The Gender Blog

On the Being Busy vs Finding Time to Blog continuum, the latter is rather losing out to the former at the moment.

However,  proof of my networking and writing activities came all neatly rolled up into one busy day last week,  when my article about IDDAS‘s report into board effectiveness (as viewed by the chairmen of a number of FTSE 350 companies) and where diversity fits within that model was published on the Glasshammer (here’s the link)  and a piece on travel tips also went live on Alpha Female.

Do check out Alpha Female if you can; it was founded earlier this year by Carol Paterson Smith (whom I’ll be interviewing later this week for a Glasshammer profile, so look out for that too) and is a fabulous treasure trove of useful connections, smart ideas and stylish hints to make life easier for busy women everywhere.

Carol and I met last month when we were seated next to each other at the WIBF awards, and that in itself was an interesting example of what can happen when you’re naughty and move the seating plan around so that you don’t have to sit with your back to the stage … if I’d stayed where I was meant to sit,  I wouldn’t have met Carol,  checked out her fabulous site (you have to create a user name and register to view the content,  but it’s free to do so and well worth it)  and written her a guest article.

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If you follow me on Twitter,  you’ll have seen that I was Tweeting on Sunday about the community party we held on my street in west London in support of the nationwide Big Lunch initiative.  More on that event later this week; as well as being tremendous fun,  it was a fabulous example of collaboration, planning and new friendships amongst neighbours of long standing.

Last week,  I had a very interesting meeting with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women (CBFfW), a relatively new charity set up by barrister Cherie Blair, which aims to strengthen the capacity of women entrepreneurs in countries where they lack equal opportunities,  thus enabling them to grow their businesses and become greater contributors to their economies.

The Foundation aims to offer women better access to business development support networks and finance in areas of the world which include India, Israel, Kenya, Malawi and Palestine.

The CBFfW is now launching  their Mentoring Women in Business Pilot and if you’d like to be a Mentor … read on.

The 10-month pilot programme will support women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, India, Israel and Palestine through mentoring. Approximately 30 entrepreneurial women will be mentored by 40 successful entrepreneurs or professionals. The pilot aims to demonstrate that there are measurable and tangible benefits from partnering women with entrepreneurial potential in developing and transition countries with successful Mentors in the UK using Google’s online applications such as Sites, Docs, Chat and Gmail. The pilot will involve testing exciting new formats and applications, so the Foundation is  looking for Mentors who are willing to be at the forefront of the development of this extraordinary international programme.

Being a Mentor is a great opportunity to share your knowledge and experience while helping others to succeed and learn about other cultures, places, businesses and market opportunities. Your participation in the Mentoring Women in Business Pilot will require a minimum of one hour of your time every two weeks, and the more you engage,  the more you will help shape the future of the Mentoring Programme.  Some of the Mentors applying for the pilot will be matched with a Mentee by July and will be able to start the mentoring relationship right away, while others will be matched in October, when a second group of Mentees will be ready to participate in the programme. Some Mentors will not be matched with a Mentee, but their involvement in the programme will be crucial for the successful management of the mentoring Platform, as they will be able to contribute to the public forums and share their expertise with Mentors and Mentees alike. The pilot phase will finish in May 2011.

Mentors are asked to provide a minimum donation of £100 per year to help support the programme and will be given training from Google on how to use Google’s applications and from renowned experts, Clutterbuck Associates and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, Cambridge Judge Business School, on how to develop a strong and effective mentoring relationship. The one-day training course for the Mentors will be on July 14^th (it’s free) and will be a great opportunity to learn new skills and to network with like-minded people.

The Platform built with Google to run the Mentoring Women in Business Programme is now ready; if you would like additional information or have any questions, you can contact the programme’s project manager via gc@cherieblairfoundation.org

If, having browsed the site, you’d like to apply to become a Mentor, please apply now, as the the application deadline is 23^rdJune.

And please feel free to share this link with anyone who you think would be a great mentor for these women around the world.

This time last week,  I was at the Dorchester hotel in central London, wandering around the pre-lunch reception with a glass (of water!) in one hand and my trusty notebook in the other, interviewing women who were there to participate in the Women in Banking & Finance (WIBF) annual awards lunch.

Here’s a link to my article about it,  as featured in The Glass Hammer.

Check it out for a very useful footwear based tip …

Last Sunday’s “Observer” magazine had a fascinating article called “30 Ideas for a Better Life” which I read with interest; instead of the usual January guff about losing weight and stopping smoking etc,  it contained practical tips from a variety of gurus (many of them female) on frugal shopping, practical money advice, job hunting (hurrah), ethical living and lots more.

Many of the experts are on Twitter, so I checked them out,  added them to the list of people whom I, as The Gender Blog,  now follow and I’ve  been reading their tweets with great interest this week. And,  in the way of the Small World, I also discovered that one of them lives around the corner from me (we were comparing snow reports on Thursday) and I then saw Sarah Pennells of www.savvywomen.co.uk providing financial advice on BBC News 24 yesterday.

Twitter also led me to the Women’s Business Clubs website,  which is a very user-friendly place for women in business to find support and network with each other. Founder Kelly Stevens posted a link to this article about a gadget called a “Poken” – described as a:

“… a ‘social business card’. It’s a small USB social networking gadget that you can store your own details on including your social networking profiles (Facebook, Twitter etc).

When you meet someone at an event with a Poken you simply touch the two Pokens together and your details are passed to their Poken, and theirs to yours. Then when you get back to the office you simply plug your Poken into your computer’s USB port, and download all of the contact data you have collected.”

Now,  I love the idea of a gadget as much as the next woman and,  writing as someone with a lot of business cards sitting in a drawer,  filed only in groups (“People I met in India”, etc) and held together with bulldog clips,  I think any gadget which can make this easier and more automated is a winner.  But I’m just trying to imagine how it will actually work in a real life situation – how do you know who’s got one and under what circumstances do you bring a sentence such as “Please may I touch your Poken?” into a conversation?

Perhaps they should be sold with a lapel badge (“I’m Poken: Are YOU?”) so that the early adopters can find each other with ease and clunk click, every trip. I suspect that Kelly is right and that,  in ten years or so,  business cards will have gone the way of the floppy disk – but it will be fun to see if the curiously named “Poken” will be the tool to hasten their demise.

Dangerous things happen to your diary when you mention to people that you’d be interested in receiving invitations to any diversity related events of which they are aware. My own diary exploded at the end of September and I was out and about for the next ten days or so; I actually had a period of four days where I didn’t eat a single meal at home, due to the invitations I accepted to various events tagged on to breakfast, lunch and dinner.

(Well, I say “dinner” – in fact, it was more “canapés grabbed from the hand of a passing waiter” but still – evening based food, at any rate.)

The amazing writer and author Alison Maitland (co-author of the bestselling book “Why Women Mean Business”) invited me to two events which hadn’t previously hit my radar; the first of these included breakfast at the Ritz (excellent!) and was the launch of the IDDAS report “Board Dynamics: A Female Perspective” – which featured interviews with 24 of the women, described as “an elite group of very hard working people” currently on the boards of FTSE 100 companies. It shared their views on the factors which can both help and derail women at the top level and asked them such questions as: what’s it like being the only woman on the board? What success factors do they bring to a company? What issues do they face? And, most importantly, what are their top tips for other senior women? Even if you’re not quite there, yet, I think these tips can be helpful to all women:

• Enjoy the role; have confidence in yourself and your abilities;
• Choose your board (and company) wisely;
• Work out your value add to the company;
• Prepare your initial impact statement for your first meeting;
• Get to know the business (sector, area) FAST;
• Don’t be pigeon-holed – for example, only speaking up on HR issues;
• Develop strong relationships with all the other board members.

On the same day, Alison and I then travelled to another part of London in order to participate in one of Goldman Sachs’ “diversity week” events. This was a performance of the play “Seven”, presented by the NGO “Vital Voices” – and I can only urge you to both follow the link provided here to read more about the play, view the trailer and to try to see it if the opportunity to do so ever presents itself.

It was a really astonishing piece of performance art, telling the stories of seven women from around the world (Afghanistan, northern Ireland, Nigeria, Russia, Guatemala, Pakistan and Cambodia) and providing us with glimpses into the lives of women who have overcome almost unimaginable barriers and sorrows.

Please – see it if you can; a truly amazing piece of work.

A busy week beckons, specifically, a very busy Tuesday 1st September. Tomorrow will be my last day at work, after 8 1/2 years with my current employer and I’ll be working in the office all day, doing a handover with my successor, prior to being “relieved” of my laptop and security pass at 5.30pm.

I’ll then be heading across London over to the second of what the Downing Street Project team call “teach backs”. Everyone associated with this exciting, embryonic project to date has been formed into one of four teams (covering such issues as fund raising, training, communications etc) and tasked with coming up with approaches for the future.

I was amazed at how much had been achieved, in terms of ideas, creativity and infrastructure, between the launch at the House of Commons on June 30th and the first teach back session four short weeks later – and I’m sure tomorrow night’s event will show similar progress. We are scheduled to cover and be reminded of the following:

- Why do we need this initiative?
- What problem in society does it intend to address?
- How does the DSP think it will make a difference?
- What is balanced leadership and why is it relevant? What can it deliver?
- What is the time line for the DSP over the next three months, the first year and next three years?

I’m really looking forward to both hearing the updates and also keeping my mind occupied on things other than the end of my job and all the implications of that …

As I move towards the end of my current period of gainful employment, the subject of networking is very much on my mind. I recently read somewhere (possibly somewhere in the thick file on “How To Get A New Job In A Recession”* given to me earlier this week by my appointed outplacement consultant) that 80% of all jobs are obtained through contacts and networking.

[* It isn’t actually called that. But it ought to be.]

Since word has leaked out that I’m leaving, I’ve had a lot of calls and emails which all have a similar theme and that is, and this is a direct quote:

“Getting a new job shouldn’t be a problem for you with your network.”

I’m not actually sure as yet how true that will prove to be, as the one job for which I am currently in the pipeline has come my way via a recruiter – although it has certainly been very useful in the six interviews I’ve had to date to be able to indicate that yes, I know this person, that organisation, that report, that news story, that network and so on. But, if this job doesn’t come off for me, I know that networking is going to become a key part of Cleo World this autumn.

And that will be OK for me given that getting a new job will effectively become my job, so maintaining my network will be a regular daily activity – but how do you do it when you already have a job, a life, a family and a myriad of other calls on your time?

Yes, networking can be time consuming – but I also think of it as the kind of thing that is useful in terms of keeping the wheels of one’s life, career and health moving along. An analogy might be – where do we find the time to go to the gym, or undertake some other “worthy” but time consuming pastime? For example, people frequently ask me where I find the time to read. To which my response is – we find the time for all sorts of things if we feel that we must, or perceive that they are important and beneficial in one way or another. So I would fit networking into that category; we will make time for it if we truly want to.

(To learn more about networking whilst reading (See? Multi-tasking), check out Steven D’Souza’s book, “Brilliant Networking” in the recommended reading link above.)

I’d also note that it depends on one’s understanding of the word “networking”. I suspect that, for some, it’s viewed as an organised activity, such as an event arranged by one of the many professional groups out there, such as the European Professional Women’s Network - which has a purposeful, self-described networking component built in. So, absolutely – for many people, adding on their attendance at an event to the end of their working day will feel like an extra thing to do and one for which they may lack the time. I could easily be out at some kind of a professional event pretty much every evening if I accepted all the invitations which come my way.

But I would rather go to fewer events but make more of my time at them; I also work very hard to keep in touch with and nurture, for want of a better word, the network that I do have, which is both enjoyable and far less time consuming than attending events. Additionally, I make use of other types of networking, by keeping in touch with people more casually and using on-line tools like Facebook and Linked-In. It’s also helpful to think about what networking you can do during your normal day – can you meet people for coffee, for example? What about breakfast events? The “Starbucks Effect” seems to be a growing trend, picked up on in this article from The Glass Hammer entitled “Coffee is the new lunch”.

Finally, here are some networking tips courtesy of “My Mentor” creator Emberin’s newsletter – reproduced with thanks.

Top 10 Networking Tips for Success

Written by Lisa Butler of Paragon & Associates
Author of Networking Exposed

Networking is important for business, career, leadership and personal success. Successful networkers know that the true nature of networking is developing and maintaining genuinely helpful relationships with others, with a focus on helping them, not you. You should not be selling when you are networking! The top ten tips for networking success are:

Tip 1 - Recognise the true nature of networking and appreciate the value it offers in your business, career and personal life. Accepting that networking is about relationship building and building win-win alliances with others is the first step to networking success. Focus on helping others and you will undoubtedly reap the rewards.

Tip 2 – Be aware of the reasons that stop you from networking. Many people are hesitant to network – often due to negative perceptions about what networking is and its value. Be aware of what stops you, and identify strategies to help you to have the right mindset and get the value networking offers.

Tip 3 – You need to network strategically. Consider why you are networking, and how it will help you to achieve your business and personal goals. This will enable you to more effectively customize and ensure you are networking with the right people, in the right places and in the right way. This focus helps you to save time and gain greater value from your networking effort.

Tip 4 – Have a good system for monitoring and recording your list of network contacts. It is important to recognise that effective networking is more about how you keep in contact with people and look after them, than it is about attending events. A good system should enable you to easily update contact details and be an easy reference tool when you need to find relevant contacts.

Tip 5 – Be genuinely interested in other people. Sounds simple, but it requires effective communication skills (the ability to ask good questions which engage people, and to listen!).

Tip 6 – Treat everyone you meet with the utmost respect and give them 100% of your attention. Never underestimate the networking value of people you meet, as it may come back to haunt you.

Tip 7 – Be able to talk about what you do (when asked!) in a way which is relevant, interesting and understandable to the other person. This requires you to tailor your response and focus on providing information which will enable further conversation’.

Tip 8 – Identify relevant and helpful reasons to continue contact with people you meet. Be on the lookout for opportunities to follow up with people, preferably in ways that will help them not you. It is far easier to follow up with someone when you are doing something worthwhile for them. It is also very powerful.

Tip 9 – Prepare to network. Before you attend an event or even just a catch up with a contact, consider your objectives, who you will meet, the topics of conversation, questions you can ask, research their companies or industries, and generally be up to date. Also consider how you can best achieve your objectives through your behaviour and the impressions you want to create.

Tip 10 – Enjoy it. The most effective networkers tend to be the people who find enjoyment from their networking. Other people are drawn to happy, positive people, and it shows in your demeanour and language. A positive mindset is an important element of networking success.

I would also add my own personal “Tip 11” to this list – do what you say you’re going to do. If you commit to sending someone an article or providing them with some other piece of information: make sure you do so, as soon as possible – and ideally within 48 hours of making the commitment. This, for me, is part of the “safe pair of hands” component of my personal brand and I believe that it makes networking a richer and more enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

Let’s hope that my networking will pay off for me now, as I gaze down the barrel of my huge and inadvertent life change.

Yesterday, through work, I received an invitation to attend a European women’s networking event in Sweden and it reminded me of the last time I went to Stockholm on business.

Although many global companies are very creative in terms of how they both recognise and then tackle the gender issue in general, and the retention and promotion situations in particular, I was particularly keen to find out more about the Swedish model once I discovered that our firm in Sweden actually have targets for female participation at all levels: graduate recruitment, retention, and promotion at every grade.

Targets around female participation always seem to arouse great debate, cf in particular the recent hoo-ha caused by Harriet Harman’s comments, with some organisations viewing them as a mandatory way to both invoke and measure progress (“what gets measured gets done”) and others seeing the word as completely interchangeable with the word “quota”, which is in turn generally agreed to be A Bad Word and no way at all to increase the proportion of women in either politics or the workforce.

So, the discovery that my employer in Sweden has been an active participant in the EU sponsored Women To the Top programme since 2004 and has subsequently established their own targets, saw me flying to Stockholm on a very cold Sunday morning last November and preparing to spend 48 hours being offered reindeer, herring and rye bread. For breakfast.

My sense was that Sweden as a country is very advanced around working women, workplace flexibility, the provision of nurseries and so on – would this prove to be true? Has Sweden developed a model which would work elsewhere? What lessons can we learn and how can we deploy them elsewhere?

On Monday morning, I walked to the office and saw an image of a baby girl, wearing an obviously false moustache, on a billboard on my way in – here she is:

Further enquiry led me to the website of the company in question, which was of course in Swedish but which was kindly translated for me by my helpful colleague Lisa. The gist of the message was focussed on a survey by an insurance company which had discovered that, in order to be a leader in a top Swedish listed company, it was helpful (in statistical terms) to be a man named Goran (as in Sven-Goran Eriksson, football fans). They then turned these findings into a series of advertisements, all illustrated by images of baby girls disguised as the opposite gender, and captioned with wording around the theme of: “Is her name Ulrika? If you want her to succeed as an adult, you’d do better to rename her Bjorn or Anders.”

Quite aside from this being visually very eye catching, it was also thought provoking to me on two levels: one, I read from it that the current Swedish status quo is by no means as positive in terms of numbers as it may appear to be at first sight; and secondly, that this is both recognised within Sweden and challenged by way of these advertisements, which don’t resemble any campaigns that I’ve seen elsewhere.

My two days with my colleagues were both enjoyable and enlightening. I learned a lot about the annual flexible hours contract available to all staff, the recently launched mentoring scheme, their participation in Women To the Top and the establishment of the “Women on the Board” external networking group.

And I flew home (and yes, I’d eaten both reindeer AND herring) feeling very aware that a combination of employer led interventions, coupled with government support, can make a very real difference to the number and seniority of women in the workplace.

Well, it’s all very strange; suddenly, offers to get engaged with various gender related organisations in the not-for-profit space seem to be popping up all over.

Like buses, three at a time.

First came the Downing Street Project (DSP), with which I am involved in some as yet to be defined way. So far, this has simply entailed helping to organise meeting room space for c. 80 people on two dates: next week and then again on 1st September. But I am having dinner tonight with one of the Directors, so perhaps my role will become clearer over a salad at Joe Allen. There are currently four teams, working as follows:

- Defining the DSP’s key messages and associated media strategy;
- Designing the leadership training;
- Creating the strategy, the organisational structure and roles and responsibilities;
- Fund raising!

And, although I’m not officially in any given team, I hope that I can be helpful in some way to all four workstreams. Watch this space.

Then on Monday, I received a call from a woman, Priya, whom I met in India last year, when I was speaking at NASSCOM’s Women in Leadership Summit in Bangalore. We’ve kept in touch since then and she has invited me to join something called the “Global Women’s Leadership Forum”, which she is setting up. Am waiting to receive more info about that. I’m passionately interested in the issues and challenges which face women in India (I’ll blog more about this shortly) and so I’d love to do something which supported them.

And finally today I was asked if I’d be interested in joining the London chapter’s Advisory Board of the European Professional Women’s Network (EPWN) – and discovered whilst talking about it (and frantically finding the website) that the existing advisory board members are also involved with the DSP.

As my granny always says: “it’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to clean it …”

What is quite interesting, though, is that I am very aware that these organisations do primarily want me because of my current role in which I run the (award winning, yet!) global gender diversity programme of a multi-national firm. So there’s presumably a sense in which they’ll get two for the price of one – a human form of BOGOF – if I join a board, as it affiliates my employer and me with the board in question. But, because I know that I am shortly to be leaving my esteemed employer … I feel forced to explain, in some cases sooner than I would have liked, that I will shortly be outta there and that, whilst I am happy to be asked and possibly to work with them – it would have to be as me rather than in a corporate capacity.

But what has been very gratifying has been that all three entities have all welcomed me on board, even though I have bent over backwards to give them a get out clause if they want one.

My hope from all of this is that I will be able to find a way to work on gender projects which I love, whilst finding a perfect job and keeping my network strong and relevant.

But all of this reminds me that I do have to get some sense, and very soon, of what is happening work wise and timeline wise, before I go mad with the uncertainty of it all.

A while ago, I wrote an article for my corporate blog, which (for now …) forms part of my day job, on the power of networking. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how potent it can be to keep an open mind and have an inquisitive spirit when you’re out and about and meet new people.

In the last few weeks and months, the following chain of events has happened to me.

In March, I spoke at an event for International Women’s Day. After my presentation, I got chatting with Christine, who is the chair of Women in Banking and Finance. A few days later, she emailed me and asked if we could catch up over coffee sometime, as she wanted to bounce around a few ideas with me. I’m always happy to meet for coffee, so we did, got along very well and exchanged some interesting thoughts and suggestions.

Fast forward to the end of May and Christine invited me to attend the Women in Banking and Finance annual lunch at the Dorchester in central London. Along I went, wondering who, if anyone, I would know – to which the answer was, aside from Christine, not a soul. But that was OK – because sometimes, when at these events, it can be all too easy to stick chatting to the people who you do know and not emerge from your comfort zone in order to meet new acquaintances.

But I was forced out of my fur lined rut, and so I chatted and mingled and went through to the lunch – where I had the huge good fortune to be seated adjacent to two absorbing women. They both run their own very different gender diversity consulting firms, and are so well connected that I have Address Book Envy.

As if a wonderful venue, delightful lunch companions, and a spirited speech (in which she called for quotas for women in leadership roles) from keynote speaker Baroness Denise Kingsmill (reported here in the Guardian) wasn’t enough, I also won a prize in the raffle, thus continuing the recent winning streak with which I’ve been blessed, having won a couple of global diversity awards lately. But the luck didn’t end there, as Pauline, my neighbour at the table, also won a prize, as did one of the other guests at table 16. I won a designer silk dress, Pauline won dinner for 6 at a top London restaurant and the other lady (another Pauline, #2) won a huge bouquet of flowers.

Then Pauline #1, who runs a fascinating company called Gender Dynamics, and I discovered that we are actually neighbours in the same suburb of London, so we agreed to meet for, yes, coffee and learn more about each other’s roles and interests. And when we did so, Pauline mentioned that, in her experience, women tend to be very open to the idea of just getting together to bounce ideas around without there being a clear agenda or a defined objective or gain, whereas some men would only go ahead with a similar meeting if there was a very clear idea of what was in it for them at the outset.

Over skinny lattes, Pauline and I discussed our ideas and interests in women, business, leadership, success and so on. She also asked me if I would like to learn more about the Downing Street Project (DSP); to which my response was: “Is that similar to the White House Project? I (corporate) blogged about that last year …”

And yes, it is indeed a UK version of the successful and high profile White House Project; in a nutshell, it’s a UK based, cross party political supported initiative aimed at promoting and enabling “balanced leadership between men and women at every level of society, up to and including 10 Downing Street.”

Pauline then threw open her famed address book even more widely and introduced me to both Lee Chalmers, the director and founder of the DSP and also to Donna Thomson, the wife of the Canadian Ambassador to Britain; she is very active in the whole women in business and women as a force for change space. Pauline, Lee and I had afternoon tea at the “residency” earlier this week and talked about our various projects; these included the Downing Street Project (Lee), a film on gender (me) and a report called the “Leaking Pipeline” (also me); Pauline’s work on gender and biology and Donna’s involvement with the forthcoming UN Agency for Women, which is due to be launched in January 2010.

… And I am now scheduled to attend the DSP’s launch event at the House of Commons on Tuesday evening.

And all of this has come from chatting to Christine back in March ….

If any of these contacts result in a new job for me, I think I’ll send Christine flowers.