Welcome to the Big Careers Small Children Podcast. My name is Verena Hefti. I believe that no one should have to choose between becoming a CEO and enjoying their young children for much too long. Amazing people like I'm sure you listening right now have found themselves stuck on the career ladder when they have children and that leads to gender inequality in senior leadership because because those people don't progress to senior leadership and the same stale, often male middle class people leading our organizations. We must change this together and I hope that many of you listening right now will progress to the most senior leadership roles that you like where you can make the decisions that make our world a better place. Outside of the podcast, I am the CEO and founder of the Social enterprise Leaders Plus. We exist to help working parents progress their careers to senior leadership in a way that works for you and for your families. We have free events and resources on leadersplus.org where you can download helpful toolkits such as on returning from maternity leave, share parental leave, securing a promotion, dealing with workload challenges, or managing as a dual career couple. We also have an award winning fellowship community which is global for working parents who have big dreams for their careers but don't want to sacrifice their family. You'll join an absolutely wonderful group of people, a very tight knit, supportive group of parents who have your back. Together. You'll explore what your career aspirations are and you'll get advice from senior leaders who are also working parents about how to achieve those aspirations. You'll get new ideas to combine your hopes for your careers with your hope for your family and and you are supported by people who are experiencing what you're experiencing yourself. I'm really delighted that a larger majority of our fellows have made tangible changes following the program, be that becoming more senior in their roles, working shorter hours, having better flexible working arrangement. They always impress me so much with the courage that they instill in each other to do what is right for them without apologizing for having a family or apologizing for wanting that top job. Details are on leadersplus.org Fellowship in this week's podcast I'm talking to Professor Gudrun Sander from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. We chat about her leading her work as part of a co leadership team of three. We talk about how to create gender equality in senior leadership roles. We discuss why some roles, especially those with finance or responsibility for human resources, are less likely to be filled with women and what can be done about it. I've really enjoyed my conversation with Gudrun and I hope you will too. A very warm welcome, Gudrun, to our podcast. It's great to have you here. Thank you for making the time. Why don't we start with you introducing who you are, what you do for work and who's in your family.

Thank you very much for the invitation, Verena. It's a great pleasure to be part of this great podcast. Thank you. How to introduce myself. My name is Gudrun Sander. I'm a professor of Business Administration with a special emphasis on diversity management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. And I lead an institute of around 40 people at the moment. Most of them are researchers, part of them are consultants. I'm in a co lead function so I prefer this kind of leadership very much. So we are three professors leading the Institute for International Management and Diversity Management and also three people leading the Competence center for Diversity, Disability and Inclusion.

Wow. I will definitely ask you about it sounds like a job share for three people, which I've never heard about. So I'm definitely going to ask you about that. But would you like to share who is in your extended family, be that biological or important people in your life or animals for that matter?

Yeah. I'm married, I'm Austrian, My husband is German. We live in Switzerland because we prefer the neutral ground of Switzerland. We founded our family here. We have three adult children. The oldest one is a daughter. She is 31 and she is a surgeon. The second one is a boy or a young man. Now he is in a function of people and culture in an IT consultancy, Scandinavian one. So that's special from the corporate culture. And he likes this very much. And the youngest one is still in her studies on computer science.

Wow. I have to say I'm very impressed. I've also got academics in the family and the fact that you managed to bring up some three, I'm assuming reasonably healthy children to adult altar and become a professor in academia, which is I think one of the most challenging or can be one of the most challenging places for parents, especially at the younger end of the careers. Yeah. So well done. I just want to pick up on the co leadership of three people. I'm interested. So I've interviewed lots of people who do job shares. Two people sharing a job. And it's quite exciting to hear of three people sharing not just a job but a leadership job. What do you know now about sharing leadership with two others that you didn't know 10 years ago?

In my experience it's really great because you have at the same level, at an eye level, you have a colleague or two colleagues, you can really work together. Of course, if you trust each other, that's the most important thing. And I started off with the co leadership with my colleague, Ines Hartmann. She is around 20 years younger than me, so that's also a generational tandem, so to say has a lot of advantages because with our different life experiences, for example, she has no children, I have three children. And also the age difference. There are very fruitful discussions. And now we merged with another institute and a younger colleague, a full professor from our university, came in.

Interesting. So just for our listeners who are thinking of even a job share just with two people rather than three, Is there anything practical that you do today that you didn't do 10 years ago to enable good collaboration, good communication, without having hundreds of hours in meetings every week.

With the co leadership, With my younger colleague, Ines, at the beginning we were quite a small team and she was my deputy and I was kind of the boss, or how you call it. But we always had a very trustful relationship and I discussed a lot of heavy topics with her, or strategic topics and so on. So we already had a lot of exchange and then at one point we said, let's formalize it in a co leadership because it's more than fair and to share the responsibility. So that's the most important thing in this co leadership arrangement. And with the growing team, what we then installed was a weekly one on one where we bilaterally exchanged the topics we have to discuss, but also take time for strategic discussions. This usually we do with our management team. So that's 10, four or when it's the extended management team, maybe five, six, seven people, and then we go off to a nice hotel or whatever and then really focus on strategic topic. But the day to day things we have to decide. First of all, we have a division of labor. So Ines and I are responsible for different teams. We lead different teams, but with the weekly one on ones we try to really be informed. Also what's going on in the other team? And a lot of questions are around leadership. So how do you handle a situation where an employee does not deliver the quality you expect? How could you improve your own planning processes, the feedback processes and so on?

Yeah, I love how you're describing the benefits of it actually, that you have that second or third person who is part of creating a really excellent leadership arrangement. And I think for the future of work to work, I do think the whole concept of leadership will evolve and hopefully Fingers crossed. Become different from what the mainstream is today. I want to talk to you about your research into diversity. So I probably should tell the listeners. The reason why I came across your work was because of a serendipitous event. I signed up to a random email list and somehow got an invitation to attend an event with advance, which is an organization in Switzerland supporting gender equality. And you had done research for them and you presented some really insightful research that changed my own thinking. And what particularly challenged me was obviously because of where at work and the work we do as a social enterprise. I'm very aware that we need to to massively improve gender equality at senior leadership. But your research seemed to suggest that there's not just a problem with a lack of women in leadership. There's also a problem that there are specific types of roles with responsibility for finance people, resources where women are even more underrepresented. Can you explain what led you to even investigate this notion of power in leadership? How and what you found?

Yes, of course. So we work with around 150 international companies. Most of them have a big footprint here in Switzerland or the headquarters based here in Switzerland and they deliver their anonymized HR data and we analyze this data from a diversity and inclusion perspective. And also we work very close with some of the companies. And what we witnessed over time is that the number of women in leadership position are increasing. But if you look closer, you see this effect. A lot of the women in leadership position are on so called expert positions, but do not really lead. People do not have financial responsibility for a bigger budget, for example. And the last year's numbers show that only 13% of women are in what we call power positions. So leading a team, having a budget responsibility or have to bring in revenues and so on and compared to 36% of men who are in this kind of positions. So the numbers, if you only look at women in leadership positions very often seem better as they are at the end of the day. I mean it's great to be an expert in a field, but of course your influence is not that big compared to a leader who is responsible for a whole unit, business unit or a big team, a large budget and so on.

That is so interesting. So in the uk, just in the last few days, the latest women on board data for the 4,100 companies was published. And I can't remember the exact figure, but it was really high, I think might have been 34 or 35% of women non executive director boards. What questions would you say I should ask if I wanted to investigate if those positions are actually positions of power.

I assume you can quite easily find out because usually the powerful positions in non executive boards are of course the president of the non executive board then the person in charge of the finances or finances or investments and I would say these are the most important persons so the president and then the person in charge of the finances. And very often you find women then in non executive boards responsible for, I don't know, communication or a special topic. I think it's getting better with the legal experts in the non executive boards because we have a lot of women who have this background and it's a transferable skill usually you can use in different companies. So on this level we see more and more women.

Yeah, I definitely agree and I think it's quite funny again in the UK and US the term they tend to use is a chairman, isn't it? Of the board and it's usually chairman. And I still remember I was a chair of trustees at a as in like a chair of directors at a charity in called Citizens Rise and I remember how other people very kindly and respectfully referred to me as chairman which always I was like no, I'm actually not a man. But I think we still need to change that in Interesting. So I think there's something in counting the data because it's very easy to count women versus men versus all genders. What should you change about how you count the powerful roles? Should you just go by how many finance people? I guess I'm asking this because I'm thinking some of our listeners are in a position where they can influence how data is collected in the organization. So what would you recommend they should change in terms of collecting that data about female representation in leadership?

Yes, I definitely would recommend to change here something. My husband, he is in management accounting and he always says the creative people are in finance and in management accounting because it really depends how you count. So for example very often, especially in countries where there is a lot of part time work, it's better to count the heads. So having head counts because usually you end up with more women than in leadership positions compared to the FTEs. So the full time equivalent. So this is one thing whereof whether you use headcounts or FTEs to count the women in leadership positions and then also have a look at who is in key leadership positions. So the really influential ones, the powerful ones because usually we find a lot of women, especially in the German speaking area we find a lot of women in HR positions Communication, marketing positions, also on senior levels, but again, very few in COO positions. So Chief Operating officer, which is usually the best place to then become a CEO. So having a COO role before leads you very likely to become the next CEO of the company. We find very few women in this position also, of course, if it's the CEO, the Chief Technical officer, production roles and so on.

Interesting. I'm going to use this podcast, if you don't mind, to get some advice. Our social enterprise, we run a program which is all about career progression for working parents. It's 90% female and we do quite well in that we have 63% who get promoted or get a board role or similar within nine months. And we do that by obviously peer network, but also access to social capital. So sponsors, mentors, changing the way that you network, diversifying your network, strategically position your achievements and so on. But I guess my question to you is, we're already doing stuff through sponsorship networks and so on to move people to more senior roles. We do that well. But what should we change so we can move more people to those positions of power that you're describing? It's a simple question for an academic who has decades of experience. So no worries if you don't want to go that simplistic. But I'm just curious in your thoughts.

I would highly agree that sponsorship is a very powerful tool or way to pave the way for more women to senior leadership positions. I totally agree on this. What else is possible that's then more from the systemic view of the company to reflect on their promotion procedures? Are they in any way biased? So, for example, is the promotion only depending on your direct supervisor? Because then usually you have a high similarity bias alert. So we usually promote people who are in a way similar to us. And if my promotion is only depending on my direct supervisor, that's always a risk. So if the process is more transparent, if the criteria are clear, if there are promotion committees over several steps of evaluation, then you usually end up with more fair promotions, I would say, which also means to bring up women the career ladder.

Interesting. You've said earlier that you've supported more than 150 companies as part of your work at the University of St. Gallen. I'm imagining that you do sometimes tell them the same thing again and again. I'm just interested, what are the greatest hits? Key messages from Gudrun Sandhe? The things that just come up again and again in the data that you just wish employers got right.

So one advice or one wish is always to be transparent on promotions and on hirings. So have clear criteria to have hiring committees, promotion committees to make sure that the process is fair. But then again, look at the criteria you use. So if you want to foster inclusion culture, then you have to promote bridge builders. So the ones that really care for the people and are not the egos who more or less only look at their own career. So also the criteria have to be the right ones to promote people. And this has to be stringent over the whole processes. So from hiring to evaluation to promotion and so on. Another thing we always tell the companies is look at having a family as a normal part of the career path because most of the employees will have a family in their life. So don't frame it as a problem, it's just a normal part of career development of the individuals. And make sure that this is ingrained in all your processes. And also maybe policies like parental leave and so on.

So one thing I've been thinking a lot about is that organizational culture piece and how you get an organization to consistently respond right when working parents need support. Because I think there's something about policies are critical and people understanding and following policies that matters. But then I know some organizations who have brilliant policies, but we still have individuals who just clearly they haven't been promoted because they are valuing that bridge building and they're not behaving in the right way in that moment when it matters. You know, we actually literally had in our nursery a tree fell onto the nursery roof and yeah, the nursery was closed, as you can imagine. And responding right in that moment matters. What do you think needs to change to get that culture right?

Yeah, that's really important. We call it an inclusion culture and this means that people feel they belong and they are valued for what they bring to the table. And again, to foster this kind of culture, you have to promote the right people with the right mindset. And also when it comes to parents, I think what is very important with the inclusion culture is also to have this mutual flexibility. So of course, depending on the kind of jobs you are doing, but usually in more senior management jobs, more flexibility is possible. And on the other hand also that taking the flexibility does not have a negative impact on your career. Because again, what we see from our analysis of the Swiss HR data is that 85% of all the promotions go to full time workers. Then another 10, 11% go to the ones working 90% and only a handful, 3, 4, 5% go to people working below 80%. So you are immediately punished if you Reduce your employment percentage. This is a special thing in the German speaking area and it might not be that important in other regions. But no one can tell me that working a few hours less per week can have such an impact on your career progression. So that's a typical bias. The one who promote people then have.

I completely agree. And actually it is very similar in the uk. So in the UK there's a lot of gender pay gap reporting and we notice that the part time employees get paid a lot less per hours than full time employees. And that's because part time employees stay in junior roles while the full time employees, like you say, progress. So sadly not a better picture at this side. So what's the solution do you think, to solve this problem of career progression for part time employees.

You have to concentrate on performance and not on working hours. I mean we need the working hours for some legal reason. So do we get a pension, how high is the pension and so on. But if the company culture is trust based and has clear goals, measurable goals, so that you can evaluate then people whether they reach their goals or not, or how much of the goals they reached, then you have a transparent basis for a good evaluation and then also for promotion and it's not then biased because people are present. So in my team we have a lot of flexibility and there is always a risk that I underestimate the performance of people. I don't see a lot in my team. So I have to make sure that I have the right criteria, that I have the right goals that I can measure to evaluate all my employees in a fair manner.

You're absolutely right. And it's easy to evaluate employees when they work in a very financial driven environment. So a lawyer with billable hours or a salesman person. But I think there's a real skills gap in measuring productivity of people who don't have those roles. What do you think can be done to help people measure performance properly? Where should they start if they want to upskill themselves to have a more outcome based management approach?

I think there are ways. So for example, we have a tool in place and that's not rocket science. So whether we have internal projects or external projects, we assign hours per person and then people record their hours and then we see whether it's within the target hours or they need it more. And of course once they approach the limit of the targeted hours, they usually have to go to the supervisor and say, look, if you want me to do a better quality on this or that, I need another 10 hours or whatever and Already this kind of planning process helps a lot to have a good estimation. How much time does it take? And I mean, it's not necessary to count in five minutes slots. That's stupid. But to have a rough estimation. So if we want to do, I don't know, a social media campaign, what steps do we have to go through and how much time would it take? So we estimate. And this is then also better at the end of the day when you have external projects because then you have experience. How much time does it take to run a survey, to analyze this kind of data and so on.

It's interesting when you're describing that. The word that comes to my mind is discipline. Basically you just have to be organized and commit to saying, this is what we're going to achieve, this is the time it will take. Let's evaluate whether it's correct and let's evaluate whether the person is able to perform within that. But often we don't do that because it's like a nice to have and actually we need to get started with the project. Interesting. I want to ask you about a different topic, which is this backlash against DEI at the moment we are hearing every day in the news in the UK of another big, usually American affiliated company, like for example, Deloitte saying that they are starting to roll back diversity programs, Apple saying they're going to change their approach and so on. What's your response to it? Are you worried about that?

I'm a little bit worried. Let's frame it like this because I think the core values behind the programs, to be a fair employer, to be an attractive employer, they will stay. And again, it depends. Do you have problems getting the right people? So are you confronted with the qualified labor shortage for examp? Then you probably have to go on in this direction. Whether you name it a diversity and inclusion program or an employer branding program or whatever, I don't care. But the direction and the value base and the programs, whatever is the name of these programs doesn't matter. At the end of the day, they will stay. Of course, if you are in a position where you have a hundred or thousands of applicants for a vacancy, you can relax and just do your more or less fair hiring process will depend on the context. So this is one thing, I think a lot of the initiatives and programs will stay. Maybe they will change the names. We had this before. When I started this journey with my PhDs quite some time ago now, some decades, I would say the wording was more about equality, equal opportunities, and the focus was mainly on gender and then it evolved to diversity and then to inclusion and then to belonging and well being and so on and so on. So it's always slightly changing what kind of terminology we use, what kind of concepts we use, but the basis of the values behind they stay. So it's around fairness, it's around also the business case. So do you really get a better performance, for example, with a more heterogeneous team and so on? I'm convinced this will stay because if we compromise on these values, I think then we end up in a very bad position. And I do not want my children really to grow and work in an environment where you have a lot of corruption, you have totally unfair processes, it's only if you have money, you succeed and so on. I mean this kind of world. I really do not want to imagine the future of my children.

I agree. I have a prediction and I think that now it may be that we'll really understand who is generally committed to inclusion and that there will be greater diversity. So the organizations that have always just paid lip service and just did it to look good, they're going to drop out, which isn't the biggest sadness because they are probably already didn't do the greatest job of it. But I think the organizations who, like you say, really value those things and who also see it as a competitive market advantage, they will double down and use it to stand out. And I think you will see a really diversified environment, but hopefully an environment where you, the people who perform the best or the organizations that perform the best, will inspire others at some point. It won't be advantageous to be next to your competitor who is offering fantastic inclusion to their employees. While you are known to send emails about having to resign tomorrow if you haven't sent bullet points in whether or not you've done a good job last week.

I totally agree. And also I think there will be some pressure in several sectors. So think about human medicine. At least in Switzerland we have 60% women finalizing their studies in human medicine. If we can't manage to keep them in the profession, to keep them on their career tracks, the quality of our healthcare system will go down because we can't import all the foreign doctors from the neighboring countries. There is a limit at the end of the day and I think therefore there is a public interest in some sectors like medical, health care and so on, that this program go on and that there is fairness in the processes and we use the potential of the people we have well educated. For example.

I completely agree. I was made aware of that issue almost by coincidence. So we work with individual employers, but also we have open programs where you can just apply and join. And we had so many doctors wanting to join our open programs to support them with career progression as a working parent that we had to move them out and do a separate group just because there were too many in the cross sector group. And I think that just shows that there are some sectors that are A particularly tough for working parents and B, where there's a real absolute desperate desire to combine a family with a big career. And people don't want to give up on a career they've invested 10 years in in training. Absolutely. I want to ask you about your prediction for the future of work. How do you see the world of work changing or how would you like to see the world of work changing?

I would like to see more flexibility on both sides, so the employers and the employees. I would like to see that it's not a question of making a choice whether to have a career or a family. So that in the mindset of the people it's I will have my career and I will have a happy family. So both is doable and it's not a decision between two different things. So this of course means that companies have to normalize the career tracks, that parenthood is part of having a career. And on the other hand we will see a lot of further education because at least my children, I assume they will have to work around 60 years until they get retired. So one education will never ever be enough. This then also implies that the companies rethink their career path because some are very old fashioned. It doesn't make sense that I have the career peak around 40 to 45 and then I have to work until 70. What do I do the next 30 years? So to make also the career path more flexible, to allow transition from one field to the other, or that you are not punished, for example, if you reduce your working hours, I don't know of 10% per week. And then you overlooked for all the promotions. So that's stupid in my view. And then what I said before was looking at the performance and not at the presence. So I would call it smart working. I give you a small example. I have a woman who supports me in the household and she is very efficient. And I realized this and then I didn't have small children at that time. They were already in higher education. So I could give the flexibility she loved to have. And we agreed on what to do. And I don't care how long it takes, so don't count hours. Of course we need a contract for the pension and so on and all the insurances. But whether she works five or ten hours per week, I do not care. I just want things to be done. And we found a great way. So I trust her, she delivers, she performs what I expect. And how many hours this takes, who cares?

What a great example. I'm interested, just as a final word, if you have any practical ideas for our listeners who want to progress to more powerful roles and who work in organizations that perhaps aren't yet at the stage where you and I both want them to be, what would be one or two things that they could try out that doesn't take more than five minutes, but they could try out this week to increase their chances of getting to a powerful leadership position?

I mean, performance is always necessary, so that's a must. You can't negotiate on this. But the second most important thing is visibility. So take up the opportunity, for example, to present for a senior board or in front of the CEO, for example. If you have the opportunity, just take it and try it and do not wait. What I see a lot, especially with younger women, is that they always have the idea I have to be perfect to do this. No, you learn on the way. So how should you improve and learn if you are already perfect from birth? I mean, this doesn't work at all.

That is excellent advice. If people want to find out more about your work, the work of the university, or want to connect with you, where should they head?

They can find me on LinkedIn. Also our website, for example, the competence center for Diversity, Disability and Inclusion. Yeah, I think that's the easiest way. And also for me, I always respond if I get an email. So that's the safest channel. I sometimes overlook a LinkedIn message or a team's message, but via email I will always respond.

Fantastic. Thank you so much Gudrun. It's been a real pleasure to chat to you.

Thank you Verena.

I really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much and I always love to hear from our listeners. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just go to Ferina Hefti and I'll be delighted to hear your feedback and your suggestions or just have you say hi. Likewise, if you, if you do feel passionately about gender equality and you want to support a female led podcast, then please do leave a review and share it with a friend. Just because at the moment podcasting is still a very, very male dominated environment. Most of the top charging podcast are led by men. I really love all the people who've joined from the podcast, our Fellowship program, and if you want to do the same, then please head over to leadersplus.org/Fellowship in order to get access to a community of support to help you combine an ambitious career with young children together with people who have your back. See you next week.