How women got on the executive team at BP - Women's Agenda

How women got on the executive team at BP

When Patricia Bellinger, now the executive director of Harvard Education, joined BP back in 2000, she encountered a leadership team “almost exclusively white, male and Anglo-Saxon”.

She knew she had her work cut out for her, she told an audience at the Women on Boards conference in Sydney Thursday, when she was asked to address the oil giant’s lacking gender diversity. But she had one advantage: the men she would be working with recognised the issues that were preventing women from rising up the leadership ranks, and they were willing to address the problem.

Indeed, when Bellinger went through and analysed the relevant data — including the fact women graduates were entering the organisation in equal numbers to men — to report back to then CEO Sir John Brown, he was silenced. “He raised his eyes, glasses perched at the end of his nose, peered at me and simply asked, ‘Where are all the women?’ I smiled and replied, ‘I just got here. You tell me!”

Women were leaving the organisation, but their career progression was stagnating around a managerial level.

Five years later and the number of women executives at BP had increased by 60%. BP won a Catalyst Award in 2006 for its efforts.

So how did they make the change? Bellinger pointed to a number of initiatives including developing gender targets and, importantly, linking those to the performance indicators of the CEO and the executive team. They also sought to change cultural behaviours that saw ‘talent’ and ‘leadership’ defined in masculine terms by bringing men and women together to learn about their differences, and the assumptions they’d make about who was ‘ready’ to lead.

“I cannot tell you the number of times corporate types directed their conversations to my executive assistant until, mortified, the poor young man found a way to tell them that I was the important one,” she said on her own experience with such assumptions.

Every intervention to progress gender diversity was underpinned by meritocracy, so they looked at how high potential female candidates could be given plenty of options to compete. They instituted “diverse candidate selection panels” for managerial positions and required women to be on any lists considering candidates for development roles.

Overall, Bellinger worked to ensure gender diversity was seen as a strategic issue that would be managed like every other strategic issue in the business — meaning it had a strategic plan, measurable targets monitored on a quarterly basis, and line accountability for results.

These were early and innovative measures — implemented in the first five years of the century — given much of the promotion regarding the “business case” for gender diversity has occurred in the last decade.

More broadly, Bellinger sees “strategic goals” as essential too for seeing a widespread increase in the number of women on boards.

As was noted at the conference yesterday, Australia has made some modest improvements when it comes to the number of women on boards, especially thanks to advocacy work that has seen the “where are the women” conversation ramp up. Like those executives at BP, our key male executives (not all just yet) are recognising how a block in the pipeline of women for leadership is not good for business.

So how can we ensure changes for women in leadership already achieved are sustained, and progress continues?

Bellinger believes first and foremost that “naming and shaming, otherwise known as gentle encouragement” works when it comes to getting companies to address a lack of women on their boards. She also believes self-advocacy is powerful — ensuring women actively network with executive search firms, and those women who are already on boards. Meanwhile, education will play a fundamental role and business schools and other organisations are increasingly developing programs to train women for corporate boards.

But ultimately, Bellinger said it comes down to ensuring children get the message. “Let’s make sure that we’re teaching children that women are more than wives, girlfriends and princesses , but rather can be powerful effective board directors and anything else they choose.”

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