Why women and people of colour fall off the glass cliff
[Music]
so i spend most of my time
talking and thinking and writing about
women’s experiences in uk and u.s
workplaces
particularly black women’s experiences
and so for me understanding the glass
cliff the situation
that underrepresented leaders find
themselves in when they take on
leadership positions
only to find that their chances of
success have been limited before they
even begin
really was an eye-opener
now i’m aware that for a lot of people
this might be the first time you’re
hearing about the glass cliff
and so i think the easiest way into the
conversation is by starting with the
glass ceiling
that invisible but seemingly impossible
to break through barrier
that sits above the heads of women in
business and stops them from reaching
the absolute pinnacles of their
professional capabilities
we talk a lot about the glass ceiling
being there and what it’s like to live
and to work underneath it
but we don’t really talk about what
happens to those people who do
manage to break through i feel like we
maybe have this
shared imagination that if someone were
able to break through the glass ceiling
it would be onwards and upwards from
there you know the sky’s the limit
but in reality that’s not what often
happens
because all too often when somebody does
break through the glass ceiling
they find themselves in a new dangerous
position
they find themselves teetering on the
edge of the glass cliff
so i’m going to talk about
underrepresented people a lot in this
and that can mean so many different
things to different people in different
moments and different contexts
but i’m talking about those people who
are most underrepresented
at the most senior levels of business so
that is women
and that’s racially marginalized people
essentially anybody who’s not both white
and male and so the story often goes
that when underrepresented people take
over a business
that business seems to start to fail
and that’s really strange and if that’s
true that’s worth looking into
and so the times newspaper did look into
it
and they released an article with a
headline women on the board
a help or hindrance and they said what
i’ve just told you
that when women take over businesses at
those most senior levels
board member ceo that those businesses
seem to find themselves in a moment of
trouble
and so they concluded that women on the
board were in fact
bad for business and they were right
but just in one small way
in a hundred other much bigger much more
important ways they were absolutely
wrong
but we can start with where they were
right they were right that the research
does show
that when underrepresented people do
take on those most senior roles
that businesses do seem to be in a
moment of trouble
but it’s not like they want you to think
it’s not that we’ve you know
stomped our way into boardrooms only to
look around and think
oh god i don’t know what i’m doing here
it’s not that at all but the reason you
might think that
is that they haven’t told you the
beginning of the story
and the beginning of the story is what
we need to understand
if we want to see what’s stopping more
people who aren’t both white and male
from being successful when they take on
leadership
roles
so there’s a piece of research from the
university of exeter
and they looked at ftse 100 companies
and when they appointed
female leaders those businesses were
much more likely than average
to have already been in a consistent
period
of five months of poor performance
and that poor performance can look like
all kinds of things
it could be a reputational scandal where
the tarnish is likely to be passed on to
the new leader
it could be a hit to market valuations
or to profit but whatever that was
these businesses were all much more
likely than average
to have already been in a consistent
period of poor performance before that
new leader
was appointed and this isn’t a single
piece of research
and it’s not even limited to a single
country
researchers at the university of utah
did a really similar thing
but they didn’t just look at the
appointment of women they looked at the
appointment of women
and racially marginalized men and they
looked at fortune 500 companies over a
15-year period
so a huge data set and they found
exactly the same those businesses that
appointed
underrepresented leaders were much more
likely than average
to already be in a period of poor
performance
so maybe you’re listening to this and
you’re thinking well so what
so long as these people are getting an
opportunity why does it matter if the
businesses aren’t in perfect condition
before these people arrive
well one of the reasons it matters is
the narrative that that pushes back to
us
if an underrepresented person takes on a
role and their chances of being
successful
are limited before they even begin if
they do fail
if they do fall off that cliff the
message that we get back is
well of course they did someone like
that
that’s the not the right kind of person
to run a successful
business and so that message compounds
and we just internalize it
so i think all of this logically leads
us to two
questions the first of which is
why is this happening why
are businesses that are in trouble more
likely to appoint an underrepresented
leader
well it could be that in patriarchal
societies women are viewed as caregivers
as nurturers
and so research has shown that when a
business is in trouble
women are often appointed to lead not
for their ability to make
transformational change but because of
their perceived
soft skills for their ability to
re-engage that
workforce and to get them back motivated
again
but importantly because she’s not hired
for her ability to make transformational
change
research shows that she’s often not
given the tools or the time
necessary to make that change and so her
chances of falling off that cliff
are increased before she even begins
because of the limitations of the
imaginations
of the people who have brought her in
the second reason to paraphrase kristen
anderson who’s a psychology professor at
the university of houston
is that in business women might be seen
as more disposable
more expendable and that means they make
really good scapegoats
in that case if your business isn’t
doing well
bringing in a female leader could be a
real win-win scenario
if she comes in and is able to make that
transformational change then great your
business is transformed
but if she’s not all of the blame is
able to be put onto her shoulders
and she’s able to get pushed out of the
business pushed over that cliff
importantly the research then shows that
she’s more likely than not to be
replaced by a white
man a move known as the savior effect
and that savior effect signals to us to
shareholders investors employees
that the business is back in a safe pair
of hands
it’s back to business as usual and
really importantly that new
white male safe pair of hands is more
likely to be given
both the tools and the time necessary to
succeed
where the underrepresented person has
failed
so up until now we’ve been talking
about what happens when you are a
racially marginalized person
or a woman but as i said the majority of
my work
looks at black women so what happens
when we do take that more intersectional
look
when we think about the experiences of
people with not just one but
two marginalized identities
as you might imagine it’s not the best
story
if a new black woman takes over the most
senior role in the business
board member ceo we can safely assume
two things the first thing that we can
assume
as we’ve discussed is the business might
not be in great shape
and the second thing that we can assume
is that she’s likely to be managing a
large team of white men
that leadership layered just below her
her closest cohort
and we can assume that because in 2019
the lenient foundation
reported that white men make up about 30
of that
entry-level junior cohort but by time we
get to the c-suite
that’s actually ballooned up to 68
that means white men are the only group
whose representation
grows as they become more senior
or to put it a different way they’re the
only group
who experience the opposite of the glass
ceiling
instead of looking up and not being able
to see themselves reflected back at all
they look up and see nothing but
themselves at the most
senior levels there is of course until
they don’t
until they have a new boss who’s
somebody like a black woman
and the reason this matters is there’s
research from the university of texas
and the university of michigan
and they look to what happens to that
group of men
who are so used to seeing themselves
directly mirrored back
when they get a new boss who doesn’t
mirror both their whiteness and their
maleness
and what they found was amazing they
found that as soon as they get a boss
who doesn’t directly mirror them in both
of those ways
they report feeling less personally
connected to the business
less able to personally identify with it
and less personally invested in it
and that means that their work
performance suffered they did worse at
their jobs
now if a business is already in trouble
even the greatest leader is not going to
solve it single-handedly
she needs her team particularly her
senior team
and so if they’ve stopped doing their
jobs properly all they’re doing
is continuing to push her towards the
edge of that cliff
the second thing that same piece of
research found was that
they stopped doing a really important
part of any manager’s job
that’s managing their teams they stopped
developing
mentoring working with the people who
was their job to take care of but they
didn’t stop doing that equally
no they mostly stopped helping working
with developing
anyone in that team who was also
racially marginalized
and so in that way the glass cliff bites
twice
we’re not only pushing the existing
leader closer to the edge of their cliff
we’re stopping what could be this new
cohort of underrepresented leaders from
coming up
because we’re not giving them the same
support
guidance mentorship development that the
rest of their colleagues are getting
so i’m telling you this because i want
you to be a part
of making this change and that might
sound impossible you might be thinking
well
i can’t change businesses or charities
governments
any of the places where we see the glass
cliff playing out
but and stay with me for a second
you can because none of those things are
real
businesses government charities all of
these things they’re just groups of
people who’ve come together to do
something
and we’re a group of people who have
come together to do something
and so we can make that change
we can look at our own conscious and
unconscious biases
and we can decide that we see the value
in all people all of the time
not just some people when we have a
problem that they might be able to solve
or something that we might be able to
blame them for
so as angela davis says we have to act
as though it’s possible to change the
world
and you have to do it all of the time
and so that’s what i’m asking you to do
i’m asking you to look at yourself and
to decide that you are not going to be
part of pushing anybody else closer
towards the edge of their own cliff
and i want you to know that i’m going to
be right alongside you
trying to do the same
you