I was truly honored to facilitate The NEW Male Champion session at the Network of Executive Women (NEW) Leadership Summit, Thursday, September 30th in Dallas, Texas. NEW is engaged in a 10-20-30 growth program that includes their membership being 10 percent men, 20 percent Millennials and 30 percent multicultural. The NEW Male Champion session was a complement to this initiative because it was the first time there had been an all-male session at the Summit.
Over seventy men attended the working session that had three objectives:
- Accelerate organizational progress by transforming more men into effective women champions within their companies
- Learn an approach to help men gain the mindset, skillset and toolset that aids this transformation
- Increase support, relationships and networks to sustain and continuously improve this transformation
The men truly embraced the session—they openly shared their aspirations, challenges and developed individual and group action plans to advance women.
Accelerate individual and organizational progress
Having worked in the Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) field for over twenty years, I’m amazed at how much has changed, and not changed, with respect to the advancement of women in business. Men, predominantly majority men, make or break the careers of women. Women need male champions to advance. What has changed is that there are more male champions today than twenty years ago and their level of cultural competence has improved. Moreover, there are even a few women with enough clout as CEO and senior executives to enact change for women as well. Finally, the volume of talented women who want to advance their careers to the highest levels has increased dramatically.
Today the primary challenge of the NEW male champion is not finding talented women, but fostering the organizational cultural change so that women can strive and thrive in corporations. To address this challenge, men developed individual and group action plans during the session. The NEW Career Accelerator and Summit Planning Guide were used as resources to create individual action plans. Executives from several companies recognize the value of women’s leadership and will be incorporating goals outlined in the workshop into their individual personal development (PDP) plans.
The group action plan incorporated results from The Conference Board CEO Challenge® 2015 to ensure our initiatives would align with business results. Participants such as Dirk Herdes, Vice President – Retail Services, Nielsen Company, have already volunteered to be catalysts and coordinators to work on the group action plan.
I believe using the resources was critical because for a NEW Male Champions’ efforts to be sustainable they must clarify a win for themselves and a win for their organizations.
A major obstacle to NEW Male Champion sustainability will be apathy, the feeling that efforts to advance women are purely altruistic and have no business impact. To change culture, men must recognize that championing women means a win for themselves and their organizations. I urged men to consider these three benefits:
- Greater customer affinity: Understanding women better means understanding markets better;
- More co-worker engagement: Understanding women better means accelerating their and your performance; and
- A stronger personal brand: Understanding women better means better fine-tuning and improving your personal brand.
Again, this major obstacle of apathy was addressed head-on by aligning the group’s aspirations to the top challenges faced by CEOs.
Learn a new approach
The NEW Male Champion has the mindset, skillset and toolset to identify, support and advocate cultural change within organizations that benefit women. The mindset is one of high self-awareness and knowledge of others, particularly women. The skillset can generally be described as being a good listener, observer and communicator. And the toolset is having the ability to align strategies that advance women with achieving business objectives.
During the session, men challenged each other with questions such as the following:
- How well could others articulate why gender advancement matters to me?
- Who are my female role models?
- How do I foster gender knowledge?
- What is my aspiration regarding the advancement of women?
- How much time do I spend mentoring and being mentored by women?
After these discussions, the male participants developed a clear and poignant list of behaviors they will model, obstacles they will overcome and personal actions they will take to become male champions.
