Finding, Keeping and Promoting Women in the Workplace with SHRM’s Jennifer McCollum
About This Episode
This week’s episode is brought to you by SHRM. Read on to learn more.
Jennifer McCollum has driven a long and winding road to her position in the C-suite. Today, she leads Linkage, a SHRM company, where she oversees the strategic direction and global operations of this leadership development firm.
This week, Carrie Fox sits down with Jennifer to talk about, well, a lot. In addition to her work as CEO, Jennifer has become an inspiring voice in women's leadership. Her book, In Her Own Voice: A Woman's Rise to CEO: Overcoming Hurdles to Change the Face of Leadership, is a definitive take not only on what it takes for women to advance their careers but for any organization eager to improve gender equity at every level for this generation, and the next.
As McCollum explains, while women represent half the workforce, a stark drop-off occurs in the executive ranks. "When we look at the C-suite specifically, about 70% is still the leadership majority of white men," she says. McCollum's mission is to change that status quo.
The data is out and shows clearly the positive impact of women in leadership roles. What are organizations doing to help women face the unique challenges, societal expectations, and work-life pressures they face, while enabling these same women to do the best work? "To drive change, we must encourage women to bring their full, authentic selves to work," she says.
Through Linkage, McCollum has empowered thousands of women. Now, with her book, she hopes to reach women at all career levels with research-backed insights on overcoming hurdles and help them to truly thrive.
Our great thanks to Jennifer McCollum for joining us this week.
Sponsor: SHRM
SHRM provides solutions for 95% of Fortune 500 companies to transform talent management, accelerate executive development, elevate workplace culture, and build inclusive workplaces. SHRM promotes diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging while advancing women leaders to construct better workplaces. Mission Partners routinely consults SHRM first when facing HR and best practice challenges and we're thrilled to be able to work with SHRM as the sponsor of this week's episode. Learn more at SHRM.org.
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Welcome to Mission Forward.
Carrie Fox:
Today's episode is brought to you by SHRM. You heard me. S-H-R-M, SHRM. There's a reason that 95% of Fortune 500 companies turn to SHRM. From elevating workplace culture and talent management to accelerating the performance and development of their executives, SHRM has a full suite of solutions to transform the way you work. I really admire their driving principles: promoting women in leadership, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and ultimately building better workplaces for a better world. I'll tell you honestly, every time that we have a question over at Mission Partners tied to HR and best practices, the first place we go, you got it, shrm.org. So for listeners tuning in, SHRM is the perfect partner to help solve business challenges keeping you up at night. Learn more at S-H-R-M.org. And now, back to the show.
Hi there, and welcome to the Mission Forward podcast, where each week we bring you a thought-provoking and perspective-shifting conversation on the power of communication. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and Certified B Corporation. Today we are inviting you to join us for a conversation with Jennifer McCollum, CEO of Linkage, a SHRM company and author of the brand new book, which I just finished today, In Her Own Voice: A Woman's Rise to CEO, Overcoming Hurdles to Change the Face of Leadership. My friends, I am so excited for this conversation. Here's what I'll preview with you that you'll learn more about today.
Jennifer's book chronicles her own journey to CEO. It's compelling, it's accessible, and she has an incredibly clear voice that tells wonderful stories. It's packed with these research-backed insights and we're going to hear about some of those today. And also packed with stories from throughout her career designed to break bias, build understanding and empathy, and help organizations situate themselves so that more women can thrive in leadership roles.
Two pieces of her book that really resonated with me, one, the undeniable advantages of women-led companies. I might be biased here too. We are a women-led company and we know the advantages, but the research is powerful and she's going to share some of that with us today in the conversation. And, two, understanding what companies that excel at advancing women do differently. I love these kinds of conversations because they're practical and tangible and they give our listeners things to take away, try, experiment, and implement in their own companies. Jennifer has identified four key areas of focus that support women in their rise to leadership, and I suspect we're going to hear about some of them today.
Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Jennifer McCollum:
Carrie, thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
Carrie Fox:
So have I. How did you get into this incredible work that you were doing?
Jennifer McCollum:
I'm going to go back a couple of decades. This topic of gender for me in my last 30 years or so, has really focused on leadership and it's about helping all leaders, but really specifically, I have a soft spot in my heart and passion around helping women really reach any level that they aspire to at any stage of their career. So I think back and even at the early stages of my career in my early 30s as a leadership consultant, a leadership coach, I was working with women in groups in my free time, pro bono, helping them get clarity on their purpose, on their vision. And we later branded those groups. We called them the Visionista groups, and there are still Visionista groups popped all over the world to this day.
It's funny when I think back, when you really get clear on your own intention, your purpose, your vision, it's so clear that you can see it when you have that, and women struggle with this, by the way, but when you have that, the universe conspires to help you get it. And so for me, that happened about five years ago, the culmination of my career landed me right here at Linkage. And Linkage, we will talk about it more if you'd like, but Linkage is the most incredible company that has a mission to change the face of leadership. And that's what we've been doing for 35 years. About 25 of those years have been squarely helping advance women at all levels of leadership and helping organizations who aspire to support them.
Carrie Fox:
I suspect a lot of folks who are listening know inherently that this is a really important mission, changing the face of leadership, but you've got a lot of data that reinforces why changing the face of leadership is so important. So tell us a little more about that.
Jennifer McCollum:
And first I want to clarify, when we say changing the face of leadership, it really means two things. The first is more figurative, changing the face of something. It's changing our perspectives on what it is great leadership means, what great leaders actually do. So that's the foundation of what we do at Linkage. But it also, as you can imagine, is very literal for us. And changing the face of leadership means helping the largest underrepresented population, which is women, helping them advance in leadership roles at all levels. And our belief is that if we can help the largest underrepresented population, by extension, we also help other forms of underrepresentation like race, ethnicity, LGBTQ, et cetera.
So back to the data, and you asked that question, when you look at men and women, the entire spectrum of gender entering the workforce, it's about 50/50, a little more women than men. But you immediately see that drop off, that accelerates all the way through to the CEO level and the board level. So when we look at the C-suite specifically and the senior executives, about 70%, the leadership majority is still white men. And while we've been making some progress over the past five years, it's grown four or five percentage points when you look at the executive VP plus level women. When you go down to the director level and below, the numbers are not changing at all. And that's really the crisis point because unless we can fuel that pipeline, we're not going to have a broken rung. We're going to have ladders that just don't have rungs at all. And we need to accelerate that.
Carrie Fox:
Right. I mentioned at the top that I run a benefit corporation, a B Corporation, and there are now thousands of companies who are B Corporations around the world. There are still a very small percentage of those companies that are women-owned and women-led. And so we talk about this a lot in our conversations in a group called We The Change. That's a bit like your Visionista groups of how do we support one another? And there's only so much you can do to support one another as much as the system also has to support women leaders. And it seems like that's really where a lot of your research has focused.
Jennifer McCollum:
And I'm actually glad you mentioned that because back to what you're doing, and congratulations on building a woman-led company, it's that access to capital and access to sponsorship that really, I mean, the numbers are shocking when you look at the capital given to men versus women-led businesses. Our expertise at Linkage is more around what is preventing organizations from solving this problem. And the four prongs that we look at, as you mentioned at the top of the program are, one is around culture. Are you creating a culture in your organization where women feel welcomed, where they feel like they belong? The second one is around people, systems and processes. So when you look at those, is there true equity in those processes? Things like talent acquisition to promotions, to succession planning. And what we tend to find there is that women will say things like, "Well, the job internally opened up and then all of a sudden announcement came out and I didn't even know about it and I wasn't considered." So those are the types of things when we look at talent systems, is their equity?
The third is around executive action and commitment. And this is the one that actually is the lowest scoring as we've tracked this data over many, many years. And this is about executives doing more than saying the right things. It's, are they doing the right things? So when women look up at the executive ranks, and where 70 plus percent are still men, do we see them truly and verbally committing to the advancement of women, sponsoring women, not only opening the door, but helping women, pulling women through that door. That's executive action. And then the final one is leadership development for women. Carrie, this is so important because there's a perception that, well, why are you treating women differently in terms of leadership development? Do you need to fix the women? And I always say, no, no, it's not about fixing the women leaders. Women are exceptional leaders, and we can have another conversation about the leadership data that we look at and the gender differences. This is about helping women and organizations understand the unique challenges that they face on their path to leadership and how those challenges are different on the path for men.
Carrie Fox:
Right. In the opening, I very intentionally said, your book does such a great job of setting this understanding and empathy for the experiences that women are having in the workplace. And, if all right with you, there is a story you tell in the book that I'd love you to recount here, and it's about Magic Johnson and a conversation that you had with him that had a couple ahas in it.
Jennifer McCollum:
This happened just a few years ago, and Magic does not know this story is in the book, by the way, but it was fascinating. We invited him to our Women in Leadership Institute, one, because we'd gotten some feedback that we need more men on our stages, especially men who support women in their rise to leadership. And Magic, by the way, he's got an investment in a women's basketball team. He invests in women and minority-owned businesses. He's got a lot of women on his executive team. So he was the perfect speaker. We always align our speakers to the competency model that we measure and develop women around for their advancement. And he was aligned to the competency of bold, which is aligned to the challenge or the hurdle of making the ask.
So I started asking Magic all kinds of questions about, "Have you ever had a moment in your career where you really wanted something but you were afraid to ask?" And he looked a little perplexed and said, "No, if I want something, I ask for it." And then I would follow up and say, "Well, but if you get told no, how do you actually feel about that? Do you fight back?" And he goes, "Well, if I'm told no, I just go right back in." I kept serving up these questions hoping that women would say, "Oh, I see how I can follow Magic Johnson's path." But the women just started laughing because Magic Johnson's experience with being bold and making the ask were so incredibly different than the experience of women that at the end, what I realized was we just needed to acknowledge that Magic's experience with being bold and making ask was different.
Does that mean we have to be more like Magic or more like men? No, but we can learn from the experiences of men who don't face the same hurdles of asking for exactly what they want versus the watered down version of what they think they deserve or what they think they will get. Magic didn't face the same experience of women who say, "Maybe I shouldn't ask for the money, the raise, the promotion, the title, because it's not time yet. I'm not ready for it yet." Men, by and large and Magic especially not, they don't face that same hurdle that we do in the extreme.
Carrie Fox:
And yet perhaps they're trying and learning. And that's where a book like this can help, right? I'm thinking about my husband who happily talks about himself as a feminist and a girl's dad and will go out of his way to advocate for women's issues. And many of the individuals that coached and mentored me throughout my career were men as I'm in a largely male dominant industry and always found ways to believe in me and push me and support me. And I realize that that is not the norm.
Jennifer McCollum:
It is not the norm. And so while women can look to men as examples, I think a couple of things are needed. One, when you have an important ask, and again, I'll give you a really personal example, when I started as the CEO of Linkage, even in the negotiation process, I wasn't familiar with the private equity-backed CEO world, and I knew I was going to need a lot of support with this negotiation. What should I expect? What is the average salary and compensation package? What can I ask for? What is unreasonable?
And so I actually surrounded myself with a couple of people that were very deep into the private equity world, who became my voice and my advisor for the negotiation. I have an amazing COO. He has been in the role of COO of Linkage for the better part of 25 years. Along the way, he was whispering in my ear about, "Look, at this board meeting, in this business planning process, we probably could be stronger about what we're asking for here." He helped me create the business case, and then it was up to me to create the relationships in the environment to make that ask. Did I get everything I wanted? No, but did I get far more than I would have had I not made the ask? Absolutely.
Carrie Fox:
One of the things I appreciate about the book, and perhaps you have a story to bring to life here, is that as I was reading, I thought, "Oh, that's not just in my head. Oh, I'm not the only one that experiences that." And you talk about some of these barriers and challenges that hold women back. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about those.
Jennifer McCollum:
At Linkage, we call them the inner critic and the seven high hurdles to advancement. And our goal when we do all of our work, the coaching and the consulting and the training and the conferences, all of our work is designed to really support building awareness of these hurdles and helping women overcome them. We've already talked about the organizational role in that as well. So I won't go deep into all of them. I'll talk about a couple of them. You can read about the rest of them in the book, but the inner critic is the one that really amplifies all of the other hurdles, and that's that voice in our head that everybody has. It's just a little bit louder for women. It's the voice that's critical of ourselves. It can also be critical for others.
But it often sounds like this. It sounded like this for me. Again, we'll go back to the CEO job. Several of my executive team members when I started at Linkage said, "I can't believe that that private equity board hired a woman to be a CEO." And I thought, "Well, that's odd because we are a company that has an expertise in the advancement of women." I wasn't surprised that I got the job. I was surprised that I even put myself in the running. And the reason was because as soon as that headhunter called me, my inner critic went wild. And it sounded like this:
"You're not ready to be a CEO. You need to be a number two first so that you gain that experience." Or, "You've been managing a P&L at publicly traded companies, but not all the way to the net income line. You've been only managing to the gross margin line. There's too many things about operating expenses that you don't know." Or, and this was the hardest one, "What kind of mother are you? You have a child in middle school, in elementary school and high school. They need you. You can't take a job in Boston when you live in DC and be the kind of mom you want to be." So that's the example of the inner critic. It can stop you in your tracks. It can prevent you from taking action. There are a couple others if you want.
I'll just highlight without going into too much detail, the three highest hurdles, and we measure these year over year. For the last decade, the three highest hurdles have been clarity. When I ask women, "What does success look like for you professionally in the next two, three years," the vast majority of women will say, "I've never thought about that," or, "I'm afraid to think about it because what if I don't get it?" Or, "I don't like to think about myself. I like to think about the team's success." You start to hear those themes. So clarity is really critical. Why is clarity critical? Because of the second-highest hurdle, which is proving your value and proving your value is the tendency for women to believe that if I put my head down and I work harder and harder and harder, and I say yes to more and more and more, as we layer on work and children and community and elder care, if I just say yes to it all, I will be rewarded in the end.
And you know what? That just leads to a lot of burnout and ultimately a lot of resentment. Proving your value is about how do you do two things? How do you learn to attract and commit to those things that really align to your clarity about what you want with career and life and being comfortable to say no to other things? And then, too, how do you inspire others? It could be at home and it could be at the office or the school fundraiser. How do you inspire others and delegate so that they're in it with you? Even if you could do it better in your mind than your partner or then the committee, how do you let go a little bit? That's the second. And I'll tell you one more if you want.
Carrie Fox:
One more. Go ahead.
Jennifer McCollum:
Okay. And the final hurdle is what we talked about with Magic Johnson. It's making the ask. And we teach women, how do you do this? How do you, one, build the courage and the knowledge base to make the ask and make sure that you go back in if and when you're told no? And men and women both make asks equally, but women will take a much larger step back if they're told no. And partly it's because we've been punished for making the ask over time. "She's too aggressive," or, "she's too ambitious." And that's kind of the backlash that women often get. So we teach them how to overcome them.
Carrie Fox:
Jennifer, there's like a million things that I want to talk about that you just shared, which is why I was jumping out my seat about to step in there. It's like we've been, not like, I think we have been conditioned as women, as employees, as individuals on all of the identities that we hold. We have been conditioned to think about these dominant norms that exist and how we show up within them.
Earlier this season, we had a conversation with someone, Reverend Ronnie Galvin, and he was talking about systems change largely around wealth inequality. And he made this example that I want to bring forward here because there's a really interesting thread between the conversation I had with him and this conversation that we can think about how we change the systems that exist, how we change and challenge the dominant norms that exist inside our workplaces today, or we can completely reimagine them and start again. And what I hear you saying is first identifying and knowing and owning that there are these barriers that exist and that there is in fact a different way to go about getting over the hurdles and thriving in the workplace. There doesn't have to be a playbook that we all follow, that magically leads to success.
Jennifer McCollum:
I love where you're headed and you're getting partly at why now with this book. This isn't the first book written on gender and leadership. The take on this book is what has changed and what can we really consider and conceptualize differently than we did perhaps five years ago? And COVID actually was a really big awakening. It was an awakening because we saw a whole lot of women leave the workforce for many reasons, but at the same time and really start to imagine, "What do I want my life to look like? How do I want to live? How do I want to lead? How do I want to partner and parent?" And COVID really created this reckoning. And so we saw this massive exodus with the Great Resignation, and then we saw the Great Breakup where women said, "I'm not going to do this. I want to have more control over my life and my flexibility." Look, I wasn't only women, but when you look at the gender difference, it was by and large more for women where flexibility has become the number one consideration. So that's one thing.
I think another thing I might say is what has shifted in the way we even conceptualize the hurdles? So I'll give you one example here. We used to teach about branding and presence, which is still one of our hurdles, but we used to teach it with how do you want to show up so that you can thrive in a workforce that by and large is full of white men, how they talk, how they dress, how they golf. And I'm not saying we shouldn't all learn how to play golf. If you want to learn how to play golf, do it. But the evolution of branding and presence for us is now around how do you show up authentically in your own power to ensure that you can be yourself at work? Now, that could mean, is my uniqueness valued? Do I belong in this environment? And if your light can't shine where you are...
By the way, Caroline Wanga, I don't know if you know who she is. So the CEO of Essence was on our stage last year, and I love this quote. She said, "If you can't be who you are, where you are, change where you are, who you are.
Carrie Fox:
Yes. Well, I'm not going to give away the last line in your book, but there is something that just I hung with that, sneak peek, there's a little bit about love in there. And the folks who listen to this show know, I like to talk about love in the workplace, not romantic love. We don't need that, but agape, love for the human and creating spaces where we can be fully supportive of one another. So, just another reason why I think this book really resonated deeply with me. Alrighty, we got last few minutes. You have the book sitting right next to you right now. Tell me what your hope is as this book gets out into the world, what you hope people take and do with this message.
Jennifer McCollum:
We had a fascinating conversation and my original conception for this book, and who knows, right? This is my first book, so I know you've written more. My first book was, we're already at Linkage impacting thousands of women. But those women are coming to us, they're coming to our conferences, and by and large, they're being sponsored by their organizations. So the very first hope that I had for this book is to make this content far more accessible to women at all levels and at all stages of life.
If you aspire and you identify as a woman, if you aspire to advance in your career and in your life, I think this book has something for you. And if you're an executive in a position of power, in a position of influence, regardless of your gender, and you aspire to help women and other underrepresented population advance, this book is also for you. I don't know actually. This is the seed that we're planting out into the world on... Very soon the book will be, you can pre-order now, but it's going to be out in the world within a few weeks. My hope is that we can scale and have a much greater impact on the significant problem we have in this country and the world. It's worse in the rest of the world in terms of gender equity and leadership, and that together we can change the face of leadership.
Carrie Fox:
Thank you, Jennifer. This was a fantastic conversation. My hope is we get to have another part of this conversation at some point soon, and maybe in person. We're not too far from one another geographically. So many congratulations to you. Having been on this journey, I know it is a big, big lift to put a book into the world, and what you've done is really an incredible body of work, research stories, how you are sharing and what you are gifting to your readers with this book. Thank you so much and thanks for being with us today.
Jennifer McCollum:
Thank you, Carrie. Bye-Bye.
Carrie Fox:
Today's episode is brought to you by SHRM. You heard me. S-H-R-M, SHRM. There's a reason that 95% of Fortune 500 companies turn to SHRM. From elevating workplace culture and talent management to accelerating the performance and development of their executives, SHRM has a full suite of solutions to transform the way you work. I really admire their driving principles: promoting women in leadership, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and ultimately building better workplaces for a better world. I'll tell you honestly, every time that we have a question over at Mission Partners tied to HR and best practices, the first place we go, you got it, shrm.org. So for listeners tuning in, SHRM is the perfect partner to help solve business challenges keeping you up at night. Learn more at S-H-R-M.org.
