When Top Women Leave

Morning everybody. Dr. Robyn McKay here. Welcome to Mindset Rx. This is your place to be if you are an emotionally intelligent leader, especially those of you in tech, fintech and healthcare, who are really ready to set the tone for a positive, productive and purposeful week. And today I'm talking about, more about the great resignation. Somebody asked me the other day, one of my team members said, "Doc, you're Mindset Rx, why are you talking about the great resignation? Why are you talking about... " Hey, Holly. "Why are you talking about what happens when top women leave organizations?" And I said, "Well, everything kind of tracks back to mindset, doesn't it?" And it really is an important time right now to adopt an attitude of curiosity and openness and wonderment even about what's possible now and in the future for women leaders. And I will say this, that this is not just a women's issue, this is a human issue. It's something that is impacting, it looks like every level of business at this point. And what I wanted to focus on today is what happens when top female leaders leave their organizations.

The impact on the organization, but also the impact on other women as well. Of course, other women are part of the organization, but it does have a special kind of ripple effect, when we look at the effect of top leaders leaving organizations who usually have been involved a lot in mentoring and developing relationships with the next generation of people with leadership potential. And sends a message that maybe the organization needs to do some, at least some damage control on it at this point, but also I think in the long-term look at strategy and systems and approaches to preserving top talent, rather than just letting them leave for what I would say is no good reason, although there are really good reasons that people are leaving as well. So let's start like we always do, because this is Mindset Rx, by doing a little bit of just centering and coming into the present.

I read something yesterday that said this: If you are living in the past through worrying, concern, depression, regret, or if you're living in the future, anxiety, activation around what's next, and you're not living in the present, you're actually living in a non-reality. And I think that that was a really powerful way of thinking about the importance of being present in the here and now. In the here and now is our reality. So I just want to invite you to bring your whole self here today. And I'm noticing, for example, if you could see my screen right now, I've got a billion things up in the background, so I'm gonna shut down a couple of things too, because we wanna clear out any distractions that we have in order to make the most of our time together. If you're watching live, I'd love to hear from you. Holly's here from, I think she's at Nike these days, so it's nice to have you here, and anybody else who wants to say hello, I would love to hear from you. If you're watching the recording, do the same thing; I always pop back in and say hello to you all as well.

And last thing. This is a grassroots movement, and so this Mindset Rx is something that is sort of is growing in steam and taking hold in some people's lives, and I would love for you to share this with other people who you think could benefit from that. It'll make a whole lot of difference in a lot of people's lives if we can all come together on this deal around mindset. So to bring us into the present, let's just go ahead and take a deep breath in through the nose. And hold it, and then let it go. And I always like to shimmy my hips around a little bit, and get myself situated in my chair. Good morning, Vincent, it's nice to see you here this morning. Just breathe in and breathe out. The most important thing that you can do right here in this moment is just notice, When am I breathing in? And when am I breathing out? And give yourself the gift of this time to come into the present, to ignore any non-realities, anything that's coming up, anything that has already happened. Those are not part of your reality right now.

Just be right here right now. Alright, good. Awesome. So today I wanna talk about what happens when top women leave their organizations. And I wanna say a couple of things about that, just right off the bat. One is, part of this information, a lot of this information actually, comes from my personal experience speaking with top women in fintech and tech particularly, about their own experiences with watching what's happening with the great resignation. The great resignation, of course, I believe is coming as a result of the last 18 months or so of being in a position of working from home, of really looking at, What are my top priorities? And asking questions that maybe we weren't asking in the past, they're existential in nature; really, what's the point of all of this? What's next? What's my purpose? And it's those people, I believe, at least in my circles, are the ones who are either leaving or they're considering leaving. They're considering going somewhere else in order to do meaningful work if they're not finding meaning and purpose in their current positions. And so that's the first thing I wanna say is it does come from my personal experience as an executive coach for top leaders, but then I also found a report I wanted to just share with you, and we'll share this in the show notes too.

But this is a... It was produced by the TrustRadius, and it's a 2021 Women in Tech report. It was produced, or excuse me, published in March of this year. And there are 50 new statistics and quotes on gender equality in the workplace, and the topics that are included are barriers to promotion and unconscious bias, of course, is something that we've been dealing with for a long time. And I'm not gonna go into a lot of the details on this, but I do wanna just point out a couple of things about this report that I think are really relevant for organizations to take into consideration if your intention is to actually preserve top talent rather than just allowing them to leave without any kind of effort on your part to keep them in the ranks. And also to the women who are considering leaving, I want you to... I'm gonna give you some recommendations too. I think it's important to look at both the organizational piece of this and also the personal piece of it. So I'm gonna read to you the top nine takeaways from the Women in Tech report. This is in the report, of course, but I thought that this was really pretty interesting.

One is, of course, Covid-19 severely impacted women in tech. Women in tech carry even more household work now than they did before. Women in tech are divided on the impact of remote work, some of them really love it and don't wanna go back into the office, and some of them are really ready to get back into the office as well. Here's one, and then I'm gonna talk about a little bit more in a minute, is the bro culture, it's still pervasive, according to women in tech. And they actually have broken this one down into percentages based on the field. So I think in the field of engineering, for example, 63% of the women surveyed said that they were still infused with the bro culture, but women in fintech... No, sorry, women in sales, particularly, I think 78% of them, were experiencing a lot of the bro culture. So this is something that continues to be looked at as, from the outside looking in, as a problem. I think that it's my opinion, and you know I'm very liberal with my opinions on this, but I think the people who aren't talking about it are people who benefit from it.

So that's gonna be something that we have to continue to look at in terms of maybe not breaking through it, but transforming it, so that it is a more inclusive, diverse, and a place where people can actually belong regardless of gender, or regardless of difference from the center of privilege. Women are still outnumbered in the tech industry. They have to work harder to prove their worth, they think. They face more barriers to promotion in tech. Gender equality has not changed in the last year, it's no great surprise. And then there are some recommendations that they have in order for what companies can do to be able to change the conversation here, and change the experiences of women in tech and in other fields as well.

So I wanted to share that with you just because this is something, it's in the ether, as it's in the conversation that we're having around, How do we preserve top talent, particularly women. And I will say, the conversations I've had with top women, my goodness, they are saying things like, depending on what level a woman is, if she's an individual contributor, that's gonna have some impact, of course, but on the morale of the managers and so on, on how management is thinking about recruiting and retaining top talent, especially female talent. But at the top, one female leader in particular said this, she said, "When a woman at the top leaves an organization, particularly one where women are already in the minority in leadership, it really sends... " She called it a ripple effect, it feels quite frankly more like a tsunami to me, around... It really sends a message to the rest of the organization, "If she can't stay, what am I doing here? Why did she leave?" And it creates kind of a spin in terms of speculation, curiosity, interest, and also kind of disrupts what people are doing in the organization that are... I'm gonna use the word beneath, I know that's not the proper word to use... But who are reporting into her or who are influenced by her.

See, one thing I believe that women leaders do really well in their organizations is to create mentoring opportunities, relationships, for other women, in order to support them, in order to help them and guide their career paths. And when they leave, you can imagine how disheartened and disenchanted the people who have to stay, or who are choosing to stay, might feel, and might have that experience. So what do we do about that? And listen, I'm not one to say, stay in a job that you don't like. I'm not one to say, stay with a company that is toxic or that is not making strides or making inroads into transforming the culture of their work. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that you must actually, you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your contribution on the planet to go and make the difference that you came here to make, and if you're not fulfilled in your work, and if you're not feeling like you're making the progress and living out the purpose that you came here to make, then it is probably time to leave. So I'm not about making people stay or telling them to stay just because.

But what I am about is both the organization and the individual looking at the underlying influences that create the conditions for top women leaders to leave. And not only that, to be able to... For the women who are choosing to leave, to remind you, and you've heard me say this before if you've been paying attention to any of these Mindset Rx's recently is, my gosh, wherever you go, there you are. So if you're not doing the inner work, if you're not making the inner transformation, you're just doing a geographic, and you'll recreate a lot of the circumstances, the feelings, the burnout and so on that you experienced in your current job. Unless and until you change your relationship with time, with money, and with work.

So I wanna pause here for just a second. And I would love to hear if you're watching live, if you've got a question or if something is giving you an aha or something to pause about. Let's hear from you, and I'd love to get some feedback on that.

So my big question, and I don't, to be honest, I don't have an answer for this, but this is a question that I've been thinking about and processing through with my private clients who are in my executive coaching programs, and also I just did an executive roundtable recently for women leaders on the future of women in leadership. And one of my big questions is, what's at stake here? What's at stake when top women leaders leave? And it has to do with the morale, it has to do with the attitudes toward women, it has to do with the disruption in the innovations that could be happening within the organization. Thank you, Mary, it's nice to see you here this morning; Mary Sander's here. And you're welcome for that. I'd love to...

I know that you probably have some opinions about this issue too, so we should put our heads together at some point. So we have to answer that question, what's at stake? And I think what's at stake is different for everybody, right? But there are some things that I wanna talk to you about in the time that we have remaining that can really be helpful in terms of turning the tide of this great resignation, in terms of really giving organizations and also individuals the opportunity to change the conversation around the future of women in leadership, around why you're working in the first place, and what you're meant to be doing now and in the future. Because... My Spidey sense tells me this: What you did in the past... I don't wanna say that it's no longer relevant, because of course your past experiences are relevant and inform what you'll do now and in the future. But there's something else that you're meant to be doing. If you're watching this live, if you're participating in any of the conversations we've been having, there's something more that you're meant to be doing, something different that you're meant to be doing than you did before. And certainly the past informs that, but it's not the same thing. So we wanna get you off the gerbil wheel and we wanna get organizations off the gerbil wheel as well.

So let's take a look at some of the things that we can implement pretty easily to change this conversation, and I'm gonna just toggle back over here to this report, because some of the ideas that they have are similar to mine, and some of them... I think that we've had this conversation for a long time, a couple of recommendations that the TrustRadius report recommends are offering equal maternity and paternity leave; 55% of women want this. Conduct unconscious bias training; 57% of women want that, and certainly this is something that is an ongoing conversation in corporate culture around unconscious bias. I think that the people who are resisting that are the ones who benefit from it, and they're the sometimes the hardest minds to change as well. So that's something that we have to continue to strive forward on making changes. And then, of course, they recommend... And what 64% of women said that they wanted was to offer flexible scheduling and location of work. There are a lot of women who are finding the benefit of staying at home and living and working and having a great life in this new work-from-home environment.

I personally started working from home way back in 2002, and really never looked back. I was in the office every once in a while, for a couple of years here and there as I was finishing my PhD, but working from home has really always worked for me. So when the pandemic came forward and everybody landed at home, I was like, "Welcome to my space, this is something I'm very familiar and used to." So that's something that I think is something that organizations are taking a look at pretty closely in terms of how they're gonna navigate that in the future. Here are the two things that I wanna say that I'm in alignment with this report on. One is to provide mentorship opportunities for women. And what I'll say about this is that the mentorship opportunities change... Sorry, the mentorship needs change depending on what level of experience a woman is at. So what a young woman who's just starting in her career needs in terms of mentoring, in terms of leadership development, is very different from what a senior female leader needs.

A senior female leader is gonna need, sometimes mentorship also... Mentorship is different from coaching, of course; mentorship is typically either a peer-to-peer or a higher level to lower level relationship that gets formed, hopefully organically, those are the best kinds of mentoring relationships are the ones that form organically, between two co-workers. Either two colleagues who are coming together, two people who work in the same area are coming together, and one is mentoring the other. I think that, it's my experience with mentoring, having done it for so long and developed mentoring programs, that if it's not done properly or if it's done just sort of like pulling two people together and have these conversations, there's some limited advantage to that. But the real advantage comes from providing targeted mentoring, and mentoring that is having trained mentors is going in and having conversations and working with people who are at different levels than they are. But that's for the earlier stage of work people. By the time you get into senior leadership, mentoring is less necessary than advising and executive coaching.

There's something about having an outside advisor coming in and having conversations with you and picking at your brain about your best way forward. And so, of course, that's some of the work that I do with my top women leaders. And to be able to have conversations about negotiating salaries and finding new positions that are just right for them and so on. These are not things that mentors are typically trained to do, know how to do, or necessarily even have any experience doing. So that's when the higher level the woman gets, the more important it is to have targeted and expert mentoring and advising from an outside source. Somebody who isn't necessarily embedded in the organization, who maybe knows the organization, certainly I have companies that I know the organization pretty well because I've worked with them for a long time, but...

Who isn't invested in the organization herself, in terms of her own position, or... Yeah, position; we'll just stop there. So I really want to encourage that, the mentorship. Now, here's the rub, is that everybody knows that mentoring is a good thing, everybody knows that executive coaching is a good thing, the challenge here, for those of you who are corporate leaders, who are the decision makers, is actually creating lines in your budget to fund mentoring and advising and executive coaching. It's one thing to say it but, to be really transparent, the women who are coming to me who are top leaders, they're VP level and above, they're coming to me for executive coaching, they're laying down their own credit cards. They're paying for their coaching themselves, privately. They're happy if their organizations will reimburse them the CMEs, or the CEs, or the continuing ed dollars, but they're not counting on it.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with that actually, but I would like to see now and in the future, line items in budgets specifically for engaging training, mentor training, and executive coaching for women leaders. That is going to go a long way in retaining and preserving top women in leadership. When they get the support, the right kind of support, that they require at those top levels when they are actually very much embedded with bro culture, when they can start understanding the role of the leader now and in the future, and really applying that to how they're leading and how they're thinking about leadership and how they're thinking about contribution, this is what's gonna make a difference in the organization. And the last one that the tech report and I agree on is actually to promote more women in leadership. Now, that's a tough one.

Because of course we know that we need to promote more women in leadership, but we're also a merit-based, for the most part, a merit-based society where we're looking at who's doing the best job, and leadership is often treated as a reward for hard work at an individual contributor level. And I think we really need to change the conversation of how people are leading and who is leading, based on what their actual leadership abilities and profiles are, rather than just promoting somebody who's a really good individual contributor but not such a great leader, into a leadership role.

I think that my experience is, and maybe yours is different from mine, but I think that there are a lot of leaders in positions who got there because they worked really hard and they did all the right things, they hit a lot of home runs earlier in their career, and they're not so great leaders. And then there are some emotionally intelligent humans out there who are exceptional leaders who maybe aren't technically the strongest, but, boy, they know people, and they know how to bring out the best in people. So I think we need to look at who we're promoting, how we're promoting them. But here's the thing for those of you who are top women leaders who are thinking about leaving. One of the pieces of the study that I really paid attention to was that women are reporting that they feel like they have to work harder in order to prove they're worthy of the job that they have, of the salary that they make, of the promotion that they're wanting. And worthiness, you can't legislate worthiness. In other words, I can't tell you to be worthy, and I can't tell you that you are worthy. I can, but it doesn't land. To feel worthy is an inside job.

This is something that is so important to look at within yourself. Worthiness, a sense of deservedness; how much do I deserve, what do I deserve? And if you're coming from a place of servitude or worker bee energy, and you're bringing that into your leadership, or you're bringing that into wherever you are contributing in the organization, that's not something that somebody outside of yourself can change. That's something, and you may not know how to change it either, but that's something that you work on with coaching, that's something you work on behind the scenes. Because once you actually shift your worthiness, once you actually heal whatever is blocking the worthiness, which is oftentimes corporate trauma... Once you heal that, then you have awareness of opportunities that have probably been there all along, and you have a natural confidence that comes forward as a result of healing that inner conversation that you have with yourself about how worthy you are.

So, I agree, I think that we need to promote more women into leadership. I think that we need to get real transparent about salaries, and I think that we need to even the playing field with regard to salaries. 'Cause that's, frankly, a lot of the times that I'm talking to these women leaders who are thinking about leaving, they're looking at other organizations who are offering them 25%, 30%, 35% raises from their salaries, and their own organizations are pushing back against that. So they leave and go get more money. It's not always about the money, but it is about money, I think, as a representative of an acknowledgement of the amount of influence that you have. And if you're not feeling influential in your own organization, you may wanna take a look at your salary with regard to that. And this is something that I know is a slow... This needle is gonna move slow. But I do think we need to keep having the conversation about optimizing salaries across the board, so that there actually is equal pay. And now this is just for white... We know that women of color, we haven't even touched on LGBTQ+ people and how they're experiencing this great resignation and where we are in business right now. But I think that these are conversations we still have to have.

So, that's my two cents for today. I know I went way over, but I thank you for hanging in there with me. And I'm going to just come back and look at what a couple of you all have said. Holly says, "We're talking about the coaching, bespoke coaching that fit your needs, not the corporate cookie cutter training." Yes, thank you for bringing that forward, Holly, that's super important to be able to look at targeted coaching specifically for the psychology of women. Which is not cookie cutter at all, and, you know, that's my wheelhouse. And then, let's see, Roxane, "Absolutely agree with your comments on who we are promoting; exceptional leaders are the ones who can inspire teams to reach their high-performing potential." Yep, that's it, that's who really is important to start promoting. We have to understand that we can have these conversations. And, in some ways, I'm preaching to the choir here, but there is a mindset shift that we personally have to have as women leaders, and then to... The next thing that I wanna talk about at some point, I don't know that we'll do it today, is to talk about sponsorships. Because still the people at the top, the decision-makers who are making decisions about line items and budgets around mentoring and coaching, for example, are male, and they are very, very close to the center of privilege. And the invitation for people...

The invitation for people to sponsor, to be sponsors, to say yes and open doors to new opportunities for people who look different from how they look, from people who think different from how they think, is going to be the people who do that. The men who show up and say yes and open doors to people like you and people like me, are our champions. And we have to start calling them in too, because this is not something that we can do by ourselves, and nor should we. And Mary says, "I'm living this life right now, just left a wonderful career to discover what else is out there for me." Yeah. And so that's a perfect time, Mary, to look at what's next and to get some real targeted, and maybe you are, some targeted information about how do I want to contribute now and in the future. How do I want to contribute? Awesome, well, that's all I have for today. It's been so great to be here with you all, and we will circle back again next week on the next episode of Mindset Rx. I'm your host, Dr. Robin McKay, if you loved what you heard today, I'd love for you to share this with somebody else who you think could benefit from being part of our conversation. And find me online.

I love to connect with people on LinkedIn, just private message me and tell me something that you're taking away from today. I think that'll be a really great place to start. I will see you next week. Ciao.