Characteristics of the women in the study
We do think differently, we do act differently, we do bring different things to the party. So this isn’t men versus women, this is actually taking the best of all worlds and recognising that they bring different things. (Lillian)
I’m slightly nervous that there may be some areas where I’m deluding myself a bit as it were, about what’s really the case. And some areas where perhaps if I think about it afterwards actually the male impact on my life has been much more negative than this conversation has explored. (Andrea)
Introduction
This chapter looks at the key characteristics and qualities identified and evinced by the women in our study. It compares and contrasts those working in the public and private sectors and analyses the key factors that may have contributed to their success. We also discuss domestic and social circumstances and backgrounds and identify the key drivers in the women’s career progression. We explore the extent to which the main qualities exhibited are innate or learned, with special reference to good leadership.
Social profile
However ‘success’ is ultimately conceptualised, there is no doubt that the women in our study were all high achievers with a range of accomplishments that in some ways made them ‘exceptional’. By this we mean that, in formal terms, the majority of them were chief executive officers (CEOs) or equivalent, or else were on the next (deputy/vice) layer of management. In some cases, the women held positions of significant responsibility in very large-scale organisations, with thousands of employees, so that their level in the hierarchy could be considered to be less important than the level of responsibility and size of the job in which they were currently engaged. In these cases, the women were usually directors or heads of large sections within their organisations. Almost all were either in full-time employment or were self-employed, and often juggling a range of projects within their portfolio. One of the women in the study described herself as ‘retired’, even though in interview it became apparent that she was still working on a number of projects.
Given the focus of the book, we interviewed mainly women who were currently employed in the public sector or who had had substantial public sector experience in the past. Of the interviewees, only one had never been employed in the public sector at all, but the nature of her work was such that she did a good deal of work for public sector organisations. We felt it would be worthwhile including a small proportion of women whose work had been in the main outside public sector organisations as we were curious to note any differences and similarities of experience. In this context, it is interesting to note that a number of the participants in the study questioned whether there was any longer any difference between working in the public as opposed to the private sector, given the many changes that had taken place in recent years. Kate, for example, compared and contrasted her own experience with that of her daughter-in-law, a lawyer:
What I think would be interesting is whether actually being in the public sector makes a difference as opposed to being in industry … I can’t decide whether it’s an age thing or whether it’s because my daughter-in-law works for a private firm, but her approach to the way she thinks about her work, her life and whatever is very different to mine. Although both of us would come together on the shared agenda of wanting to do a good job, her definition of a good job feels much less values-based than mine might be. Her good job is bringing it in on time, saving money, earning money for her firm. It’s just a completely different set of approaches really, and that interests me.
Some of the participants in our study had made a very conscious choice to work in the public sector; Ruth spoke with much passion about her particular career path, a feeling shared with a good many women, and not just in the UK (Fine, 2007):
Due to my political beliefs as a student … and reading an Arts course and sort of Marxist political thought played a large part in that study. Then having taken my course. I believe that information is a right and it’s about using information to enable people to live better lives. I believe in working for the public good. I would have to say that I come from generations of … public sector workers. My mother was a teacher and the ethos that I was brought up with was about public service.
Kate went on to reinforce Ruth’s point about the appeal to a person’s values and beliefs of working in the public sector and the sense of service and vocation that it could bring – something that she did not feel she would gain in the private sector – again, a sentiment more widely shared, as for example in some North American case studies (Caldwell-Colbert and Albino, 2007; Porter and Daniel, 2007). Kate comments on her experience:
This is going to sound really awful – I have always considered it a privilege to work for the Health Service because you know that your work is making a real difference. Would I get that excited about managing Sainsbury’s? I know, for me, I wouldn’t. Working for an entity whose values are what I think are real values for me is important. even now. I can think of incidents in my working career. when I came away thinking actually me being there, as opposed to you being there, made a real difference. That’s such a rewarding thing. Interestingly, when I talk to people who are currently [in the profession] they go ‘she’s mad, it’s not like that at all any more’. But I think that’s because they don’t see it. I think it is there, but they don’t necessarily get that sense of satisfaction. It’s always been there. I think it’s to do with the way society has changed.
In terms of age, our interviewees ranged from early 40s to mid-60s, with the majority being in their 50s. This is unsurprising, given the time needed to rise to the top of most professions – and perhaps this is particularly evident in the public sector where complex, bureaucratic systems of promotion and advancement are the norm. Unlike the private sector, there is evidently less opportunity in the public sector for the kind of entrepreneurial activities that could get people noticed and subsequently promoted very quickly (see, for example, Fogarty et al., 1971; National Academy of Sciences, 2007; Vinnicombe and Colwill, 1995). So, for the most part, it had inevitably taken some years for these women to reach the top jobs. Those at the younger end of the spectrum were generally still ‘on their way up’ and were anticipating further challenges. Maggie’s response, when reflecting on her current role, suggests that she could see herself at least two ‘rungs’ further up the ladder, even if she was somewhat ambivalent about whether moving up would be personally fulfilling. As she put it:
At the same time as learning new things, at the same time as building for the future in terms of being a [next layer up] … I anticipate I will seek to get promoted from this role. I do not see any other role as [current position] whereby there will be development and learning opportunities or where I’ll be able to make a further impact. So my next step will be about continuing to develop, deliver on a day-to-day basis and do a great job and then seek to get promoted. Do I see myself going beyond that to [a further level] …? In terms of my ability and my potential, yes I do. In terms of whether I want to or not, I don’t know. I’m not sure because the driving force that I love, influencing [organisation], I’m not convinced that at the present moment in time being a [post] or above will make me happy.
We focused primarily on women working in Britain, but included one American woman who has spent her entire career in the USA. During the interviews we found that a number of the others had worked abroad for a period at some point. Almost all the women in our study were white – a likely reflection of the additional under-representation of minority ethnic women in the higher levels of both public and private sectors.
Our interviewees included women with above-average academic and professional qualifications – PhDs, professorships, members and fellows of prestigious national professional bodies. Some had won significant honours, including MBEs and CBEs, as well as being national award winners in a variety of ‘women of the year’ competitions. Most of these women, in short, formed part of, and moved within, the top circles in their fields. During the interviews it was not uncommon for meetings with senior politicians, civil servants and other public figures to be referred to, for instance. What was noticeable too was the range of achievements outside of the women’s careers. Within our group were women who had run marathons and undertaken triathlons, who had been highly successful horsewomen and golfers, who had flown planes, were accomplished musicians or had raised thousands of pounds for charitable causes.
We were particularly interested in the pattern of the lives of our respondents outside work, mainly because research in the past has shown a correlation between women’s successful careers and being single and/or without children. It has been suggested that a woman is far more likely to rise to the top of her career if she does not have traditional domestic responsibilities to deal with so that having such responsibilities is a definite drawback for capable or ambitious women (see, for example, Campbell, 2009; Grummell et al., 2009). Our study is too small to be of much statistical significance, but still we were interested to see whether our interviewees were more likely to be single and childless than not. We found that of the 16 women we interviewed, 11 were currently either married, living with a male partner or in a civil partnership; three were divorced or widowed and currently single and two described themselves as single. Of the 16 women, 10 of them had children, the majority of whom were now grown up. A few women explicitly stated that they had chosen not to have children or had limited their family to one child for the sake of their careers. As well as child-rearing, two of the women were currently or had in the past been carers for parents.
Clearly then, the majority of these women did not fit the stereotyped picture of the career woman who is forced to put the rest of her life ‘on hold’ in order to reach the top in her field (see, for example, Ezzedeen and Ritchey, 2009), although a number of interesting points regarding domestic arrangements emerged in the interviews. For instance, more than one of the married women told us about arrangements whereby their husbands had ‘sacrificed’ their own careers to look after the children in order that their wives’ careers should not be held back. Those women currently with a partner or spouse made a point of telling us how essential the support from their life partner had been to their career success, explicitly describing how they would not be able to do their job without the level of domestic support they enjoyed. This theme of work-life balance and how the women saw their domestic roles as interrelating with work is a fascinating one and is explored more fully in Chapter 11 in particular.
Social background was something we had not at first considered charting, but it was interesting that a number of women talked about this unprompted in the first few interviews and so background and early life became incorporated more explicitly in subsequent interviews. Assigning social class in any meaningful way is too complex a matter to be adequately dealt with here, but it was noticeable that the women originated from a wide variety of backgrounds with very few coming from what might be termed a traditionally ‘privileged’ background of public school education followed by one of the elite universities such as Oxford or Cambridge. One of our respondents was the daughter of an MP and several came from professional backgrounds, with teachers, academics or business people for parents; the rest described themselves as from ‘ordinary’ or working-class backgrounds and most of them had had a state education. Fiona labelled herself as a ‘working-class kid, first from my street, generation, school to go to university’, while Diane described herself in this way:
I’m the eldest of two girls from a fairly modest family background. My father was a welder and my mum worked in a cotton mill, when she worked, but when we were girls she didn’t work at that point. She went back to work, I think, when I was in my teens. So I was brought up in a fairly normal family, very fortunate to pass the 11 plus and go to the local grammar school, which was a bit of an event, because in my neighbourhood you didn’t go to grammar school. Most children didn’t even sit the exam; they went straight to the local secondary modern.
Andrea’s background was similar; her description focuses on the lack of financial stability in her early life:
My early life was. very much one where you had to save for stuff. my mother didn’t work; my father had a pretty low level job financially.
Bella was one of the few in our group to have gone to Oxbridge, but her background could not be described as privileged, particularly since she lost her father while she was still in her youth, the bereavement leaving the family in a disadvantaged financial position:
A very traditional state school education: did well at school, worked very hard. My father did not go to university – not a particularly academic background – but I enjoyed work and did well, went to university.
… my father died when I was quite young and left us in an absolutely chaotic state at home with my mother not having worked for quite a long time. We were in debt – it was horrible actually – and I think that does leave quite a deep impression because certainly I’ve always wanted to be economically self-sufficient. I felt quite driven in that respect, whereas I compare with other people I know who perhaps had more financially privileged backgrounds and I don’t see that determination to make sure that things are OK for you and your family.
It is worth noting that two other women in our study lost their fathers at a young age and either implicitly or explicitly made a link between their early circumstances and their subsequent attitudes and development. Jessica told us:
I was born into a family with three children and then became the fourth. Council house – my father had been a prisoner of war for about five years. He came back and worked, but just got gradually more and more ill. He died when I was 19. From the time I was about 11 he actually was off on sick all the time, which is why I get annoyed when people say that people shouldn’t be paid sick pay – we wouldn’t have survived. We were very poor, very hard up, but happy.
I’m very, very independent, which has been fortunate at times because I’ve had bosses who haven’t been supportive and no feedback, so you have to have self-belief … maybe it’s self-belief rather than independence, where you are confident in what you are doing that you don’t need the constant pat on the back. That’s tied in very closely with resilience because I’ve had an awful lot of bashes along the way and it is hard when you’re constantly bashed. I remember the Chief Exec of [organisation] said to me, ‘my God, you have to get the Olympic medal for resilience; we’ve all been really bashing you for the last year. Most of us would’ve walked away or slunk away by now, but here you are, you keep bouncing back’. To them I appeared to bounce back, but it does get to me. But dammit, I’m going to prove to them. Determination, yes – sod them, I’m going to prove I can do it. So there is a sort of rebellious side to it as well. Did that come from my childhood? I was very streetwise when I was young.
The foregoing quotation is in some ways typical of the way the women described themselves – not in terms of the detail, which is clearly unique to each case, but in so far as it was fairly common for our interviewees to move from describing their backgrounds to outlining what they considered to be their individual traits. As such, this provides a useful introduction to the remainder of this chapter, in which we explore a number of themes around personal characteristics in greater depth.
Personal characteristics – how did these women see themselves?
So far, we have concentrated on providing a broad picture of the kinds of women we interviewed for the study and in terms of biographical/social profile we are left with a mixed, and not entirely monolithic, profile of women. They span a 25-year age range, are overwhelmingly white, more likely to be married or in a stable relationship than not, and more likely to be a mother than not. We make no claims for any statistical significance regarding these factors but merely present them as food for further reflection.
Since the focus of the interviews and of the book more generally was always on the women’s own accounts of their lives and careers, their own perceptions and realities, the remainder of this chapter will examine the responses to two specific questions. The first of these asked the women to identify any personal qualities that they felt contributed to their career development and the second asked whether they felt these were qualities they had always had or whether they had been learned through experience. It was in the context of these questions that some of the women talked about their early lives and backgrounds. As the extract from Jessica’s interview (above) illustrates, asking the women to talk about themselves allowed an exploration of what they considered to be their essential qualities, the driving force behind the trajectory of their careers and contributing factors to their success. Their subjective understanding of their experiences thereby forms the heart of the interviews. In analysing their responses, it has been possible to group the women’s descriptions of themselves under a number of rough, though not watertight, headings, as the following sections illustrate.
Ambition, motivation and determination to succeed
A good number of our interviewees were quick to attribute their success to an early and continuing sense of ambition, coupled with the determination and motivation to succeed. This is similar to the findings of Campbell in her 2009 study of minority women in the USA, who put ambition and determination high on their list of attributes. In some cases, these were qualities our interviewees had identified in themselves from an early age. For instance, Gill told us:
I can remember to this day when I was about 12 or 13 walking down the high street and thinking ‘I can do better than this’: even as early as that. And it wasn’t arrogant or money or anything like that, it was to do with using your brain. using your capacity. So I’ve always had that kind of desire to be independent and successful and not beholden to anybody, which has been important as I’ve gone on through life.
Gill continued along the same lines with explicit reference to ambition and determination as part of her make-up:
One of the things that made me successful is this early ambition. I think my mother said I was born determined and determination is quite a big thing with me, as is intellectual enthusiasm, hunger, whatever word you like to use. I love it. so that helps to push you along academically.
A similar set of self-descriptors was used by Eliza:
I don’t know whether you’d call it a quality or a downfall but definitely determination. I’m very self-motivated; I don’t need anybody to motivate me. If there is something that I really want to achieve, that I want it, I am driven and very focused.
Maggie was keen to show how ambition could be seen as negative, whereas hard work and determination might be regarded more positively:
I suppose in years gone by I would have articulated it as ambition. I would describe it now as determination. I’m a really, really, determined person. I want to do and be the best that I can possibly be in terms of my work; that doesn’t equate to level, that equates to being professional and being not just good but being exceptional at what I do. I. think that ambition has quite negative connotations in a way, because ambition, I would interpret that as quite a selfish thing; it’s about individual roles and aims. Determination is more of a characteristic, I suppose, which is about striving to achieve, but not for an ambitious reason.
I think there is a relationship between ambition and success. Some people are very pushy. but they’re not necessarily the ones that succeed. I’m not sure I can generalise about that actually – I genuinely don’t know. I know quite a few people who almost compensate for weaknesses, perceived weaknesses, by pushing themselves forward, and then there are loads of people out there who probably are successful in the sense that they’ve made it to the top, but I don’t think they’re much good; in fact, most people fall into that category – so are they successful or not?
Kate, on the other hand, put a different slant on the idea of career progression, linked to the kind of personal qualities that could be easily mistaken for ambition:
I’ve got a new boss and I had this discussion with him because he didn’t know me at all. I said ‘what you need to know about me is that I’m analytical. I think very strategically, I work very fast and I work over a wide range and I’ve got passion and commitment; I’m not actually ambitious’. That’s quite a difficult combination for people to understand, because when they see ability they automatically assume that you want to go on and on and on. Apart from [previous post], I’ve never thought ‘I must be a director or I must be this or I must be that’. What I’ve always wanted is work that interests me and I feel valued for doing. I think that I have a job that I find endlessly fascinating … I work in an organisation whose value sets I really buy into and believe and I get paid very well, but I don’t have to do all the boring stuff. I have thought about this quite a lot because the Director’s post is vacant at the moment and the automatic assumption from the people outside was that I would apply. because they view me as being highly competent. And I thought, ‘actually that’s not what I want to do’. I don’t want to do all the director-y stuff, which means sitting through endless meetings because you’ve got to be there rather than actually working and making a real difference.
From the extracts above, it is possible to see how the notion of ambition was thoughtfully considered by many of the women; it played a significant role in the way they saw their success, but its conceptualisation was by no means an uncritical one.
Energy, hard work, perfectionism
If ambition and determination were articulated in these quite complex ways, a closely related set of qualities were those emphasising the women’s capacity to work hard and with great energy. ‘Energy’s hugely important’, said Gill. Jessica stressed the need to ‘have energy, particularly when you’re running a home and a family and doing a top job’, while Helen said ‘energy is where I come from’. Bella thought about work all the time: ‘when I’m on holiday, when I’m in bed – it’s absolutely part of me’. Olivia described herself as: ‘tenacious, persevering; I don’t give up easily’. She gave some examples of how her determination manifested itself:
I decided I was going to run the marathon. I started running slowly and not very far and then I put myself forward to do the marathon and then I got a place. Then I did a plan and then I trained for five months to do the marathon and I did it in five and a half hours. I raised £4,000 for charity. I then decided I wanted to do the London Triathlon because I wanted to learn to front crawl which I couldn’t do. I then got a place, got lessons in how to do front crawl and I did the London Triathlon in under two hours and raised just over £4,000 for charity.
Jessica was typical of the women in terms of her approach to work and working hard:
I am a bit of a workaholic … When my daughter was little we had a nanny, but I was determined to get home. I was lucky, because I was only 20 minutes down the line, but I had to be home at 6.15 each day. Leaving at 5.45 was early and not getting there until 8.30; that was late to start. So I would play with her for a couple of hours then she’d go to bed and I’d work or get up at 5 o’clock and work.
Nuala characterised herself using a number of quite precise descriptors, focusing on broad notions of drive, mixed with a certain independence of approach:
Drive, determination, willing to think and act independently, not just go with the crowd, but not be too far out of line. Be willing on occasions to do the things that no one else will tackle or that they believe do not need to be done in some cases!
Like ambition, these tendencies were not always regarded entirely positively by the women, even when they recognised them in themselves: Fiona, for instance, said:
I’m a perfectionist; very, very irritating about wanting things done very well. And I’m hard on myself, harder than anybody else in terms of striving for the very best and I think that’s important. I’m obsessive, absolutely unforgiving, got to be the best. And I think in my role. I do think it is one of my jobs to push us all to strive for more than we think we can achieve. within the areas that I want us to be good at and known for I’m always pushing.
Rebels with a cause
Already we have seen Nuala describing how she does not ‘just go with the crowd’ and, in a few instances, the notion of rebelliousness or of being a person somewhat out of kilter with the norm was elicited as an indicator of the women’s potential to move ahead by being ‘different’ in some way. This is best illustrated by Isobel, who described herself as ‘a bit of an oddball’, going on to explain how she had developed a ‘portfolio’ career. This enabled her to earn a very good income by undertaking high-profile change management projects, on completion of which she would spend several months engaging in non-work-related leisure activities. For Nuala, bucking the conventional career route – while at the same time being highly successful and sought-after – was a positive confirmation of her rebel status. Some of the other women indicated that they felt themselves to be rebels in some different way, although their specific understanding of how that might express itself, or how it could work alongside other traits, varied. In this example, Helen had already used the terms ‘rebel’ alongside ‘energetic’ and ‘positive’ a number of times when she told us:
I’m still a rebel. Fiercely independent, very direct. There is no side to me; nobody’s under any illusion as to what I think. I can’t help but say it and that in my view has always held me in good stead. Because people have never had to second guess me … I find that easy to come by, trust, and also I’ve never undermined that relationship; I’ve never had to. If, at the end of the day, one needs to compromise and move in a different direction, then I sit and eyeball somebody and say, ‘look I cannot do this’. So compromise is not something I find difficult. But I’m also very independent too, not easily influenced, but I’m very good at having a view that will become compromised through debate and conversation and coming out the other end with some kind of compromise between the two of us. I’m quite good at doing that.
In concluding this section, it is useful to consider a slightly longer extract from Diane’s interview, to see how she linked the quality of persistence with a view of herself as having ‘cussedness’ – or as she put it ‘a refusal to think “I can’t do that”‘.
Persistence, I think, and a refusal to accept the accepted view of the world. One of the jobs I went for interview when I graduated … was with [organisation], because although I was a student in London I went back to [place] because I had no means of earning a living that was going to pay the rent in London any more when my grant ran out. So I went back and I applied for a few jobs. I had no careers advice or any of that in those days. You sort of trudged around, and the guys who were interviewing me said ‘why have you applied for this job?’ and I said, ‘well I think I can do it’ and they said ‘we’ve never had women applying for a job with the [organisation] before’ and I said ‘well it never occurred to me that women couldn’t work in this organisation’. I didn’t get the job, needless to say. I was never going to get the job I don’t think. It was a traditional researcher-type post but … then it struck me that there were things out there that people were thinking ‘that’s a job for a girl, that’s a job for a bloke, and you go for girly jobs’ and so on. Because people said to me ‘teaching’; well I ended up teaching but in a way I think it’s that kind of refusal to think, ‘I can’t do that, I am not equipped to do that job’, so there’s a certain persistence, a certain cussedness, I suppose, doggedness, about it.
Confidence
Confidence was a recurring theme throughout all the interviews. Gill felt that it was ‘about having that natural confidence’ which led the individual to be bullish enough – at least on occasion – just to hope ‘to hell you get away with it’. This she regarded as being a rare talent, saying that ‘not many people can do that’. Andrea, seemingly like Gill, said that she thought that she was a confident person – ‘I must be, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing these jobs and have managed it I suppose (laughs). I feel confident in many situations and that builds up over time.’ But she went on to reveal an underlying low level of confidence – like many other women even in senior positions – sometimes called the ‘imposter phenomenon’ (Clance and Imes, 1978) which had to be mitigated by working hard at analysis and response:
I would say underneath it’s counterbalanced by a huge lack of confidence and an analytical capacity which constantly identifies what I don’t have and what I need to do rather than what I do have and what I have done.
A number of other women said that they had to work hard at acquiring confidence, or avoiding situations where they did not feel sufficiently confident. Lillian commented:
I have reinforced [my self-confidence] by moving away from situations where I wasn’t confident faster than a man might have done. Because when it came down to it, I wasn’t proving anything to anybody. My family didn’t expect me – my extended family – to do anything particularly; my friends didn’t. There was no obvious path that I should’ve taken; my husband didn’t see it that way. In that sense, I never had anything to prove to people. I think the fact that I wasn’t comfortable in a senior line management position probably meant ultimately I wouldn’t be very good at it and I wouldn’t have gone too much further up the tree. So I retained my self-confidence by going off somewhere else. When I’d done that there was such a sense of ‘yes this is me’ that it doubles your confidence because you’ve succeeded in putting yourself somewhere which is right for you – it’s an almost ‘let me at it’ feeling.
Olivia had similar experiences, though in her case her confidence levels were boosted – or not, as the case may be – by people that she respected as much as situations that she avoided or welcomed:
If someone says to me, ‘I think you can do it’ and I think they should know, then I think, ‘OK, then I’ll do it’. I think it was one of the things that came back from the assessment thing is that some of my validation for some of the jobs was taken from individuals that I respected and knew. So if someone I respected and knew said I couldn’t do it – it depended on what it was – if I really wanted to do it, I would probably prove them wrong, but if I didn’t really want to do it I would just accept what they said. So there’s a little bit about I self-select what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. I don’t know whether that’s a gender thing or whether that’s just me. But if someone says, ‘I don’t think you can do that’, I wouldn’t then think, ‘I’ll show you, I’ll do it’. But if I really want to do it and someone says, ‘I don’t think you can do it’ then I would say, ‘I’ll show you I can do it’. [But] it has to be from people I respect. I don’t pay any attention to people I don’t respect.
Bella was one of a number who felt that women were particularly bad at being naturally confident (see also, for example, Kumra and Vinnicombe, 2008):
I think there’s a whole other package of issues about being female in what I see as a fundamentally male culture. One thing I’ve noticed in myself and many other people is a really fundamental lack of confidence about operating at this level – that’s one of the things certainly I wouldn’t want to come over in public, but I’m always having to push myself into saying ‘yes you can do this, you can speak to the press, you can be a national figure, you can go in confidently’. I had to talk to [organisation] the other day, all these successful male [chief executives]. That needs a bit of a deep breath to do that and also to make presentations to very large numbers of people. I’ve just been advised to address [organisation] … and part of me thinks ‘oh God, it’s just me; I can’t justify the plane fare and going over there just for my contribution’. You have to think, ‘no I’m not allowed to think like that’ … so I think there are real issues about lack of confidence that I think do come from being female. I just recognise it in too many of my female friends not to know that this is a real issue and you have to overcome it.
Ruth repeated and reinforced the perception that men were seemingly more self-confident than women, but stressed that it was important for women to be appropriately confident rather than over-assertive to the point of aggressiveness, taking due account of the particular environment and context, advice backed up by research into male and female career progression which included North America (Sanchez et al., 2007):
I was told to quell my fire a bit – redirect my fire – and that was actually a very useful thing to do. There’s something about being assertive, being aware of your own strengths and areas for development. I think the thing that can hold women back more than men, although that doesn’t discount men, is lack of self-confidence, lack of assertiveness. It’s about being assertive without moving then directly into aggression and developing those self-confidence skills, learning about organisational behaviour and being aware of power that isn’t just positional power that I think women can be a bit more naive about than men.
Kate, on the other hand, suggested that the issue of confidence was now a generational one as far as women are concerned (see, for example, De Vita, 2010), and she contrasted herself with a confident daughter-in-law working in the private sector:
I was talking to a friend of mine who is chief operating officer in [organisation] and she … even now thinks at some point someone’s going to realise I can’t really do this. Anyway … I was having this conversation with my daughter-in-law about how I felt a fraud and she said ‘well that’s interesting because I don’t think our generation feel like that’. She’s 30 this year and she’s very clear about her market value and she’s very clear about what she deserves from her employer. She said her friends have all got very clear career plans and they know when they’re going to do things, when they’re going to move up or when they want to do this. Now whether that’s just lawyers or whether that is a generational change I don’t know.
Carrie was able to speak as a confident person as a result of her long career and life experience:
I’ve done it all now so it’s just wonderful to be, I don’t care how they look at me, if the younger faculties see me in a role of the nurturer that’s fine. I think the experience, wisdom all of that comes with getting older and I think it helps frame me much more as a confident woman. I really, really, do.
Diane stressed the need to have self-belief, which she saw as being the underpinning characteristic that had made her successful and which, perhaps, had helped give her the other attributes that she felt were necessary for success:
I think a sense of self-belief that, yes, I can do that, even though there was a job that I went for that only professors had ever been appointed to and I was never a professor. I’m still not a professor, I refuse to take titles like that, and I thought ‘well, I can do the job, so I’ll apply’ and I actually got it but despite the fact that in the interview panel somebody said ‘did you know that only professors …?’ I said ‘well the job description didn’t say anything about being a professor’. So it’s ‘can you do the job?’ is the most important thing.
Communication, empathy, the ‘softer’ side
So far, we have shown how the women in our study tended to describe themselves by using variations along the spectrum that includes ambition, hard work, determination, independence and rebelliousness. In apparent contrast to these qualities – many of which have been traditionally seen as ‘masculine’ characteristics (see, for example, Kellerman and Rhode, 2007; Pinker, 2008) and which have been highly valued in consequence (Hopkins, 2000; Jones, 2000; Kimmel, 2004; Grimshaw and Rubery, 2007; Broadbridge and Hearn, 2008), several of the women also foregrounded a number of ‘softer’ qualities such as communication skills, being good listeners and a willingness to recognise their own weaknesses (see also Lau-Chin, 2007). Some of them (as we have already seen in Kate’s extract above) linked these particular personal qualities to a commitment to the underlying values of their profession or organisation. They often regarded these skills as important (and ones they recommended that others – both men and women – might do well to develop, as discussed further in Chapters 14 and 15 on advice to men and to women) and seemed happy when they could identify themselves as well-blessed in this sphere. Typical of this was Carrie’s initial response, going right to the heart of her values as a professional – values she told us were about honesty in communication:
I think my empathy, which is very high on that list of Dan Goleman’s [1] work. Empathy with other people is very important. I listen; I’m very consistent. If I make a promise, I won’t make a promise that I think I cannot really fulfil and I think that’s a real downfall for some people, and so it’s my ability to be consistent, my ability to tell you the truth in a nice way, I’m not a harsh person but I will tell you the truth.
Maggie showed that she had a very clear view of the ‘softer’ side of her character. As well as being ambitious and determined, she had this to say about herself:
I think there are probably three that immediately spring to mind. One is my humanity, the person and my values and beliefs and the person I am supersedes everything else in everything I do, so it is that humanity. The second is my humility. I recognise whether it’s in work or in life that I’m never going to be the perfect person; I never will be perfect and I’m constantly trying to just learn new things. If I get things wrong then I say yes, I’ve got it wrong and I’ve learnt from it. So humility would be the second one. The third one, which kind of underpins everything, is that I care passionately about the impact that I have on other people and I care passionately about what I do. So humanity, humility and I really care.
On a slightly different tack, Eliza linked a sense of creativity with communication skills:
I feel that my creativity, I have always had a very strong feeling about creativity, about colours, I can sense that, and that is a huge skill and quality that is required in the industry that I’m working in. I also feel a quality is that I’m good at communicating with people, with businesses, understanding their needs and their requirements and work well with them.
Gill similarly put forward this set of attributes:
What qualities do I think I have? I think I’m pretty clear, I’m pretty creative but I’m not exceptionally clever in the way that really, really, boffin type people are. But what I think I’m very good at is people and their soft skills.
Carrie’s comments linked to this:
I think people know that I care: I’m a very caring person. I like challenges a lot. I think a person has to be, in these roles, has to look at difficult situations more as challenges, so maybe there’s an optimistic side to me. I’m not a pessimistic person, I think I’m a realist, but there’s that little bit of optimism in me that tomorrow’s another day and we can try to make things better.
Towards the end of her interview Ruth described herself in a way that showed an interesting mixture of qualities when she said this about herself:
[I have] tenacity, without losing a caring side, developing a thick skin. I’m not saying you can’t be tearful sometimes …
And a short while later Ruth told us:
I think it’s about seeing your job in the broadest sense. You have to learn to do your job and learn both how to do the operational things and then learn about how to be a manager and a leader. It’s about placing your job in the context of the broader organisation and thinking about strategic issues even when you’re not a strategic manager. I have to say that earlier on that sometimes frustrated me, to read all these exciting things and you didn’t have anywhere to go with them. One of the fantastic things about being in this role is that people take notice of your ideas and that’s seen as a good thing, not a bad thing. I think interpersonal skills, communication skills, being personable and being able, getting on with people is really important.
So for Ruth, as for a number of the women, their careers had depended on having or acquiring a number of both traditional and ‘softer’ skills. A blend or balance of qualities was usually invoked in their self-descriptions – even though the precise mix could vary. Perhaps it was the awareness of a need to be multi-dimensional rather than totally career-focused that helped these women preserve a sense of balance in their lives.
Balance and perspective – ‘it’s only a job’
A number of women were keen to emphasise that while they may be hard working and committed, their work did not necessarily define them entirely. While Ruth stressed the need to work hard, she also cautioned against overwork and becoming unproductive and ineffective through ‘long hours’, and Diane stressed the need for:
… a sense of balance because at the end of the day it is only a job, it’s a very nice job, it’s a very good job, I enjoy it, it makes a huge difference but let’s get it into perspective, it’s a job; it’s not life and death. So, a sense of perspective, it’s not my whole life, I have another, there is another world out there that I live in as well, and relax in. So a sense of balance as to what the job actually means.
Echoing this sentiment, Kate added:
I’ve got children, I’ve got family, I’ve got elderly relatives. For me it’s always been this balance between work, being valued at work getting value out of work but equally having a very strong sense that the other side of my life is just as important and there are some sacrifices that I’m not prepared to do.
Gill was keen to emphasis the ability to manage stress:
Well, it is inherently stressful because it’s just constant pressure; you never have five minutes. I said to a colleague this morning, she asked me about a TV programme, and I said ‘I don’t watch TV, I never have time to watch TV’. I’m either working or playing all the time; I’m never sort of nothing. And so the job takes you over; this job takes not just me but my husband as well … But stress is something you have to learn to manage, you really don’t let it get to you otherwise you couldn’t do the job … You have to be able to do that. I mean to be fair … I don’t get a lot of what my previous boss would’ve called ‘inbound’. he used to get some horrible things from colleagues on the e-mail and whatever. Here people are very polite and respectful even though they are very unhappy sometimes. But it doesn’t get to me; I don’t think I get very stressed. [It’s] something you learn as you go up the tree I think.
Kate also felt that she could ‘cope with quite a lot of stress’:
Actually one of the things is that here we have quite a flexible working policy so I will work at home wherever possible one day a week. That’s very much a balancing day; that’s being able to do all the stuff that gives me a sense of order and calm, like putting flowers on the table and wandering around the garden and putting the washing out as well as getting some quite clear thinking work done.
The delicate relationship between work and the ‘other side of life’ was a topic that many of the women had strong feelings about. We look more closely at this in Chapters 10 and 11.
Nature versus nurture
We end this chapter by looking briefly at what the women had to say about the difficult question of nature versus nurture in relation to the course their careers had taken. Did they feel they had always had the potential to succeed – the trait approach (Bass, 1990; Northouse, 2004) – or did they acknowledge that their journey had involved a good deal of learning (Northouse, 2004)? We end with a few examples of their responses.
Gill, as we saw earlier, had a strong sense that the qualities of hard work and determination were built in, from very early on in life – ‘my mother said I was born determined’. This sense was shared by Diane, as exemplified by this section of her interview:
You probably need to ask my mother. I think she would probably say it’s true … I mean I’m very different from my sister. One of the things my mother always tells people is that when I was a girl I never had any dolls. I didn’t do dolls. I had roller skates and bikes and stuff and I was – how does she describe it – she will tell you that even when I was ill I didn’t like to be picked up and cuddled … I was much more self-contained and could do things without having to have a whole lot of other people supporting me and doing loads. So I forged a personal path and some of that has got to have been there from the very start because my sister, who was brought up in exactly the same household, although her position in the family makes that different, is very different to me. So there must be something innate.
Whether it’s learnt behaviour or whether it is innate, in terms of they’ve always had it, I don’t know whether looking back on my childhood my parents would’ve said I would’ve been as successful as I have been. I was very shy as a child and my primary school, there was four in the class, there were 30 in the school. I went to secondary school and I didn’t know anyone in my class. We were streamed and the four other people I was at primary school with weren’t in the same stream as me. So I knew no one when I went to secondary school. I was in a school of 2,000 and a class of 35/40. My mum was absolutely convinced I wouldn’t cope well with school but I just kept my head down and got on with it. So I think I work hard at what I want to do and I don’t assume it will come easily but I put the effort in.
Ruth, on the other hand, expressed the view that her career had really helped to reshape some facets of her personality:
I think one of the reasons I was pushed into [current profession] at school was that I was quiet and I liked books. So there’s that whole issue about, I’ve had to learn not to be shy; I’ve had to learn social graces. They’re a good thing, but they haven’t always come easily and you then you suddenly realise that you are doing things at a party that you started off doing at work, you’ve become the person that perhaps you weren’t always. So it’s a mixture of some innate qualities and lifelong learning of new qualities and being prepared to carry on learning how to do things better.
For the most part, the women revealed a conviction that they had been born with a set of aptitudes which turned out to be instrumental in helping them have successful careers. Most often this assumption was modified by a realisation that innate qualities could be extended or played down according to circumstances. Whether learned or innate, the ability to learn quickly and implement what has been learned was seen as a key quality, as Gill explained:
You need a disciplined mind because you have to be able to turn on a sixpence here. You have to be able to move from one thing to the next. So it’s about a disciplined mind, being able to learn so quickly that nobody knows you’re learning.
This was reinforced by Carrie’s comments:
I think that if a person disregards a learning situation and keeps repeating mistakes, that is not going to win people over to their side or to help them build an organisation, then they did not innately have that.
However, Eliza referred to how her parents were unable to mould (what she believed to be) her in-born characteristics:
I’ve always had those. From an early age, my parents would try and drill some of them out; they were always there but they just needed nurturing and they needed tuition. I feel that along my career path in each and every individual job there has been a learning curve in that job and that has made that stronger; that quality has become stronger and stronger. So that now I’ve reached this stage where I felt strong enough and believed in myself enough to actually use those qualities to run my own business. It’s been an essential tool.
Carrie admitted that – in relation to leadership, at least – a lot of the necessary qualities were innate as far as she was concerned:
I think there are a lot of leadership qualities that people have to have. It depends again on how you define leadership. Autocracy is not being a good leader, so perhaps that person wasn’t born with those characteristics. But any leaders that I really like. are empathetic or good listeners; don’t make promises they can’t keep. So I think some of it is very much, yes I think you are born with it.
The acknowledgement of parental influence, whether regarded as natural or social, positive or negative, seemed to underlie most of the accounts by the interviewees. We end with a quote from Isobel, who put her understanding in clear terms:
Conclusion
This chapter has focused on the key characteristics and qualities of the women in the study. All of them could be described as successful in terms of the positions that they occupied – or had until recently occupied – within their professions and sectors, both public and private; this gave them considerable responsibility and, as many of them pointed out, influence. It was also clear that those working in the public sector felt motivated to serve and to make a difference; these were key factors in their significant job satisfaction. Many had already been recognised nationally and internationally for their achievements to date; they had also achieved outside as well as inside their professions. We looked at the women’s domestic situations and social backgrounds and some of the ways in which their experiences – some relating to straitened financial circumstances – had affected them. We identified ambition, determination and self-motivation to succeed as the key drivers behind their current success, though a number of the women felt the need to define or qualify the word ‘ambition’. For many, the word ‘determination’ was a more appropriate term to use in describing the key elements in their success, not least because some did not feel that they were ambitious. We also observed that a number of the women were still unsure how successful they actually were. In any case, they tended to see success as less important than job satisfaction, as characterised by interesting and stimulating work that allowed them to make a real difference.
We believe that, without exception, the women saw themselves as highly energetic and had a significant capacity to work hard and independently. A number were clearly perfectionists, wanting to be the very best that they could possibly be. The idea of independence seemed to be linked in some cases to an element of rebelliousness, which made the women stand out and was perhaps a contributory factor in their success, especially when linked in with their obvious determination and an unwillingness in many circumstances to take no for an answer. These attributes were underpinned by a strong confidence and self-belief, though being confident did not always come naturally, and a number of the participants in our study felt that they had to work hard at acquiring this particular attribute – something they shared with many other women, but less so with men, who were perceived as being more self-confident for the most part. Some suggested that the question of gender differences in terms of relative levels of self-confidence was a generational issue, however, though others felt that that there were still challenges relating to how women best presented themselves.
The traits summarised as ambition, determination, independence and rebelliousness were complemented by a number of ‘softer’ qualities such as communication skills, being good listeners and self-awareness. Some of the women felt that having these qualities was part of being a professional. Humility, humanity and a willingness to admit error were also listed as being important attributes, as were creativity, optimism and realism. Given the fact that we were dealing with senior managers, it was not surprising that strategic thinking was also deemed to be important. Though work was clearly important to all the women, it was not the sole driving force and the ability to manage stress was mentioned on several occasions during the interviews. A ‘sense of balance’ was deemed to be important, and home, family and friends were very much seen as an essential part of their lives.
The chapter also explored the extent to which the attributes and characteristics identified as being key to the women’s success were inbuilt or as the result of training and learning. It seemed clear that a number of traits – perhaps most notably determination – had been evident from an early age. However, this is not to say that learning, and learning quickly – based on a high degree of self-awareness about their own weaknesses as well as their strengths – had not been important at all stages in the women’s lives. Whatever the balance between nature and nurture, there was a high degree of consensus as to the qualities needed to be a good leader, as discussed in Chapter 13 of this book.
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