Five Reasons Women Choose Entrepreneurship over The Glass Ceiling

Over the past week, several sources on my radar shed light on the ongoing debate behind the corporate glass ceiling. Collectively I believe they punctuate the reasons behind why I – and perhaps 10 Million other women in the US – have chosen to shed corporate confines in favor of the freedoms, risks and rewards of entrepreneurship:

1. Bias is a natural behavior: Serial CEO Margaret Heffernan explains that corporate leaders act upon their natural biases by choosing others that are “like them” when hiring and promoting leaders.
2. Gender discrimination is embedded in our cultural perceptions: A recent University of Utah study found that female-led firms with identical personal qualifications and company financials were perceived as less capable than male CEOs in those same roles.
3. Behaving like men is counter-intuitive to our nature: Patricia Sellers points to the female power conundrum that happens when female CEOs try to behave and lead like men.
4. To break the glass ceiling, we have to jump off the glass cliff: A study in this month’s Harvard Business Review suggests that women’s perceived leadership attributes are only embraced when a company is in crisis and needs a change of leadership.

While all of this is very interesting it makes you wonder why any woman would want to stay and fight the corporate battle. Perhaps this is why women in the U.S. are starting their own businesses at twice the rate of men. Research on women in development reveals that nearly 75% of women involved in early stage entrepreneurship are already employed. Are many of these new entrepreneurs frustrated ladder climbers?

I’m not suggesting we should abandon our efforts to support women as corporate leaders. After all that same Harvard Business Review article found that the glass cliff isn’t an issue in organizations with a history of female leaders. But it does suggest another reason that women choose a different path:

• 5. Business is NOT just business anymore. By-and-large women entrepreneurs start businesses that are aligned with both their personal and business values. Riane Eisler suggests in her latest work, The Real Wealth of Nations, that there is a strong movement – a revolution if you will -- to create a genuine caring economy—one based on balance and a respect for the intricate relationships that keep our planet and society healthy.

It is these “caring” skills that the corporate world eschews until there is a crisis. And they are the very skills that The SmartGirls Way most values. It’s about time for women to stop trying to think and behave like men and start embracing our collective women’s wisdom. I’m willing to bet that’s an idea that any enterprising woman – corporate or otherwise -- can get behind.

Business Design is a Contact Sport: Perfecting Failure

by Jean Brittingham

Source

One of the biggest challenges out there for entrepreneurs is this idea that you have to get things right before you launch and that if you make mistakes, it will cost you big time.

 

If there is one thing I have learned over the years it’s that delay in getting your idea to market is not always good. That’s not to say you don’t have to have a plan, and a plan of action, and even a fallback plan. You absolutely do. But waiting too long is not going to help you and in fact can keep you from ever launching anything.

 

There are several places in the development of your business that you should be bold in putting your ideas out there and I’ll talk about that in a future post. 

 

 

But in the spirit of the “one-minute manager” for entrepreneurs, here’s my quick list!

• Prototype, Test, Fail & Prototype
• Ignore failure except to learn from it
• Failing has no power of it’s own
• Focus on what is working
• Failure is success

These concepts seem to be particularly difficult for women entrepreneurs. It’s my opinion that this sense of needing to be “perfect” has deep roots in the conversation of our culture.  Dr. Alice Domar in her article on Why Do Women Need to Be Perfect, gets at some of the issues, but glosses over the fact that we live in a marketing bubble of male dominance that has consistently used perfection as a way to marginalize and minimize the impact and power of the feminine in our culture.

 

And while this fact is alarming, and it’s amazing to me that a clinical psychologist doesn’t see the link between Barbie Dolls, Beer commercials (with real life Barbie dolls free to the guy drinking the correctly branded beer), and the consistent marketing messages about how happy our families will be if only we get the right floor cleaner (and of course use it every time the dog comes in the house). That we seem to not have grasped how deeply and consistently we are marketed perfection is amazing to me.

 

But we’re really pragmatic here at The SmartGirl’s Way and we just want women entrepreneurs to succeed.  So here’s the truth about perfection. It will hold you back. It will keep you from starting and it will keep you from building the confidence you need to scale.

 

Here’s the truth about failure.  It’s your friend if you make it so. Thomas Edison is my person hero when it comes to failure. Some of his best quotes are here.

 

My favorite is “Nearly every man who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged.”

 

Right?

 

So here’s the thing to remember about design, improvement and failure:

• Designing your business, product, service, world-changing breakthrough is a CONTACT SPORT.
• Failure has no power of its own—only the power you give it.
• You give failure power by the way you talk about it.
• Focus on what worked.
• Don’t spread fear of failure—your people will stop trying things and that is death for a start-up.
• Create more experiments.
• The more things fail, the more certain it is that something great will work.

Finally-keep those Edison quotes and a few others in front of you. One of the best things I learned from the male entrepreneurs I worked for before starting my own businesses was their great ability to tell a new story about a failure. Sometimes they went too far in my estimation and were manipulating others through the story they told. But for the most part, they were telling the story to themselves to force themselves to weave meaning from their learning, use it to expand their vision, build their network and stay on point with their business.

 

That’s a very good lesson.

Pride, Power, Prejudice and the Woman Entrepreneur Part I

by Jean Brittingham

The Dilemma

As our research continues and our insight into women’s unique strengths in family, society and business deepens, I have become fonder of what I am calling in-born AND learned theory. Many scientific fields have studied the question of nature v. nurture attempting to answer it from a hypothesis of one ideology dominating the other. While typical of our current patriarchal cultural context, which requires a “winner” (and by default a “loser), this approach is not always useful or beneficial to the majority of those who live in society.

What is useful is to observe how in-born tendency and learned behaviors have worked together to shape our society and design our cultural reality. Ultimately, we need to shift to a culture that works better for more of society.

I’m in possession of a “secret study” given to me by a banking insider. I can’t link that document here because it was given to me confidentially. The singular question of the study was, “why do men entrepreneurs so often get the loans they need when women most often do not.” The results were stunning.

Over 100 loan officers across 70 or so banks were involved. The business plans used were the same in EVERY case.  Men received their loan approval 83% of the time. Women only 27% of the time!

The study was done in 1997 and I do believe that we are making progress—there is a growing appreciation that women business owners are going to be a significant part of a recovering economy and moreover women have proven to be very good bets in their ability to repay debt. It’s good business to do business with women.

Still, this more recent study in Australia gives pause.

The loan officers in the study were interviewed immediately after either approving or declining the loan. There were a number of interesting findings, but the ones that intrigued me the most focused on two areas—confidence and perception of power.  These results offer a peak into the culture we’ve created and currently live in. Fortunately, they also give us insights on how to begin the shift towards a more beneficial culture.

According to the interviews, women loan-seekers came across (to both male and female loan officers) as less “full of pride” about their ventures and when asked if they were confident about their ability to meet their business plans, the women waivered.  They said yes, but then they offered alternative ways that they would meet their obligations should something go wrong! This highly responsible attitude was seen as a lack of confidence on the part of these women.

Further, the women were not very forceful in their interviews. They did not push back against the questioning and did not seem adamant that they should get the loans. They were described variously as unsure, not confident and not committed.  They were perceived as not entrepreneurial enough.


Boldness is a Double-Edged Sword


The perception of personal power and pride required for entrepreneurial success is not insignificant. To the outside observer, entrepreneurs can seem audacious and over-confident. 

This is one of the primary areas where gender differences created by nature and nurture are producing challenges for women entrepreneurs. We must learn to be bold, confident--almost arrogant about our great ideas and in particular about the unique skills we possess to make our business succeed.

Yet, where do we learn to do this? Good question.  Our families are not typically the place. It is still very much the norm to expect girls to be quiet and cute. I am appalled by how often the young girls in my life are told they are cute and how infrequently they are told they are clever, creative and brave.

The traditional business setting has certainly not been the place to learn or practice these skills.  In the corporate world, most women who speak strongly for their ideas are seen as shrill, threatening and “bitchy.” As subtly illustrated in this Glass Hammer post, women are still being encouraged and trained in how to navigate a man’s world by playing the game by their rules.

I should admit here that I completely love the slogan, “they call me bitch like it’s a bad thing.” It seemed to me the best way to embrace the fact that your vocal intelligent opinion was going to get you branded no matter how nice you really are! 

But let’s be honest.  Women are generally going to be nicer, less arrogant and more focused on win-win than men. Historically, women have been and are the nurturers of society and somewhere along the way the natural propensity to nurture got branded as soft, weak and demure.  The tendency to nurture is “in-born.”  But for that, the survival of the species would be seriously at risk.

Labeling nurturing as a “soft skill,” putting most things that women do well in that category, and then making these skills seem silly or out of place in business, is a function of learned behavior; the result of a male dominated business context. It’s an example of how our conversations have shaped and created our culture.

The irony is that there is nothing soft about nurturing. Having babies, raising children, and bringing communities together; caring for the injured and dying and assuring that everyone is physically and emotionally cared for? That’s definitely the TOUGHEST job in the world.

And most men will not argue that point.

What they do argue about is the role these skills play at work. Yet, even there, evidence mounts that what women bring in terms of social intelligence, team leadership excellence, creative win-win ability and a deep understanding of how to create robust and interdependent networks is going to be deeply needed now and into the future.

So how do we stay true to our core abilities, our unique strengths, be ourselves, and be seen as powerfully capable entrepreneurs worthy of capital investment?

Stay tuned for Part II: The Solution. Coming soon!

Angry, Exhausted, Frustrated and Wrong!

by Jean Brittingham

I didn’t even know where to start when my new-media maven asked me to respond to this post by Penelope Trunk.  I get the power of a hyperbolic title, but really? Women Don’t Want to Run Start-Ups Because They’d Rather Have Children?

There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to set your sights.

At the same time I completely feel for her.

And before I say anything else, congratulations Penelope on leading (what one can hope) will be a great success in your third start-up. It’s clearly been a struggle that lasted too long with too little reward. That in itself is dismaying, but it’s much more distressing when women with talent who have begun to carve a spot for themselves succumb to the models that make entrepreneurship exhausting, silly, and impossible to love.

Let’s begin with the premise behind Trunk’s (and Jeff Steibel’s) definition of entrepreneurism as a disease.  This particular definition suggests that these two (and a few other business writers with this view of entrepreneurship) think they “own” the definition.  Entrepreneurs to them are men (and the OCCASSIONAL woman) who take on VC capital against an unlikely bet and work horrific and thankless hours (the thanklessness comes mostly from the VC partners but also from the team you are driving and the family you are deserting) to breakthrough the probability factor and post an amazing win. 

Or at least get a buy-out so that you break even.

This isn’t THE Entrepreneur typology; it’s ONE Entrepreneur typology.

The state of the planet, the state of the economy, the state of our lives and the incredible number of human beings who have GREAT ideas they are turning into GREAT businesses means that this is a limited and limiting view of entrepreneurs.

Most importantly--it’s not going to help us construct the next economy.

Instead, I see a future (and many join me here) where both the investment community and consumers take note of and then begin to actively foment support for some different breeds of entrepreneurs. 

While I am not at all sure about the role Solopreneur’s will play in the next economy, it is clear that the reemergence of a craft economy plays a significant role in the future. These individual contributors, who are often working in complex networks and loose affiliations with others, are crazy, all right—crazy smart.

More interestingly (at least to me) are the new breed of social entrepreneur—where a much higher proportion of women are striking out and making a difference while making a living. These social entrepreneurs are developing businesses that offer solutions and hope because they see themselves and their business ideas as an integral part of a better world.

And finally, there are the women who are breaking through and making businesses work well and also work with their lives—businesses that create financial success for founders and a growing contingency of employees. These women believe that you can, and should, have a life and a business, a financial goal and an nonnegotiable ethos, a current reality that works and a future that works better.

Suggesting that women don’t want to be entrepreneurs because you have burned yourself out by “manning-up and buying-in” to a set of investor and personal standards that leave no space for anything but profit, is not the future of entrepreneurs.

It’s not the future of anything.

Life is too short, the planet is too fragile and frankly, Penelope is right—there are children to raise.  The part she got wrong is giving up one to get the other. I believe we can change the rules instead!

Emotional Intelligence and the Impact of Feminine Leadership

by Jean Brittingham

A recent study on group IQ confirms what we at the SmartGirl’s Way have long known—that women have rocking relationship skills.  The study shows that the ability of a group to solve a difficult problem was directly related to the number of women in the group--essentially the number of women increases the collective cognitive abilities of the group. Women are natural collaborators and relationship builders. What hasn’t been well documented yet, is the strong positive effect that these skills, referred to as “social sensitivity” in the study, have on the efficacy and productivity of groups working together in any capacity—including the work environment. 

The growing understanding of the importance of this link and its positive impact on performance contradicts some of western society's most loved conventions—in particular, that smart people alone make a smart group and that feelings don’t matter in the workplace.

In an ever more complex world, the ability to read expression and tone, express empathy, effectively reframe a tense situation, and energize a group through a sense of camaraderie are the winning leadership skills of the future.

When I first became intrigued with “women’s ways at work” and in particular the aspects of the feminine at work in a masculine world, I began to be very conscious and take note of the language women use to describe who they are, what they are doing and how they are doing it. I started noting strong similarities in the skills that women were applying to their lives, no matter what they were doing. I also noticed that women tended not to talk about these skills to men, in particular to the men they worked with and worked for.

I started asking direct questions about this and was amazed at the consistency in the answer—women don’t talk to men about how they think, feel, work, make decisions, create, collaborate or achieve because up to now, men not only don’t understand it they think it is too “soft” and doesn’t belong in the work place. Worse yet, since it is not as natural for men, they tend to diminish the importance of this type of intelligence in the work environment.  This even  after strong uptake (at least theoretically) on the concept of emotional intelligence.

A strong contributing factor to the lack of acknowledgment of women’s unique skills at work has been the intentional (and obviously necessary) effort to create equity between the genders in terms of pay, access and opportunity. Sadly this effort has unintentionally diminished the unique and valuable differences between men and women.

Time to Embrace the Feminine Leadership Skill Set!

Highly refined “social sensitivity” is an outcome of the ability and natural tendency to create strong communities and relationships that endure whatever the circumstances. It is a subset of an amazing array of feminine strengths that we have just begun to openly discuss and tap.

These skills are amazing, awesome, world-changing!!  Why would we want women to leave these capabilities to the other parts of their lives?  They have kept families and society ticking along for millennia. They are the foundation for the way that things work when they are working really, really well.  And they are dramatically missing in business. 

Finally, and maybe most importantly—they are the same traits needed for society to shift to a sustainable and THRIVING existence on our big blue ball. I for one want more of that.

Up to Scale: Does your product or business stand a chance?

by Jean Brittingham

I keep running into articles about how important it is that innovation be scalable. I just want to say, “duh.” It really seems too obvious to write about. And yet, too often it is overlooked in the thrill of innovation—and maybe even more so in young entrepreneurial organizations. Worse yet, there hasn't been a lot written about how to test in advance if your "baby" will scale. 

Even in large seemingly capable corporations and organizations I have seen enthusiasm for an idea generated by a charismatic leader with a devoted team completely over ride the signals that they are getting that at least one critical ingredient for scalability is missing. 

So what does it take? There are five determinates to scalability. You can apply tests for each of these at any time in the design and development process, and entrepreneurs should certainly inform their design, test, re-design process around some tool to help assess scalability attributes as the idea evolves. As I use to tell young engineers and designers when I lectured to college seniors, "out in the world—it doesn’t matter how perfectly engineered your solution may be. If people don’t like it, it won’t get built!"

When combined, the characteristics of a product that are easily scaled are a measure of convenience. Humans are generally very practical. We like new things but we like the new things to integrate easily into our lives.

If you use this scale, you don't need a perfect score on all determinates, but you best not have a low score on more than three. And, I probably don’t have to state the obvious, but you should not be the only one scoring your product*, invention, business idea, project or breakthrough organizational turn-around. Ask as many others to understand, use, and score your idea as you can get to sit still for it. (*note: when I say “product” from now on it means all of the above)

In my experience, here’s the simplest most direct way to go about this process. 

Define each of the characteristics in the graphic below for your product, service, change initiative, etc.. For example, what does it mean for your product to be accessible.

Ask your customers, team members, boss, champions, and other stakeholders to rate your product against the definition. If you have a known skeptic, for sure ask her to rate your product. It will skew the score probably but if they take the test seriously it will give you valuable information about design shifts you might need to make. 

If they don’t like the definition after they have tried your product on for size, let them offer a new one. 

Gather all the scores, create a composite and give yourself a very hard look. 

You will have specific information about how to redesign, shift and improve. You may even find that you are ready to go—launch away. If the scores actually feel discouraging, you should assign someone from your team to go back and do some one-on-one interviews. You will need detailed information to understand why what you thought was great didn’t make the cut for convenience.

Let’s run through my scores for the iPhone (no not even the new one, I haven't upgraded yet—the lines are inconvenient!).

Accessible – I give it a 5 as a tool and a 3 as a phone. I don’t really like to use a headset with wires, have worries about wireless headsets, and it’s not a comfortable phone to hold to my head. It does have a good speakerphone and lets me do some things while I’m on the phone. It nets out at a 4.

Affordable – It’s an expensive phone, but we all know it’s much more than a phone. If there is one great frustration it’s the lack of flexibility in the plan. AT&T—not as happy with them as I am my phone. Still, generally for all I do on it, it’s pretty affordable. I’ll give it a 4.

Reliable – No doubt. I’ve gotten “unlost,” found the best local pizza, managed friend meet-ups and entertained myself on planes for hours. A solid 5.

Secure – This is an interesting attribute measure. Think of it this way-- does it make me feel safe and happy? This single convenience attribute is why organizational change initiatives often don’t get off to a ripping-good start. They don’t make people feel very safe—unless there is a great leader at the top communicating constantly about the benefits at the end of the pain. For my iPhone, I do feel safer when I have it with me. I also do worry about someone knowing everything about me (I know, I know) if I lose it. It’s a 4.

Interesting – This is where the iPhone shines. It is fun, intuitive to use, and there is new stuff for it all the time. Of course it’s a 5. I'd give it a 10 if I could.

Overall: 4.4 This thing should scale!!

Lower scores are acceptable when you are introducing a brand new technology or making a dramatic shift in culture or business model. Scores may be low because of resistance to change—but don’t assume this is true. You need to engage people and be open to improving your product to really understand barriers.

Feedback of this type will help you determine if your idea will scale easily and smoothly or if you are in for a crazy hard climb!

Women Entrepreneurs--the New Equal Rights Amendment

It's interesting how consistently I am hearing from women who are perplexed that after 100 or more years of active effort to achieve equity in pay, opportunity and representation, we are still pushing a very heavy stone up a very steep hill. And further, we're pretty tired of hearing that things are all good.

Here's the issue from my perspective. While there may be a few men out there who consciously and with an agenda are seeking to keep women from achieving their goals and making progress, most of what is going on is unconscious, a part of the culture of male designed institutions that we have been living in for over 4000 years. It's not personal, it's just business. And politics. And culture.

And working to change culture from the inside is not very effective. You only have to look at the current resistance to clean-energy to understand the incredible hold that an in-place culture has on us. Who would vote for dirty over clean? Who would think that societies should spend tax dollars to supplement the incomes of traditional energy giants while they increase profits and decrease investment in clean energy options. It's not logical. It's not smart. But it is common. We're used to it so we don't even (mostly) notice it.

Culture is like air. We can't recognize it because we swim in it every day. Asking the male dominant culture to recognize the things they do that make it difficult for them to see, appreciate, and nominate women into positions of influence is a bit like asking a fish to describe water--or asking them to choose air instead.

After 50 years of focused effort, the statistics are abysmal.

So, what do we do now?

Well, as a start, how about we quit trying to break through glass ceilings with rubber (or even glass) hammers?

How about we demand parity studies and mentoring programs that ease the cost of entry into traditionally male dominated industries--and encourage and empower women to start their own businesses?

How about we build a serious movement of women entrepreneurs and help them understand that they can build businesses that are not only financially successful but are also great places to work and that these great places can allow for families, communities and a healthy and vibrant future?

I'll be discussing these issues in future blogs, but for now I think it's important to acknowledge that what we have been doing is not achieving the hoped for changes--in equity and fairness and importantly in achieving the balance that a woman's viewpoint and approach brings and that the world so needs now.

As a well-known women leader on Wall Street recently commented when asked if the meltdown would of happened if there were more women engaged in the decision-making process, "Women tend not to bet the farm, understanding as we do that the kids need to live on it."
Now is the time for the new entrepreneurial movement--fueled by the power and passion of women. Join us!