Find the oasis

Our Head of Research, Edward Haigh, reflects on insights from the panel discussion at the launch of our latest research ‘Women in Leadership: Strategies from FTSE 350 organisations leading the way’.

Find the oasis

Where would you begin? That was the question we asked the panellists at the launch of our new research - Women in Leadership: Strategies from FTSE 350 organisations leading the way. One response in particular resonated with me: It came from Chelsey Sprong at Beazley, who urged people to “find the oasis” in their company.

At the risk of flattering myself, she was riffing on my analogy of many organisations being barren deserts in which to attempt to launch a push for gender equality, culturally-speaking. Her advice was to seek out the people, teams or places in your business where the cultural conditions that are central to gender equality - the oases in the desert - exist, and then nurture them.

In some ways this aligned perfectly with what I’d been saying about the need to address gender equality at a cultural level, but reflecting on it afterwards I came to realise that it was a profoundly different approach to achieving the same goal from the one I’d been imagining.

In place of attempting to impose organisation-wide culture change by design (which is what I’d been thinking about), Chelsey was suggesting that you nurture what’s already there. Hers was partly an invitation to start small, which fits well with everything we learned during the research about the importance of pace and timing. But it was also an invitation to observe how and where the cultural conditions that are needed for gender equality are already thriving within the wider cultural setting of the company. Where I’d been talking about the need to improve the fertility of the soil (culture) in which seeds (initiatives) are planted, Chelsey was suggesting that you start by seeing what’s already growing and then figure out how to encourage it to spread.

We find examples of this approach in industries like construction, where the prevailing cultural conditions may seem overwhelmingly hostile to the flourishing of gender equality, but in which seeds of change are nevertheless managing to germinate by rooting themselves in deeply- and widely-held assumptions about the importance of employee safety. Seen in that way, it’s about working with, rather than against, the environment in which you’re trying to achieve your goals, and I think that’s a very smart approach.

So, where’s your oasis?

Women in Leadership: Strategies from FTSE 350 organisations leading the way

Our latest research ‘Women in Leadership: Strategies from FTSE 350 organisations leading the way’ reveals the practices, strategies, and leadership behaviours that have enabled a number of FTSE 350 organisations to make substantial progress in advancing female representation in leadership roles. Learn more and download the summary report here.