Our Turn (8 page)

Just ask Rush Limbaugh. After the ultra-conservative radio host called former Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for asking the government to cover the costs of birth control at a congressional hearing in 2012, the online protest ignited by his rant is still burning three years later: the public outrage that went viral prompted several sponsors to pull ads from his show, consumers to boycott advertisers who hadn't pulled their ads, and national advertisers to boycott the show itself. Or consider the amazing effect of a protest campaign started by one teenager. Julia Bluhm, a fourteen-year-old from Maine, started an online petition at Change.org, entitled “
Seventeen
Magazine: Give Girls Images of Real Girls!” Some 84,000 people signed it, which in turn led to a protest that convinced
Seventeen
magazine to introduce a Body Peace Treaty that promises to “never change girls' body or face shapes” when retouching images. That treaty, aimed at reducing the self-esteem problems and skyrocketing cases of eating disorders among teenage girls, has since been policed online by people who post any perceived breaches.

No other kind of activism in history can rally as many as quickly as social media can, virtually speaking. It's fostering a society of whistleblowers, because the web gives everyone a whistle. Neither power, nor powerful friends, fame nor money can escape the matrix of social media. Online, status does not have its privileges. Just ask running back Ray Rice, fired from the Baltimore Ravens and suspended from the NFL after footage of him punching out his
then fiancée in an elevator went viral. Ask Bill Cosby. Ask Jian Ghomeshi. Months before the mainstream media broke the story, a Twitter account was accusing the former CBC radio host of sexual violence.

I was in the midst of working on this book when I learned, along with most of the world, that Ghomeshi, whose arts and entertainment show,
Q,
had more than two million listeners and syndication in more than 160 US markets, had allegedly used his celebrity to sexually abuse women and mistreat his staff. As of this writing, Ghomeshi awaits trial on five charges of sexual assault plus one charge related to overcoming resistance by choking. The disturbing news, gushing forth as it did over several weeks last fall, was hard to fathom. Several nights I lay awake wondering how I'd heard nothing about this aspect of Ghomeshi's behaviour. If I had, I wouldn't have hesitated to act and act quickly, as I have done throughout my career when people have mistreated or been inappropriate with those working with them. It upset me to discover that there were places within that five-thousand-person environment where people felt they couldn't come to me. I wish they had. But I also completely understand why some might have felt that they couldn't: reporting puts a lot of responsibility on the victim, often too much. I know that first-hand. My first brush was at the age of twenty, when a boss of mine openly propositioned me on my first business trip. I kept quiet. I reminded myself every day, as many young women do, that I was lucky to have the job, that I was replaceable and that anyone would kill to take my place. According to Statistics Canada, 90 percent of sex assaults go unreported. And that's been one of the remarkable side effects of the Ghomeshi story, seeing
and hearing the many women who now feel empowered to speak up through social media in numbers that have made the mainstream press and society at large pay attention. When Canadian actress Lucy DeCoutere became the first woman to put her name to her allegations against Ghomeshi, the story went live on the
Toronto Star
website at 9:35 p.m. and, according to a
Chatelaine
investigation by Rachel Giese, within half an hour #IBelieveLucy had more than 2,000 mentions and 2.5 million impressions online. Along with that came the support of other women who had stayed silent for so long, culminating in #BeenRapedNeverReported, the hashtag launched on Twitter by Canadian journalists Sue Montgomery and Antonia Zerbisias, which went viral within a day of its creation. From my perspective, it's all evidence that the digital universe can tip the scales in favour of what's right: enabling women, no matter who they are, where they are, or what the context, to find their voice.

Why Reaching Critical Mass Is Critical

IT WAS DURING ONE OF
the regular Twitter SWAT team conference calls that one of the members said she had noticed that too few females were speaking up at Tea Time. We discussed why this might be the case, and what we could do about it and, in the end, we decided that perhaps more women would feel encouraged to speak up if other women did. And so we decided to encourage selected women to break the ice and step forward with questions. It had an amazing result. More women did start speaking up, either inspired by hearing the voices of other women or deciding they needed to follow
their example. Either way, women regularly now step up to the microphone at Tea Time.

Why go to such an effort? It's not just about pushing females forward. It's about doing what's truly good for everyone. Getting input from diverse voices, people of different ages, cultures and experience, has always been valuable. But in the information age, it's urgent and critical. There's just so much data flying around, no one leader, or narrow management team, can possibly keep abreast of it, let alone analyze and exploit it to a company's advantage. A recent article in the
Harvard Business Review,
for example, suggests that one of the reasons one-time telecom giant Nokia failed was the homogeneity of its executive team. One hundred percent Finnish and together for more than a decade, the team completely underestimated the threat of the smartphone from Silicon Valley. The Center for Talent Innovation, based on survey responses from 1,800 men and women in white-collar professions and dozens of interviews with Fortune 500 executives and staff, found that the failure to innovate is often a reflection of senior management's homogeneity (53 percent of respondents said leadership at their firms was almost entirely white, or almost entirely male). Homogeneity as a liability is a message now making a major impression in the business world, and the trick for the modern leader is how to create this new kind of eclectic, speak-up culture.

The point is that increasing the diversity of voices in the workplace can mean the difference between success and failure. Homogeneity is a creativity killer. And several studies, from various countries, suggest that having more women in leadership roles, whether it is in management, the C-suite or
on corporate boards, the more successful companies tend to be. Part of the difficulty in making this case is that there are far too few women at the very top of anything to make a statistically powerful argument. But the research is all telling us the same thing. The McKinsey & Co.
Women Matter
report, for example, finds that companies with the highest level of gender diversity in top management roles outperform their sector in terms of return on equity, operations and stock price. What's more, when the global consulting firm assessed the organizational excellence of companies on nine criteria, which included things like leadership, direction, innovation, coordination, capability and values, it found that firms with three or more women in senior management scored more highly on every measure. And organizational excellence, no surprise, is a key indicator of financial success. But what's really worth noting is that these companies—101 of them around the world along with survey answers from more than 58,000 respondents—only saw this effect when they had three women or more at the top. Yet further proof that numbers matter, and that there's a darn good business reason to do more than nudge them up by a token one or two.

In 2004, Catalyst, the international non-profit group that aims to advance women's opportunities in business, also found that firms with the
highest
representation of women on their top management teams performed better financially than those companies with the lowest female representation across each of five industries studied. Catalyst based its research on two key financial measures: return on equity, which was 35 percent higher in companies with more women in senior posts, and total returns to shareholders, which was
34 percent higher. Then, just a few years later, in 2011, Catalyst released a study showing that companies with high numbers of female board directors outperformed those with lower numbers by 16 percent, based on return on sales. That number jumped to 26 percent when comparing companies with the highest representation of female board directors to those firms with the fewest.

The financial benefits of female leadership are also gaining global recognition. Researchers from Milan's Bocconi University and the University of Barcelona produced a groundbreaking study in 2014 that found that medium to large family businesses in Italy were more successful when they had more women at the helm. (The researchers said they focused on family firms because they represented the most common ownership form worldwide, even among large publicly traded US companies. According to their data, families hold large equity stakes in about a third of S&P 500 firms, and half of the two thousand largest industrial firms.) The study found that replacing a family firm's male CEO with a female increased profitability. But the increase was most dramatic when that change was also coupled with an increase in the number of female board members, jumping by about 18 percent and making female-led firms more profitable than those with all-male boards. The combination of female leadership and governance, the researchers said, encouraged a kind of cooperation and rich information exchange that improved the quality of the board's advice and the performance of the CEO.

It's an observation that lends hefty support to the importance of female input at the highest levels but also of cooperation in modern enterprise. The time has come for companies
to revamp the way they operate and move away from top-down-driven leadership. When companies are smaller, and team members multi-task, and there's a daily feast of data to be digested, collaboration and consensus is simply the smart way forward. And years of research show that women have an edge in forming collaborative relationships. In the scenarios where consensus is the goal, females also seem to naturally find their voice. The study from Brigham and Princeton, for instance, which found that women speak less than men in group problem-solving situations, discovered that the disparity vanished when the group was asked to come to a unanimous decision. In other words, when a group was required to build consensus instead of allowing the majority to rule, women felt empowered to speak up even if they were outnumbered by men.

Given that collaboration is proving so essential to modern leadership, businesses need to create environments that foster broad input and brainstorming. They have to move away from hierarchies toward a culture of openness where everyone has a voice. And for men and women who tend to excel in these kinds of environments, the time is ripe for women to play to those strengths in the boardroom and beyond. The trick for the modern leader is how to create this new kind of culture.

The Power of the Outsider

BEFORE I LANDED AT THE CBC,
I lived through a variety of management styles. There were places, such as Paragon under Isme Bennie, where initiative was encouraged and
rewarded. And I knew, from my own meteoric rise there, that the business as a whole benefits when the leader gains a broad perspective from the team, and that leaders are only as effective as the team they build.

The trouble was the CBC was facing many of the same structural issues as any seventy-year-old company. It was a model of big bureaucracy, with many departments and many divisions with more separation between them than I had ever seen—real silos in which the leaders were deeply entrenched and distrustful of others. It was like a collection of tiny empires rather than any kind of cohesive unit. Not that they were at war with one another, but they certainly didn't cooperate much. When I ran television we had nothing to do with radio, the radio team had nothing to do with digital, and so on.

The experience of the CBC's digital group was a good example of what was going on in the culture. Launched when digital was seen as a niche inhabited only by the tech savvy, the digital group occupied its own separate division, a place for “special projects.” The digital landscape was swiftly evolving and reaching into all departments even as the division itself was growing up separately, struggling steadily with the broadcaster's competing priorities. As a result, digital had created its own shadow departments, digital people who worked specifically in each of these areas—duplicating efforts, hampering good communication and stunting innovation. People outside digital were confused by its mandate. If they were asked to produce web content, they'd reply: “That's digital's job—I'm here to put on a TV show.” Digital's structure also left it at risk of being cut.
Being a “special project” at a time of cutbacks left it isolated and vulnerable.

By the time I moved from head of TV to the head of the entire organization, digital had matured. It made no sense to have digital operations as a separate division. People across all departments had to work in the new reality the digital world was creating. And so the first big structural change I made was making “digital” part of everyone's job.

Instead of having a separate silo, I integrated the members from the digital team into all departments. The digital sports expert went to the sports department, the news person in digital went to news, and so on. The content creators and producers would benefit from the expertise and skills the digital members brought and everyone would become cross-trained. No one could think of content being created for only one medium any longer. We were ushering in the age of “360 development” where multiple platforms became the natural way to go. It sounds so 101 now, but it was a hard sell. Some lamented the “disbanding of digital” when our goal was to reinforce the idea that digital wasn't one department's job, it was everyone's.