schools, public administration, large public corporations, or entrepreneurship, we found that the majority of our leaders had been boosted and propelled to the top with the help of the family name. Many were promoted by fathers, fathers-in-law or husband, by default, or very occasionally as a vote of confidence in their ability.
They found they were members of a prominent family, rather than women first, in the eyes of investors, customers, suppliers and employees, and that seemed to somehow mitigate the risk of dealing with a woman. But their impact went way beyond the promotion of a few well-connected family heiresses. Most of the female family leaders we interviewed purposefully built more diverse teams to support them, recruit women actively and engage in advocacy programs with girls and young women.
The best advice I have for women who want to break into leadership roles is to jump onto the opportunities that arise rather than wait for the perfect job. Men can afford to be strategic and wait for the best match. Women have lower odds of having major career opportunity come their way and need to think carefully before passing on the opportunity, unless there is a truly compelling reason for abstaining.
We also need to take more risks and put our names forward for jobs in times of crisis. It might backfire, but until we have a more level playing field, they also offer unique opportunities for promotion.
And we need to build our networks very strategically. We need strong women networks, like the GUILD, and we need to crack male-dominated networks, even if it means learning to golf or engage in hackathons.
and my advice for women in leadership roles is to target revenue-generating positions and not settle for positions in communications or HR. And relentlessly leverage financial performance metrics, at the individual, team and firm level.
What isn’t measured isn’t taken seriously by organizations, even if it’s the right thing to do. By coming to the C-suite and the boardroom armed with data around revenue and cost saving, we can prove that diversity of gender, but also ethnicity, age, education and social background, increases the bottom line, and start chipping at the expectation that soft, rather than hard skills, are our major contribution.
My hope for the future of women is that every single woman gets the opportunity, education and confidence to choose where, how much, when and in which capacity she wants to work, irrespective of social pressure; to pursue the career, family life and personal objectives she dreams of; and the chance to negotiate and proactively manage with her partner and family the work life balance that works for both, free from the constraints of dominant societal norms and patriarchy.
What excites me the most is to initiate, build and complete projects I passionately believe in and can be proud of, no matter how simple or complex they prove to be. And move on to the next challenge.
I love finding a balance between leveraging expertise and challenging it, learning new skills and resetting my own expectations of what works and what doesn’t work with each project.
And I love to work with, listen to, challenge and learn from the young leaders I mentor. They keep me energized and motivated, and nothing beats watching them reach major “aha” moments, when they suddenly see new opportunities or different paths to reach career or personal goals.
Here are my ways to decompress: I walk the streets of beautiful cities like San Francisco, Paris or Barcelona whenever I can, or the hills of California and Provence, camera in hand to capture unexpected angles and fleeting moments;
I find joy and serenity in stepping into the footsteps of my French mother and grandmother, whipping up favorite family recipes and uncorking a great bottle of wine, before presiding over a large table of family and friends, talking, laughing and eating until the sun sets, with kids and pets running around until they collapse and curl up on old cushions. And spend the next day alone with a book, listening to rock & roll, gypsy jazz or bossa nova.
What it means for me to be a woman is to live on a daily basis with the irony of belonging to a majority treated like a minority, and laugh it off with like-minded “sisters”, because it feels so much better than anger; to have the absolute privilege to carry and give birth to children, which was for me a completely transformative experience that brought me unexpected confidence and serenity, a new perspective on what really matters, and at the same time a renewed desire to fight so that women can choose if and when they want to have children, and have a magical rather than traumatic experience of motherhood.
Being a woman is an important layer of my identity, but I refuse to let it fully define me and reduce me to a stereotype.
Biculturalism, being a university professor and an advisor to large family businesses and foundations around sustainable strategies and social impact and leaving in Silicon Valley are also major building blocks of my identity and add another layer to how I think and act.
Isabelle is Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Family Business at Hult International Business School (San Francisco campus) and a consultant and advisor to large family businesses on innovation, social impact and next-gen leadership. She grew up in France and was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, before moving to the UK for a master and PhD on innovation in the iron and steel industry. She started her career at McKinsey in the industry practice before returning to academia. She has taught economic and business history, innovation, sustainability and social impact strategies, and family business at Oxford, the Sorbonne, NYU, USF. She is an alumni of the Institut Universitaire de France, a member of the IHEE network and a board member of the Bay Area’s Project Management Institute. Her latest publications include a book and two articles on Social Impact in 100-Year family firms, and a forthcoming history of impact investing. She is working on a global study of women leaders in their own words, and a separate study of women’s careers, influence and advocacy in large family businesses.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabellelescentgiles/
Isabelle is the is the co-author of Social Impact in Hundred-Year Family Businesses:: How Family Values Drive Sustainability Through Philanthropy, Impact Investing, and CSR
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