8

Claiming and Sustaining Ambition

Ambition is a problematic issue for women. Our data shows that talented women are not as ambitious as their male peers and that the gap widens as women move through their thirties and forties. In the business sector, for example, 53 percent of highly qualified women ages twenty-one to forty see themselves as “very ambitious,” whereas in the forty-one to fifty-five age group that percentage drops to 37 percent.

A good part of the problem is the nonlinearity of many female careers. Off-ramps and scenic routes are difficult to recover from—it is the rare woman who emerges from a career break with her job prospects intact. DeAnne Aguirre—the senior vice president and managing partner of Booz Allen Hamilton’s global organization, whom we met in chapter 6 and who off-ramped and on-ramped eight times during her sixteen-year career at this professional services firm—is highly unusual. More commonly, off-rampers are subject to a myriad of penalties. Many of them lose heart and voice and eventually reduce what they expect from themselves. Aspirations and dreams are downsized.

Another part of the problem is the glass ceiling that continues to limit and constrain the career prospects of women. Difficulties range from overt discrimination to a dearth of role models and mentors to a paucity of networks. Whatever the precise mix of reasons why women lose momentum, the result is the same: to a greater extent than their male peers (who also find the slippery slopes of upper management steep and treacherous), experienced, committed “high-potential” women are closed out of top jobs.

What to do? A key fix is employer-sponsored women’s networks, which can be extremely effective in helping women claim and sustain ambition. Networks boost confidence and create traction by connecting women to peers, provide access to senior executives, serve as a showcase for leadership skills, and expand business relationships—both internally (inside the company) and externally (with clients and customers.)

The two networks featured in this chapter are state of the art. Johnson & Johnson’s Women’s Leadership Initiative and General Electric’s Women’s Network are well-established initiatives with impressive track records—they have a proven capacity to accelerate women’s careers. An important defining characteristic of both programs is the emphasis on doing business better. Network events are not coffee klatches where women trade parenting tips; rather, they are substantive sessions where women hone leadership skill sets and build their business relationships.

The Women’s Leadership Initiative is a little softer-edged than the Women’s Network, focusing on work-life balance issues and community outreach as well as leadership skill building. General Electric’s Women’s Network is unapologetic in its focus on career advancement—explicitly aligning itself with the company’s succession-planning processes.

Employers can also accelerate women’s careers through leadership training programs that specifically target female executives—at Johnson & Johnson these programs are embedded in the Women’s Leadership Initiative; at Time Warner, Breakthrough Leadership is an independent program.

The idea that companies need to offer leadership training that is customized for women is key here. Female professionals face a distinct set of challenges that revolve around a lack of role models and the absence of informal networks. But it’s also true that women want different things from their work. As we discovered in chapter 2, women are motivated by a more complex series of career goals than their male peers. For female professionals, connection to colleagues, recognition from bosses, giving back to community, and flexibility all tend to trump compensation as reasons why they go to work. It therefore stands to reason that if employers want to tap into the full range of female aspirations, they need to customize leadership training for their high-potential women. Time Warner’s Breakthrough Leadership program is a model on this front.

JOHNSON & JOHNSON: WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE

Johnson & Johnson’s Women’s Leadership Initiative got off the ground in 1995. With its impressive track record and extraordinary global reach, the Women’s Leadership Initiative has become an important player in women’s networking—a gold standard for private-sector programs aimed at helping women claim and sustain their career ambitions.

With more than 230 operating companies and 115,000-plus employees in 57 countries around the world, Johnson & Johnson is a major force in the pharmaceutical industry, with products ranging from medical devices to baby supplies. Despite its formidable size the company has a well-deserved reputation for being woman-friendly. For twenty-one years Johnson & Johnson has appeared on Working Mother magazine’s list of the 100 best companies to work for.

It wasn’t always so. JoAnn Heffernan Heisen, chief diversity officer of Johnson & Johnson and a member of the company’s executive committee, recalls that when she arrived at the company seventeen years ago she was one of just a handful of executive women. “Johnson & Johnson had a great reputation as a family-friendly company but like many other corporations at the time, there were few women in executive positions.”¹ It had a comfortable—and highly entrenched—male culture. Many male employees joined the company at age twenty-two or twenty-three and spent decades working, socializing, golfing, and becoming connected with one another.

Though a supportive culture for male executives, Johnson & Johnson felt closed off to women who hadn’t “grown up” at the company. Like Heisen, many of these women were midcareer hires. They didn’t have strong relationships across the business units, relationships that had been cultivated by years of networking as so many men at Johnson & Johnson did. A few women had managed to achieve positions of power but they were a rarity. Heisen saw the need for creating more opportunities for women in leadership, particularly given the significant growth opportunities forecast for Johnson & Johnson in the marketplace. She knew that more and more women with credentials and ambition were entering the workforce. According to Workforce 2000, a 1987 study by the Hudson Institute that influenced Heisen’s thinking at that time, between 1985 and 2000 only 35 percent of new workers would be men. Fully 61 percent of new entrants to the labor force would be female—42 percent of them white, 22 percent of them women of color.² It seemed to Heisen that Johnson & Johnson had a compelling business case for grooming more women to take leadership positions.

Heisen’s personal history was also a driver. Her father had died of a brain tumor when she was nine years old leaving her mother widowed with four young children, one of them a newborn, and little in the way of earning power. Since her father had been CFO of the National Institutes of Health, the NIH reached out to the family and offered Heisen’s mother a secretarial job, but it paid little and the family constantly lived on the economic edge. The adolescent Heisen became her family’s intermediary with its creditors. “When the premium for our car insurance hadn’t been paid or the gas bill was overdue and the bill collectors came, my mother would send me to the door to make excuses and buy us time,” she says. For Heisen, it was a wake-up call. “These experiences made an indelible impression on me. I understood—deeply—the burdens and heroism of working mothers.” She also understood the need for financial security. In her words, “You never knew when a husband might die or leave you.”³ Heisen vowed she would never end up in a situation where she had no other option than being a secretary.

Undoubtedly, Heisen’s childhood honed her ambition and prepared her to cut a powerful path in the business world. After graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in economics, she joined Chase Manhattan Bank, where she was one of five female recruits in a pool of twenty-five new hires. While at Chase, she joined the Financial Women’s Association of New York and eventually became its president. There, she says, “I saw how important it was for women to have a strong and caring network that provided support and encouragement to counter the isolation they often faced in the workplace.” When Heisen was appointed treasurer of Johnson & Johnson in 1991, she became the company’s top female executive and one of the highest-ranked women in the corporate world—but she hung onto her keen awareness of the need for female solidarity across management levels.

The Birth of the Women’s Leadership Initiative

In her new position Heisen got to know many senior-level women in the various Johnson & Johnson operating companies, and she reached out to each of them. Simultaneously she was developing solid working relationships with the company’s top male executives and began talking to them about an initiative that could accelerate the progress of women at Johnson & Johnson. “They were totally supportive of the idea of a women’s network,” she says, “just not savvy about how to make that happen.”

Beginning in 1990 Heisen and thirty other top-tier women at Johnson & Johnson—vice president level and above—began meeting for regular dinners to discuss their business concerns. The executive committee of the company, which was then all male, would join the group for cocktails. They understood the importance of meeting these high-achieving women—most of whom they only knew on paper through HR reviews. Then, Heisen says, “We would send the men packing and we would get down to business.” The group grew over time, and, realizing what an impact this small network was having on their own professional development, began to feel a responsibility to the wider pool of women at Johnson & Johnson. The next step: they decided to hold a conference to explore the changing landscape of women’s leadership at Johnson & Johnson and in the business world in general. In March 1995 over three hundred Johnson & Johnson women, director level and above, gathered at the company’s New Brunswick, New Jersey, headquarters, and the Women’s Leadership Initiative was born.

Chaired by Heisen, the Women’s Leadership Initiative determined that its mission was “to challenge the Johnson & Johnson family of operating companies to define and enhance policies that will attract, develop and retain talented women.”⁴ The stakes are big. The data shows that almost 80 percent of graduate degrees in the health sciences now go to women; if Johnson & Johnson can effectively tap into this rich talent pool, the payoff for the company will be huge.

As its framework evolved the Women’s Leadership Initiative became a powerful yet decentralized network that united women around common interests and activities across Johnson & Johnson’s 230 operating companies. It is governed by a steering committee comprising many of the company’s most senior women who represent all the major business lines. Within each operating company, the Women’s Leadership Initiative is led by business unit chairs—like Amy Jumbelic, an operations leader for the Johnson & Johnson Consumer Products Company. Jumbelic took over as chair of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at her operating company in 2004.

Business unit chairs such as Jumbelic provide their respective operating companies with leadership to support the Women’s Leadership Initiative mission. They also plan activities for women in their division. At the Johnson & Johnson Consumer Products Company Jumbelic and her team sponsor more than a dozen meetings each year and, through their communications liaison, contribute news and feature articles to the Women’s Leadership Initiative Web site, which is accessible to employees worldwide. In addition, subcommittees appointed by Jumbelic and her Women’s Leadership Steering team have reached out and offered help to female employees with mentoring, networking, and professional development.⁵

Scope and Reach

The Women’s Leadership Initiative’s impact is both broad and deep. Take executive education. On this front the Women’s Leadership Initiative has introduced three kinds of training opportunities for women. First was a decision to join the Smith College Consortium, a collaboration between six major corporations to provide management and leadership training for high-potential women—Jumbelic was a participant in 1999. Second, the Women’s Leadership Initiative worked with Smith College and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business to create a program that provides management training for women with international responsibilities. Each year Johnson & Johnson sends a contingent of high-potential women to the Smith-Tuck program for global women leaders. And third, the Women’s Leadership Initiative approached Smith to customize a leadership training program for manager-level women. This program is held annually and is open exclusively to Johnson & Johnson women.

The Women’s Leadership Initiative has expanded far beyond its original purpose. “Initially it was simply, ‘Let’s get together and talk about how we survive as women,’” says Ellen Griffith, speaking on a promotional DVD created to showcase the Women’s Leadership Initiative.⁶ Today Women’s Leadership Initiative activities range from the training and education programs described above to promoting work-life balance to girl power and community outreach. For Jumbelic work-life issues are a priority. “‘Worklife effectiveness is one of our key issues,” she says. “This can mean anything from helping a single mother secure a flexible work arrangement to making sure women across the board know about the benefits and programs on offer at our companies. We find that many women don’t know what’s available—and are afraid to ask.”⁷

Attendance at Women’s Leadership Initiative events has also grown exponentially since that inaugural conference in 1995. At the five-year mark (2000), the number of conference attendees—women at the director level and above—had grown to eight hundred. At the ten-year mark (2005), well over two thousand senior-level women attended eight conferences and celebrations around the world.

The impact of the Women’s Leadership Initiative is unambiguous—the network has been a powerful force in accelerating women’s progress at Johnson & Johnson. Between 1995 and 2005 the percentage of women at the vice president level or above rose from 14 percent to 30 percent. While Johnson & Johnson had no women on the executive committee in 1995 and only one in 2000, by 2005 four out of the eleven members were women. Today, women have reached the company’s top rungs—Christine Poon, vice chairman of the board and worldwide chairman of Medicines & Nutritionals, and Colleen Goggins, chairman of the Consumer and Personal Care Group, lead two of the company’s three main business units.

Still, the work of the Women’s Leadership Initiative is far from over. While over half of Johnson & Johnson’s employees are women, only a third of the top earners at the company are female. Jami Miller, regional account director for Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems, notes that, like herself, women with children continue to face barriers and hurdles as they try to move up within the company. For example, to advance her career at Johnson & Johnson, Miller has been required to relocate four times. As Miller points out, she was lucky—her husband was supportive of the many moves. Often women with families don’t have this luxury.

Miller is clear on one score: the Women’s Leadership Initiative has been a huge door opener. “When you’re involved in the Women’s Leadership Initiative you see how things have changed, how women are getting promoted across the company. When I joined the company fifteen years ago I went through a management training program that had sixteen people in it, fifteen guys and me. I was one woman in a sea of men. That kind of ratio is a thing of the past.”⁸

What accounts for the Women’s Leadership Initiative’s success? One factor, according to Heisen, is that its focus has always been on doing business better. “Those early dinner meetings always focused on honing skill sets and enhancing business relationships—they weren’t just social gatherings. Conversation centered on issues such as market share, market trends, and growth prospects. We were developing a relationship network with our business peers, just like the men who had ‘grown up’ together at Johnson & Johnson,” Heisen says.⁹

Thanks to both its longevity and its conspicuous success, the Women’s Leadership Initiative now serves as the prototype for a greatly expanded roster of affinity groups at Johnson & Johnson—the African American Leadership Council (AALC), the Community of Asian Association at Johnson & Johnson (CAAJJ), the Gay & Lesbian Organization for Business and Leadership (GLOBAL), the Hispanic Organization for Leadership and Achievement (HOLA), among others. Despite this explosion of affinity group activity, the Women’s Leadership Initiative remains the largest network and the only one that has expanded worldwide.

Going Global

The Women’s Leadership Initiative has expanded overseas to support women in Johnson & Johnson operating companies around the world. The challenges vary according to region. For example, with regard to equality, European women lag behind women in the United States but are making progress. Heisen believes that—in terms of how women are doing—some Asian countries have leapfrogged over Europe. China is particularly impressive, at least in part because of its recent history. “Chairman Mao said that ‘women hold up half the sky,’ and during the decades of communist rule Chinese women were fifty-fifty partners in the workplace,” notes Heisen. But while China has surged ahead, other Asian countries have lagged behind.

According to Sakiki Kon, who works for the Johnson & Johnson Medical Company in Tokyo, the Women’s Leadership Initiative has been particularly important in Japan. Kon is head of the Women’s Health Business Unit, which is responsible for a variety of medical devices including those used in breast cancer surgery and minimally invasive surgery. In her country, Kon says, there are not nearly enough women at the top, and there’s a dearth of female role models. “The programs of the Women’s Leadership Initiative are therefore extremely helpful in establishing a culture that is more receptive to women in senior positions,” she says.¹⁰

Kon is convinced that the main obstacle to women’s advancement in Japan is the local culture—which prefers to see women as wives and mothers rather than as powerful professionals. This is a more significant obstacle than the absence of support programs and policies. On the work-life front, flexibility is at the top of women’s wish lists, but the Johnson & Johnson Medical Company in Tokyo already does well on this front, offering flexible and extensive maternity leave and providing a $1,500 bonus per year to working mothers to help defray child-care expenses. These programs dovetail with recent government policies designed to combat low birth rates by encouraging working women to have children.

Kon, who has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona, was asked to head a Women’s Leadership Initiative program soon after she joined the Johnson & Johnson Medical Company in Tokyo in 2002. She plunged right in, organizing a team of six women to help her identify the most pressing problems and develop a vision that would guide the new program. The team then came up with an agenda that focused on two things: ambition and acceleration. The company was pushed to promote more women, and women were encouraged to set their sights high. For a first move, Kon’s team met with over one hundred senior executives at the company to discuss their objectives and propose a target—25 percent of executive ranks should be female within five years. This target was accepted and three years later a great deal of progress has been made. The number of female managers rose from 9 percent in 2002 to 19 percent in 2005.

According to Kon, the increased visibility of women has prompted a noticeable change of attitude among senior male managers, who now seem more willing to consider young, high-potential women for promotion. Women are also beginning to help themselves. Kon sees women at the company taking advantage of leadership training and networking opportunities provided by the Women’s Leadership Initiative and becoming more proactive. One hundred thirty women attended the tenth anniversary Women’s Leadership Initiative celebrations in Tokyo in June 2005—along with thirty senior male executives.

In 2005, Johnson & Johnson received an equal rights award from the Japanese government for the role the company has played in promoting women’s rights through the Women’s Leadership Initiative. That same year, fifty private-sector companies including Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Pfizer, and Panasonic, joined to form the Japan Women’s Innovation Network (JWIN) to promote the idea that accelerating women’s progress is good for companies and good for the Japanese economy. “We’ve helped create a private-sector movement that is driving a new message and a new reality: women have talent and credentials and deserve to be in leadership positions” says Kon. “What’s more, women are no longer alone in their struggle to achieve this—their companies are right behind them.”

Heisen has every reason to be proud of the Women’s Leadership Initiative’s impact in Japan—and elsewhere. She considers her job to be one of the best in the world. “I get to go around the globe spreading the good news—that a diverse and inclusive organization such as Johnson & Johnson has a competitive advantage. We have every intention of running with this issue,” she says. “We will brand it, own it, and deliver it.”¹¹

TIME WARNER: BREAKTHROUGH LEADERSHIP

Time Warner, the world’s largest media company, boasts several innovative programs that nurture the ambitions of female employees. One of the most successful is Breakthrough Leadership, a program developed in partnership with the Simmons School of Management in Boston.

This program was the brainchild of Patricia Fili-Krushel, executive vice president for administration at Time Warner. Inspired by the “camaraderie and bonding” she experienced while participating in a women’s leadership event at ABC, the television network, Fili-Krushel decided to host an event for Time Warner women—a screening of a “chick flick” produced by the company, followed by a cocktail hour. Richard Parsons, chairman and CEO of Time Warner, was an invited guest, but when he walked into the room none of the other attendees paid him any attention. The women were too busy talking among themselves. Another CEO may have been put out, but Parsons got excited. “He said to me, ‘What is this? Something huge is going on,” remembers Fili-Krushel.¹³

At the end of the evening it dawned on Fili-Krushel that the event actually underscored a negative at Time Warner. Women executives at the company had no community within which to bond, no place to come together and make connections. This created a situation where the few women in senior positions felt extremely isolated.

Fili-Krushel’s fix took a lot of thought and planning. She approached the Simmons School of Management and explored the possibility of designing a customized women’s leadership program. Then her team, along with representatives from each of the company’s divisions, spent a year working with the school to design it. They interviewed leaders around the company in an effort to understand what women really needed to succeed at Time Warner, and incorporated modules on developing those specific skills into the final program.

The Breakthrough Leadership program was launched in October 2003. It was hosted by the Simmons School of Management and took place at the school’s Boston campus. As thirty Time Warner women gathered for that first five-day program Fili-Krushel assumed she would offer some introductory remarks and then fly back to New York, returning on the last day of the program to give a “what we learned and now goodbye” type of closing speech. To her great surprise she ended up staying the entire week, drawn by the power of the workshops, the presentations, and the participants themselves. “This was simply the most energizing and rewarding experience of my career,” says Fili-Krushel. “When I left Boston, I felt I had birthed a third child.” (Fili-Krushel has two children.)

Companywide the repercussions were immediate. “I had managers calling me and saying, ‘What did you do up at that management meeting? I’ve had two women in my office today asking for raises!’” recalls Fili-Krushel.

That first Breakthrough Leadership program had a powerful effect on attendees. This inaugural class refer to themselves as the “tiara” class because of the way one participant described her work mode before the program—head down, incredibly busy and focused, she somehow expected a tiara to fall from the sky and crown her. A significant insight for this group came from realizing that rather than expecting automatic rewards for industriousness, women need to pick up their heads and strategically manage their own careers. The tiara metaphor was so resonant that one member of the inaugural class handed out tiaras at the final dinner. Some of these tiaras—rather tarnished at this point—can still be found hanging proudly on corner office walls.

What are the “ingredients” of Breakthrough Leadership? What makes it so special? To begin with, away from their desks and everyday responsibilities, participants become immersed in a fourteen-hour-a-day symposium. The sessions cover five basic areas:

1. Personal leadership. In this module attendees, all of whom are female, middle- and upper-level executives, delve into what Time Warner perceives as “good leadership”—what behaviors participants need to cultivate in order to progress at Time Warner.

2. Skill building. Over the course of the program, participants focus on developing leadership presence—and the ability to inspire others. They also learn to negotiate for the components of leadership success—specifically resources and support for their next career move. (A guiding prompt for this aspect of the program—studies reveal that while women tend to get promoted on performance, men tend to get promoted on potential.) In addition, women analyze their networks and discuss how well they are positioned for leadership success.

3. Peer mentoring. Throughout the program participants work with “peer” mentors with whom they discuss leadership and career and business issues. Vera Vitels, vice president for People Development at Time Warner and one of the designers of the Breakthrough Leadership program, says that many participants stay in touch with their mentors long after they’re back at their Time Warner jobs.¹⁴

4. Exposure to role models. Several highly placed female executives from across the Time Warner divisions take time out from their work and fly up to Boston to join a series of panels focused on leadership and career. They talk about how they achieved their positions and other “secrets” to climbing the corporate ladder at Time Warner. These panels put a face on success and provide the participants with an opportunity to learn from both the achievements and the mistakes of women who have made it.

5. Interaction with senior leaders. A final element in the program is the presence of the top brass. Richard Parsons, Time Warner’s President and CEO, attends each year to meet participants and share his views on leadership, Time Warner’s businesses, and the importance of advancing women within the company. Ann Moore, President and CEO of Time, Inc., also spends an afternoon with participants, discussing leadership and sharing lessons from her own career.

How are women selected for the Breakthrough Leadership program? Vitels, the program’s principle designer, reaches out to divisional HR heads within Time Warner and asks them to recommend women who are deemed high potential (in terms of their performance ratings) and see themselves as potential leaders. Most years there are more nominations than there are places in the program. Getting into Breakthrough Leadership is increasingly competitive.

One member of the inaugural class, Maja Thomas, vice president for Digital Content Strategy at the Time Warner Book Group, remembers that she didn’t know anything about the program when she was tapped to go. “But I was excited because it sounded like going back to college—without final exams,” she says. Thomas had been at Time Warner for thirteen years and compares her Breakthrough Leadership experience to a couple in a good marriage who end up “going into therapy” to make their relationship even better.

Thomas had never had any formal leadership training nor had she taken presentation or speech classes. “I felt I was filling in a gap, and now I tend to think of my career as ‘before Breakthrough’ and ‘after Breakthrough.’”¹⁵

Rhonda Joy McLean, associate general counsel at Time, Inc., and another member of the inaugural class, seconds the positive feedback. “It was a gift of time away from the everyday concerns of my job where I could focus on personal development,” she says. McLean notes that she and other participants feel that the Breakthrough Leadership program “brought a new richness to the quality” of their work experience. “I felt really valued,” she adds.¹⁶

Thomas particularly appreciated practicing negotiating skills. “I’ve never liked negotiating on my own behalf,” she says. But the program taught her how to walk in and tell her boss about things she could do to take a broader role in the company. “Since Breakthrough Leadership, I’ve had three promotions,” says Thomas.¹⁷

Another valuable tool is the 360-degree feedback participants receive from classmates. Thomas talks about her feedback as being both flattering and critical but always revelatory. In her words: “I don’t consider myself a natural leader but the 360 really helped show me the way.”

Although participants are stimulated by the panels, inspired by the workshops, and motivated by their 360s, in the end they all say that the most powerful aspect of Breakthrough Leadership is connection to other women executives. “For me, it was all about the people,” says Tina Sharkey, senior vice president for Network and Community Programming at America Online and a graduate of the third Breakthrough Leadership class. “To have the opportunity of meeting so many women from other divisions of Time Warner was invaluable,” she says.¹⁸

As of October 2006 there have been nine Breakthrough Leadership programs, involving 229 attendees. One additional session is scheduled for 2007.¹⁹ According to Fili-Krushel women who go through this program are more likely to get promoted than women who don’t. Besides promotions, women who attended the program are more likely to move into different jobs with increased responsibility.

The program has been tweaked a bit over time: Vitels and her colleagues survey attendees to find out what worked well and what didn’t. More substantively, Time Warner ensures that Breakthrough Leadership alumnae keep their skills honed and their network fresh by organizing annual “reunions.” Graduates of the program gather in an off-site meeting space—generally a hotel—and participate in a day and a half of refresher sessions. Because the reunion group is larger than any one class, women have yet more opportunities to network.

Today, Breakthrough Leadership has a huge underground reputation and has become an extremely sought-after program. Vitels is constantly receiving calls—from women who want to attend the program and from senior managers wanting to nominate an outstanding woman in their division.

GENERAL ELECTRIC: WOMEN’S NETWORK

The General Electric Company is an industrial colossus, producing engines, plastics, refrigerators, and power plants in over one hundred countries around the world. The company has three hundred thousand employees, and in 2005, revenues topped $150 billion. Fortune magazine’s list of “Most Admired Companies” ranks General Electric number one.

If the company is known for its industrial might, it is also known for its uncompromising macho culture. But times are a-changing. In recent years General Electric has made huge efforts to be woman-friendly. Indeed, in 2004 the company won the prestigious Catalyst Award—given to a company that has made significant strides in advancing women—and for the last four years General Electric has been on Working Mother magazine’s “100 Best Companies” list.

A great deal of credit goes to chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt who has pushed General Electric to “look more like the world” that buys its products. That world contains a great many women. Immelt also stresses the competitive strength inherent in expanding the talent pool. As Deborah Elam, General Electric’s vice president and chief diversity officer, points out, to maximize growth opportunities, General Electric must have “global brains.” According to Elam, “GE needs to be inclusive if it is to access a broad range of talent across the world.”²⁰

General Electric’s diversity efforts began with the development of affinity networks. The first of these, the African American Forum (AAF), which was founded in 1993, has become a powerful tool in the company’s drive for more diversity and an aid in identifying individuals with leadership potential.

In 1996, at the fourth annual AAF symposium, former CEO Jack Welch was struck by how helpful and effective the affinity group was for its members, and decided that a women’s organization along the same lines had real potential and would be a boon for the company. So he met with senior women at General Electric’s various businesses and discussed how to create such an entity. The end result: the General Electric Women’s Network, which was launched in 1997. The top 120 women at General Electric were invited to the kickoff event at the company’s Crotonville, New York, campus. There they were encouraged to consult with their units and figure out what a women’s network could do for them—and what they could do for other women at the company.

The Women’s Network rapidly expanded. Although the Network was inspired by the AAF, the founding members didn’t position the new network as an affinity group. Rather, they chose to position their mission as helping women compete in the no-holds-barred meritocracy that exists at General Electric.

This mission infuses everything the Network does. For example, Network members do not ask for special treatment, nor do they focus particularly on flexible working hours or work-family issues. Instead, to help women navigate the intensely competitive General Electric playing field, the Women’s Network teaches members how to develop their leadership skills and provides career-broadening opportunities as well as tools for advancement. In addition, it offers a “safe haven”—a place where women can talk honestly and openly about their career challenges without fear of reprisal.

One of the Women’s Network’s main initiatives is recruiting talented women in technology and engineering—fields that are still predominately male. “Our recent track record is impressive,” says Jeanne Rosario, vice president and general manager of General Electric and a founding member of the Women’s Network. “In terms of the percentage of women in entry-level engineering jobs, we’re hitting upward of 28 percent. Considering women comprise only 20 percent of graduates at engineering schools around the country, the Women’s Network is doing a pretty good job,” she adds.²¹

The Women’s Network has other, yet more ambitious objectives, which are intertwined with General Electric’s succession planning. When leadership slots open up the Women’s Network attempts to find wellqualified, in-house female candidates. To facilitate this objective, the Network has aligned itself with the company’s leadership development and performance management system known as Session C—which uses an annual review process to pinpoint and promote leaders. These initiatives have put more women into the pipeline of potential General Electric leaders. As Susan Peters, vice president for Executive Development and a founding member of the Women’s Network, says: “The Network is about creating a forum for women. It’s about focusing the company’s resources on developing leaders who also happen to be women.”²²

Because the Women’s Network is run like a business, being female does not automatically open the door to a potential leadership role. Network leaders aren’t volunteers, rather, they are identified through Session C’s list of high potentials—the idea being that the Women’s Network provides high-potential women with the experience they need to give their careers a lift. Once appointed, Network leaders select officers, create an operating plan, and establish annual goals.

While leadership roles are tightly controlled by the company, Network events are open to all employees—women and men—and cover a broad range of topics: performance, networking, customer service, and work-life issues. Sometimes forums include speakers; other times the Network may offer workshops or networking dinners.

Like many new business ventures under the General Electric umbrella, the Women’s Network was created in the United States and then expanded overseas. Currently the Network has four U.S. and nine international regions. There are 130 “hubs,” or chapters, of the Women’s Network worldwide and over forty thousand members. The Network’s impact on the retention and advancement of women at General Electric has been dramatic. Thirteen percent of General Electric’s top officers are now women—up from 5 percent ten years ago. In 1996 female attrition levels were high—General Electric was losing 14 percent of its senior women every year. But by 2002 this rate had fallen to 7 percent—a major improvement. At the same time the pipeline has strengthened significantly. The number of women in the first band of management at General Electric—which represents “bench strength” for the future—has gone up 79 percent over the last decade.²³

The Women’s Network has a high profile on other fronts. Since “customer centricity” is a core principle at General Electric—everything the company does must offer value to customers—the network hosts an annual “Leading & Learning” event that provides the opportunity for General Electric women to interact with female customers and build business relationships. The Network also hosts an annual “mega-event” that brings together hundreds of General Electric women from around the world who have been identified as potential leaders in the Session C evaluation process.

Visibility is a huge issue for General Electric women—in a company of over three hundred thousand employees it’s difficult to get the attention of senior management. In interviews many women stressed that an important function of the Women’s Network is to create opportunities for members to get connected, meet others, stand out, and shine. Elam elaborates, “We see the power of the Network in providing opportunities for mentors and role models for younger women. This is such a huge company, so spread out, so acquisitive, that the Women’s Network creates important glue for women. It’s easy for isolation to set in, especially among women scientists and engineers. It’s possible to be working in a division without another senior woman around.”²⁴

Worldwide Influence

General Electric’s Women’s Network has become an important presence around the world. Heather Wang, the Network’s leader for Asia and China, points out that women face particularly difficult challenges in Japan and Korea where cultural barriers are high. But the Women’s Network is helping change that reality, creating opportunity and access. Over the past three years approximately 370 women have been promoted to executive or senior professional “bands” in General Electric’s Asian operations.

Wang brought the Women’s Network to China in 2002. “Within months we had launched hubs in Shanghai and Beijing,” she remembers. Immelt was visiting Japan, and Wang invited him to speak to her fledgling network—a group of two hundred General Electric women. “They were so impressed that despite a killer schedule the CEO found time to visit with them—the Network was that important to the company,” says Wang. Currently, approximately three thousand of General Electric’s eleven thousand female employees in Asia attend Network events. “It’s helped a lot,” Wang says. “Many of us feel newly appreciated in the company.”²⁵ The Network has allowed Wang to improve her leadership skills and has given her the opportunity to understand the needs of a range of people—an important skill set for an HR leader.

Elam is extremely pleased with the measurable success of the Women’s Network but knows there’s work ahead. For example, she wants to involve more senior women—to have them act as role models for new members just joining the Network. According to Elam, in the early years senior women were skeptical of the Women’s Network. Their feeling was, “I’ve gotten where I am on my own, so why should younger women need help?” However, Elam is finding that senior-level colleagues are beginning to see the benefits of the Network.

While General Electric’s Women’s Network is still a work in progress, it has already become an admired program within the business world and has helped propel the company to the forefront of change. Elam describes the Women’s Network as a “crown jewel” at General Electric.