I second Lord Davies’ views. I believe that quotas alone are not the solution – tokenism will not overcome the systemic and cultural bias that stand in the way of women’s professional progress. Business cultures need to change, gender stereotyping stifled. In my research on why women left their corporate careers, the large majority stated it was because they were unsatisfied with their roles and their progression.

It is reality that today’s talent is managed with yesterday’s ethos. Women and Generation Y are facing cultural hurdles through hierarchical, impersonal, stifling and highly-political corporate attitudes. These attitudes are costing companies dearly. We calculated that a 20,000 strong company can lose up to £200 million over 15 years as a result of women leaving corporates at the pinnacle of their careers.

And there are large numbers of women that qualify for board positions. The women who are leaving corporates are increasingly turning to entrepreneurship. They are the CEOs of their own businesses, and generating success in their own terms. However, the talent pipeline for boards is skewed to a particular typology, and blocking this creative, powerful talent-base from forging its way into UK boards. This is why corporate cultures have to change. For a blueprint to make change happen, read Your Loss.

‘Believing someone else is going to take care of you is really risky. As a woman I recommend that you should always be able to take care of yourself. If you are a mother, make sure that you can take care of your kids because, in the end, you can count on no one else but yourself.’.

This is a quotation of one of our interviewees for Your Loss: How to Win Back your Female Talent, Emily Walker is a highly successful corporate executive turned entrepreneur. She rose to the top of the corporate ranks and is now a running her own international consultancy.

I am drawn by the power of this quote. It instantly negates the traditional, stereotyped image that we have as a girls growing up who will “find their prince charming who will look after them”. Today’s reality is very different. Women have to break down barriers in all walks of life, and in every level. Boys don’t go through the same challenges. They are encouraged from day 1 to “fight it out” and “win”, to “compete”, to become “leaders”. Women, on the other hand have been reinforced subservient roles and it falls squarely up to them to break those mindsets and, at the same time, to take control of their career.

To be smart in how to play the game of business. Here are some of the key tenets I always recommend:

Be proactive

Women tend to focus on being excellent at what they do and feel a sense of duty to deliver and offer support to all around. They tend to work away unnoticed, driving themselves into the ground and, of course, are disappointed when they cannot fulfill everyone’s, and most importantly, their own very high, expectations. Women need to be proactive about their career. Be intelligent – what will you need to do to get to where you want faster, smarter and with less effort?

Have courage: Speak out!

Women are great workers. They are the silent holders of the fort. While men are keen networkers, women believe ‘my work will speak for itself’. We have news for you: it very seldom does. You must reject what you learned at school or at home that ‘girls should not brag or speak out’. If you don’t talk about your successes, who will? If you do not voice your discontent, how will your manager or organisation know the challenges you are facing?

I sincerely applaud the women who start women’s networks and other such affinity groups in corporations because, at the very least, they have brought to the discussion the culture in which women find themselves and the challenges they face in business.

Sell yourself

Have the courage to ask for what you are worth, ‘I contribute X,Y and Z to the business. I would expect A in return.’ If your line manager or sponsor will not listen, move on. Enlightened organisations will react and will support you. If they don’t, they simply do not deserve you. You can then move on, with no love lost. If we do not raise our voices or vote with our well-heeled shoes, corporations will not wake up to the stifling cultures that are prevailing in their businesses.

Network outside of your organisation too

Women tend to be focused on their own working environment and are excellent internal networkers. The common held assumption (and I held it too during both of my redundancies!) is that your employers will look after you. However in turbulent times, or when redundancy occurs, the absence of a good external network is keenly felt – by you and only you.

To mitigate that, you must build external networks to ease your transition to pastures new. My experience? A former boss became a client and I was able to contribute to his business as a free-lance consultant following my second redundancy in 2002. On the back of this experience, I have helped hundreds of women to be strategic in building networks, within and outside their organisations. You need to build that network and promote your own, strong personal brand around your area of expertise.

As the quote above suggests, if you want recognition, flexibility and to ‘feel’ engaged with your work but also able to fulfil your family obligations, you and only you can do this. You need to change your own mindset before you can take over your own careers. When you do, you won’t look back. Emily Walker certainly didn’t.

The greatest disparities centred around how women and men view their compensation, career progression and flexibility within the IT field:

74% of women felt that female IT workers face a different set of career challenges than their male counterparts (48%).

78% of the women polled said they don’t believe compensation is equivalent between them and their male colleagues. But almost half of the men surveyed believed compensation was equal between the genders.

More women than men saw being challenged and flexibility as important factors for career satisfaction, whereas more men felt compensation was important in their career satisfaction.

This correlates with the global research and survey we undertook as the basis of our book: Your Loss, how to win back your female talent. Whilst our research was not sector specific, the women how chose to turn their backs on their successful careers to then become entrepreneurs highlighted that:

Passion at work is key

Home-in on what they enjoy working on and what really “turns them on” intellectually. Sounds like management 101, but surveys on engagement levels worldwide highlight that this basic management principles is clearly overlooked.

Foster a flexible culture

Move beyond the traditional “flexi-working”; make flexibility in the career path (i.e. non-linear), offer flexible ways of cutting the work-pie so that individuals focus on the areas of their strength. Most importantly, actively work against the stigmatizing and stereotyping that takes place when parents (of either gender) asks to work from a different location other than the corporate HQ.

Inspire Innovation

48% of our research base highlighted that women were eager to have opportunities to be more creative, to incorporate their diverse outlook on business issues to commercial realities. However, corporate cultures stifled that innate creativity; this is why they endeavoured the path of entrepreneurship.

Support Sustainability

Linked to the desire to have a flexible, even scenic career path, the women we spoke to were advocates of an experiential talent management process, with diversity of learning experiences forming the backbone of their corporate development. Why should employees not be encouraged to take a year off for a sabbatical, or to work for a cause they care for (or even, have children) and the learnings from these experiences to be brought back into the workplace?

If you are a man looking to build the talent base that will create your future competitive advantage, and save yourself the millions of dollars that losing your top female talent is costing your business, you can discover the best retention strategies here.

Female entrepreneurship is the largest growing segment of the business market. Women are increasingly walking out of large businesses in their well-heeled shoes and are forging their future as entrepreneurs.

Has your business got $ 200 million to spare?

In my recent book called Your Loss, How to Win back Your Female Talent, my co-author and I calculated that the cost of replacing lost women to an organisation with 20,000 employees could be as much as £200 million. The international consultancy Bain and Co has concluded that if corporations lose 5 percent a year of their talent base for 10 years, then investment in recruitment would need to be increased by 20% in order to keep up with the losses.

These figures just do not add up.

Why is your company still incurring these heavy losses? Why are you losing these women?

In our global research for the book, we spoke to the women who your company had trained, who then left to become entrepreneurs. The majority stated that they left at the peak their career: at the ages of 30-44. We asked them the reasons why they left their corporate careers, and the primary reason was that these skilled women did not feel fulfilled in their role.

The issue around flexibility and control were clearly reasons for pursuing entrepreneurship. However, for these ambitious women, of equal importance is their creative streak that entrepreneurship was able to satisfy. A ‘chance to be more creative’ was a key motivation, combined with more flexibility and control. Entrepreneurship presented a chance for this commercial powerhouse to be creative, perhaps to try something completely different.

What can you do about it?

If you want to save your company the millions it is losing, then you need to:

Read the numbers – measure the attrition levels by gender and rank. We suspect that you will find it is abnormally high among your female population

Stop the hemorrhaging – turn the taps off. Speak AND listen to your women about what may not be working for them in your culture. One of the resounding frustrations for the women who took part is our research was that they were not heard. Those that did attempt to voice their discontent and challenges to change the business culture, were just given lip service.

Don’t “fix the women” – don’t just set up a “women’s network” and expect all your retention issues to be resolved. Traditional women’s networks isolate, rather than integrate. This is an issue relating to your corporate culture, not a “woman’s issue”. Assess where you culture is faltering, and work to redress those specific issues.

Your company may be doing what you think is the right thing, but it is quite obvious it is not working. Women are increasingly forging their careers as entrepreneurs. Shame you wasted all that money training them up. Great news for Global Entrepreneurship Week.

For more information on the blue-print for a gender-savvy organisation, visit: www.yourlossbook.com

I believe the fault lies with our brain. It consists of over 180 billion neurons, each processing information through 15,000 synapses per second. So as to be efficient and save energy, the brain “cheats” and creates shortcuts for processing information. Imagination, and consequently innovation, requires for the brain to break from past experiences, and to experience new visual stimuli as well as be forced to think in a different way. Neural cheating, also called Predictive Coding is what leads us to make quick assumptions about others, and is the basis of stereotyping. This is where I believe the crux to overcoming barriers to gender stereotyping in business lies.

From a scientific perspective, the brain structures of men and women are different in a number of ways. Women, in general, tend to have mental preferences that utilise the right brain, and men the left. As a result, we see some of the typical “masculine” behaviours and values around hierarchy, rationality, logic which pre-dominate the world of business with typical “feminine” values of flat structures, community support and inter-personal management lagging behind.

Crucially, experiments in innovation undertaken both by MIT and London Business School, have identified that teams with equal representation of both genders are more likely to create innovative solutions for specific business issues, reflecting the importance (and complimentarity) of this heterogeneity.

Research in the University of Columbia has taken this one step further. Individuals who were able to positively re-affirm their multi-culturality (an African American in the US, or a woman in a male-dominated Engineering environment), and had higher levels of “identity integration” (they are comfortable in integrating their multiple social identities), displayed higher levels of creativity when problems require that they draw on their different realms of knowledge.

This is where tapping into our mental flexibility is important in overcoming gender stereotyping for the benefit for greater innovation and ultimately business performance. We need to encourage neurogenesis, the creation of new synaptic connections through experience. So, if you want your organisation to leverage the best of your people for enhanced productivity and sales generation, whilst at the same time address the diversity agenda, consider:

Your Organisation’s Mental Map

What is the overriding mental structure of the organisation? Like people, the way we do things is dictated by our wiring. So, an organisation or department is likely to have its own “mental map”. We work with Whole Brain Technology^TM because it is a validated and highly reliable tool for organisational development. Is your culture, and thus the expected over-arching behaviour, focused on metrics and numbers – are sales, closing quarters, revenue and profit margins the key drivers in your business? Do you see some “blind-spots” in the way the business is run such as in the failure of recognising and appreciating differences? Perhaps even dealing with employee feelings/concerns and engagement are low on the priority list because they are not perceived to contribute to the bottom line? This focus is typical of an organisation driven by the rational, logical and highly analytical A-quadrant, the part of the brain that finds meaning in situations upon sequential analysis of rational facts.

Are there differences in Mental Preferences?
Are there group average mental preferences that may differ to the norm of the organisation? Over 1million men and women that have used the Whole Brain Technology tool, women, on average, have a greater preference for the lower-right quadrant, the parts of the limbic brain that encompass Expressive and Emotional processing. Men, on the other hand, veer towards the model above, focusing on rationality and logic. So, in a number of organisations that we have worked in, we have seen this dichotomy between the genders. This is why Women’s Networks or Affinity Groups exist – they represent the spaces for this expressiveness and inter-personal rapport-building to take place.

What are the implications of these differences?
If you were in a foreign country, say in China, and were from the UK, you would no doubt pick up how behaviourally different Chinese were to you and the values that guide them. It is the same for women in a very male-dominated organisation. Whilst women’s networks provide a channel for this cross-cultural education for women to learn how the mental preferences, and thus, behaviours play out in a male-dominant organisation (through skills building seminars), this is very much still one-way….

There are always exceptions to the rule….

Whilst the mental preferences highlighted above are based on the law of averages, there are, as always, exceptions to the rule. How is your business tapping into those exceptions? Just because you are a woman does not immediately imply that you have the average mental preferences mentioned above; and vice -versa; we have worked with men whose strongest preference where the primarily right brained, with a strong sense of intuition.

Celebrate Individuality

We have created our Individual Leadership model precisely to enable the appreciation individual mental preferences and differences in the way values and beliefs manifest themselves. From an individual and organisational perspective, it is critical to set up processes and ways to remind ourselves when we are letting our brain cheat, and confirming stereotypes.

I believe our focus needs to lie on offering experiences within business to break stereotypes, particularly to “educate” BOTH genders. However, it is uncomfortable to have to remind ourselves that we have blind spots and that we need to find ways to overcome them. The power of neurogenesis, creating new mental paths for our brain to process information in areas that are not our individual or organisational strength is not easy. It requires commitment from the business as well as tolerance for doing things in a way that has not been done before.

The model and details of my approach will be the subject of a future blog.

I shared my personal and professional experiences which impact the development of female leaders. The key themes? Segregation, Sport as a Performance Driver, Cultural Challenges of the male-dominated business world and, the Way Forward.

Segregation

As a Venezuelan Greek, I was brought up in 2 multi-cultural context – ethnically and gender-wise. Ethnically, I have always been different, from day 1. I was also blessed with a brother. I had all his cast offs – his BMX bicycle, his clothing; we would play together – Lego, the Scalextric, card games; it thus became natural for me to “play with the boys”. I felt comfortable and sought out being with guys and being just as good, (if not better…), than them.

As such, sport was very important to me, and I was in the school teams for basketball, volleyball and tennis; I always wanted to train with the boys. The same at university when in the Volleyball and Rowing teams.

I believe I am but one example of the genuine benefit of sport:

• Girls who participate in sports have higher self-esteem and pride in themselves.

• Sport is where girls can learn goal-setting, strategic thinking and the pursuit of excellence in performance and other achievement-oriented behaviours – critical skills necessary for success in the workplace.

• Sports help girls develop leadership skills

I believe the biggest rift in the male/female gender challenge comes from the Gender Segregation we face during our formative years. Girls and boys are encouraged to play and perform sport separately. This is then spread into daily and social life, where gender-based segregation becomes the norm. Boys turn into men and feel more comfortable being in the company of other men in the context of work. They network well together, and fight it out in business and able to then go for a drink as chums in the pub or social equivalent. Women are excluded from traditional male rituals. In this environment of cultural segregation, machismo and stereotyping become prevalent, as, in the most extreme cases, women are seen as alien and relevant for only a number of activities…

Cultural Challenges

Fundamentally, the corporate world has been traditionally a man’s world, and systemically, leadership behaviours that are rewarded are those of men. This Gender-based Segregation leads to either:

• Stereotyping – you can’t do this because you are a woman or assumptions made on your behalf or

• Are not accepted within the social norms of the business (including the omni-present Old Boys’ network).

Enlightened companies are raising the Diversity flag, and trying to address the apparent lack of organisational (and political) savvy for women – through Women’s Networks and training-based empowerment interventions. These are good starting points, but I believe one-off interventions are not leading to change required; they are but what I call the Band Aid Approach. They are momentarily alleviating but are not curing the symptom of cultural exclusion.

The Way Forward

A lot more needs to happen, and this is about culture-change and re-education of the status quo on the inherent benefits of a diverse organisation, rather just than “fixing” women. I believe firmly in the model for Transforming of Business Culture which we developed at Aquitude and consists of 4 key areas:

Appreciate differences:

Recognise Individual DNA and motivations – understand that one size does not fit all; women and men are wired differently, and we have different social norms and codes of behaviour in terms of our management and leadership styles; these need to be incorporated into the professional working fabric

Demonstrate flexibility in terms of career transitioning:

This relates to managing career transitions; in the context of sports, from the Competitive Sphere to the Business of Sport (National Governing Bodies, Media, Sponsorship Agencies, etc); We have developed a process called Career Course to manage the transitions of women in their professional careers.

Engage Collaboratively:

Diverse teams perform more effectively than homogeneous teams, as well as being more innovative. We need to embrace opportunities of innovation from gender mix and cross-fertilise thinking between various bodies and organisations.

This is why we have created the forum called bidiversity.com (business innovation through diversity), to encourage cross-fertilisation of thinking between policy shapers, industry, academia and business on gender and ethnic diversity as a driver for innovation.

Express Care:

Care about the employee, their world, their family – enable and encourage service offerings and work practices to enable altruism (women have burden of family and, if not, caring responsibilities of the elderly).

All of this needs to happen in order to Break the Stereotypes by knocking unconscious bias on its head – you can be a woman and a top sailor, or a woman and a Chief Technologist.

So, what can the sports industry learn from business? I believe all bodies need to collaborate in a concerted manner to support women in terms of:

1. Promoting female role models and their achievements (and how they have broken down the stereotypes) – this is where internal and external communication is key.

2. Mentoring is critical to culture change. I do not espouse the purely traditional model of a single mentor. The Ancient Goddess Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom, assumed the shape of Mentor, a family friend of Odysseus’ son Telemachus, giving him prudent counsel. Since then, wise and trusted advisers have been called “mentors”. We believe in the aptly-named Athena Mentoring Programme that we have designed in harnessing the power of peer Mentoring between business women (and men) and sports-women will lead to greater appreciation and even funding for sportswomen and sporting activities.

3. Encourage Active Personal Brand and Visibility management and promotion for both sports-women (and businesswomen). Women need embrace the art of self-promotion, creating platforms to build their personal brands. This is where technology works with womens’ strengths of communication through new media such as blogging and Twitter and building engagement with fans. A great example is top female sailor, Sam Davies, who came 3rd in the gruelling Vendee Globe this year; according to Yacht Sponsorship.com, Sam managed to be completely ‘on brand’, sailing solo in the southern ocean. Her tweets and blogs are fun, individual and highly engaging, attracting a loyal fan-base of new generation female sailors.

4. Fight the cultural comfort zone and reject the “not invented here” syndrome: set transparent and diverse recruitment processes and develop a leadership pipeline that is ethnically and gender-diverse.

Let us stop trying to just “fix” women: whilst it is important to provide forums and mechanisms to support women and build women’s confidence, it is critical to hit the issues of Gender Segregation and systemic bias head on, where the Alpha Male typology is the basis and the norm for leadership, with only associated behaviours being recognised and rewarded… We need to make change and educate all on the benefits of the Ying and Yang – men and women working, as well as performing competitively together.

• Only 13% of senior executives at the vice-presidential level or higher say they are “willing to go above and beyond what is expected of them”-a decline from 29% two years ago.
• In the December survey of the Corporate Exec Board’s 79,000 member employees worldwide at 123 organizations, 20% of all respondents said they were disengaged, vs. 10% two years ago. (Employees are classified as either engaged, neutral, or disengaged.)
So, following from our example above, if you have an employee that costs you £94,500 and they are working at 50% capacity, they are in effect, costing your business £47,250 per annum. For a company with 400 employees, the average of 20% disengagement would equate to: £3,780,000. That is quite scary…

To put it simply, employees are happy with doing “what is expected”, with no passion and… at your company’s cost.

You can argue that figures can be played with to prove anything. Whether the metrics are absolute or not, the hard fact are that disengagement costs your business money. How do you increase engagement?

According to a study by the European Commission states that diversity programmes have had a positive impact on employee motivation for 58% of companies that have implemented them.

The power of harnessing diversity, is that it benefits the organisation, its employees, its customers, its shareholders. Whilst the current financial crisis has had its toll on all from grass-roots to the top of organisations, the time is ripe to invest in activities that will re-engage and refuel your employees. We are proponents of promoting diversity of thought, whereby it is the respect for the individual and what they stand for that is key. Whether someone is a woman, ethnic minority, gay, or disabled should not matter.

The challenge is that we have to fight against nature when we are looking to overcome all the stereotypes of “minority” groups. We need to fight against how our brain functions, following years of evolution and specialisation. Basically, our brains controls our existence through neural connections. As we have over 18 billion neurons, the brain effectively cheats when it is performing tasks that it may have performed in the past – it covers gaps with what it perceives should be there. Such as when we read and sometimes we miss our own typos.

Putting it in the context of work and talent management, when we are working with the subject of diversity, we effectively have to re-wire our brains. We have to re-programme the fabric of our business to a new reality. As the neuroscientist Gregory Burns put it, “in order to think creatively, and imagine possibilities that only iconoclasts do, one must break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization-or what Mark Twain called “education.” For most people, this does not come naturally. Often the harder one tries to think differently, the more rigid the categories become. There is a better way, a path that jolts the brain out of preconceived notions of what it is seeing: bombard the brain with new experiences. Only then will it be forced out of efficiency mode and reconfigure its neural networks.”

So what is that better way?

Embed Diversity of Thought as a strategic requirement
If you want results, diversity is more than just a box-ticking exercise. Your organisation needs to avoid falling into this trap, and embed activities into its strategy development. Consider questions such as: Where do we focus on as a business? What are our strengths? What are our possible blind-spots? What do we need to do to get the best out of our employees in those areas to maintain our competitive advantage? What is currently missing that would make a difference if it were introduced tomorrow? A useful tip: develop a scorecard – ask your leadership team, and then compare with the responses from the grass-roots…

There is no quick fix
Have you ever recovered from an injury? Physiotherapy gives us a clear understanding of how nature works: only with persistence, slight discomfort and repetitions do we create new muscle fibre. In order to engrain diversity of thought, your organisation needs drive new experiences around multi-cultural management and appreciation, with consistency and a long-term focus. Learning and personal development activities need to be targeted, flexible and often hybrid in nature, adapted to individuals’ learning styles.

Focus on Individual Leadership
Embracing the Power of the Individual is key; the only way stereotyping and unconscious bias will be reduced is by homing in on the stereotypes and contravening them – e.g. working mothers and risk aversion do NOT go hand in hand. Create role models of individuals who are breaking those stereotypes and give them predominant positions where they can act as Champions to the new leadership model and corporate behaviour.

Harness Passion
Disengagement is often a result of employees’ talents not being utilized. When we are performing mundane or uninteresting exercises, we literally “switch off”. Engagement is about the complete opposite: find what really, truly, honestly engages your employees and gives them fulfillment. As entrepreneurs show, it is seldom purely about financial gains; it is about performing and having responsibility for activities that utilize their mental strengths and individual passions.

Embrace and Reward Innovation
Readers of my blog, will have seen how Diversity of Thought is linked to innovation. Group think is a result of teams made up of like-minded people with similar backgrounds, ages, experiences and social constructs. Diversity reaps benefits only when teams and activities involve a cross-section of all of these.

So, can your business not afford not to harness diversity? I would be happy to hear your views – contact me here…

In our experience, this becomes even more important if your customer is female. In both the B2B and B2C spheres, women are becoming the major purchasers of products – ranging from cars, to computers to computing systems. Whilst traditionally these purchases were made by men (and hence this is why car show-rooms are still the most un-attractive places for a woman to walk into), some of the metrics are interesting: 60% of new car purchases are dominated by women in Japan; in Europe women make up about 47% of PC users.

So, what are some of the ways that your organisation can delight your female customers?

Deliver an Interconnected Offering

Neuroscience has dictated that the male and female brains are different. Women have 20 million more neurons than men, largely in the Corpus Collusum, the interconnecting highway between left and right hemispheres. Consequently, on average, of course, women are experts at Integrative Thinking: according to the anthropologist Helen Fisher, “they want to explore multiple interactions, the multidirectional paths, all of the permutations of the puzzle*”. So, when considering your company’s product or service delivery, have you considered the myriad of applications that it may be used for, and how each can be relevant for the user? If something goes wrong, have you considered looking at non-traditional ways of finding the solution? If, for example, you are delivering IT systems and something unexpected goes wrong, did you consult the breadth of the team delivering the service to come up with the solution? This process is part and parcel of what your female stakeholder is likely to be looking for, in order to see that your business is using all the knowledge base available to obtain a (novel) solution.

Seek to understand…. to obtain the ultimate brand ambassadors

The best brands in the world understand that a loyal female customer, is the best customer in the world. Her innate need to communicate (the hormone Oxytocin has been proved to be responsible for her need to connect with others), means that she is very likely to share her positive experience with a friend or colleague. When loyal, women are the best ambassadors to your company or service. So, how do you obtain that loyalty?
You have to prove you understand and care for her as a person, her business, and her world wider world. You have to satisfy this innate sense of personal and community altruism. We are working on a number of projects with our clients in the IT and Financial Services sector whereby client-supplier activities focus on constructing connections on a personal and socially responsible context. How are you expressing your commitment to a stronger client-relationship? How is your organisation making a difference in the worlds where your client may have an interest or presence in?

Flexibility leads to Creativity and Innovation

As an extension on the point above, women embrace flexibility. The worst thing to say to your female customer is to insinuate that there is no other way to solve her problem/or issue with your product or service. Surely, if she is such an important customer as you make her out to be, then being creative in solving any problems is part and parcel of your offering? In fact, you will let her use her innate creativity (remember, point 1 above about Integrative Thinking), and you will let her work with you in identifying the appropriate solution. This is why women make excellent relationship managers – they, on average, tend to utilise this skill in solving problems for their customers. So, ask yourself, how flexible are you and your team being when your disgruntled customer contacts you over a problem? How are you showing her this flexibility?

Genuine Delivery of Promise

One of the most critical value-systems that guide women is that of authenticity. Delivering your service or product with a genuine, authentic desire for her or her company’s success is critical. Make sure your strategy engages her in dialogue – ask her frequently what would make a difference to her, and adapt your product or service accordingly. Remember one important point – deliver what you promise. If you do take the time and make the genuine effort to understand what she requires, then act on it. The female hippocambus, the part of the brain that never forgets a conversation, is larger and more active in women than in men. So if you say you will amend your processes so that she receives the reports with the frequency she wanted, do so. If you don’t, then the disappointment is greater. So, consider how are you communicating and delivering that authenticity? How are you servicing that undeniable claim that you are in business to serve her business?
I suspect you are thinking this makes sense good business sense, as well as being common sense. We ask ourselves why does most of the business world, however, overlook this market and these basic premises?

*  The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World, Dr Helen Fisher

A month ago, two women were also among the group of sailors who sailed single-handedly around the world. Spending over 90 days sailing solo in the Vendee Globe Race, Sam Davies and Dee Caffari, proved that they not only succeeded were other men failed (19 sailors of the 30 did not actually finish) but they also did it as women.

Sam Davies proved to the world that attitude is everything. In a wonderful clip she danced to Girls Just Want to Have Fun in the middle of the southern ocean. Clip Here Despite minimal press coverage, I believe these two women are great role models for women, and other minorities, around the world.

So, how did they do it?

• Preparation – it is more brain than brawn. At times, it is easy for women to feel disadvantaged. However, our brains are wired for strategic thinking as well as being very finely tuned with our intuition. Skippering involves “feeling” the boat as she glides in the water as much as planning. The same can be said about business too. Listening to intuition is just as important as strategy.
• Maintaining a positive attitude, no matter what: when you are faced with what feels the whole world is against you, taking a step back and re-assessing why you are doing what you are doing is key. Allowing your mind to wander from a problem or issue and then coming back to it later gives your brain the equivalent of fresh air. Sam’s dance to Girls Just Want to Have Fun is a great example of doing just that.
• Appreciate what their strengths are and working with them: as mentioned, physical strength is not a woman’s strength, so strategy in racing becomes even more critical. These two women made sure they thought through the implications of their moves. As they were smaller in size compared to men, they also made decisions around their boats to overcome their limitations.

So, next time you are in a situation were you feel you are the odd-one-out or even the underdog, I invite you to consider:

• How can I prepare for this situation better than those around me?
• What can go wrong?
• If it does, what can I do to redress the situation?
• How can I keep myself going when the chips are down?
• Who do I need to call upon to help me through?

So, as we congratulate these women for their achievements in representing the strengths of the “fairer sex”, I would like to draw on another female skipper’s words: Ellen McArthur. She said “As a woman, you are obviously never going to be as strong, but you just have to train harder”.

So, banks are forcing businesses and consumers in any way they can to cough up the goods. At all risk. It is like they have been given clear instructions to get funds no-matter what. People who have up til now had gleaming credit scores with few loans and no defaults, are being treated like criminals. Like absolute dirt. Why? Because they have been caught out when the hyper-inflated credit bubble burst. One of the most heart-felt and honest recordings of bully tactics used by some of the world’s financial institutions have been logged at http://creditcrunchersdiary.blogspot.com/.

In today’s competitive world, negative customer service experience opens the door to your competition. Customers are savvy, they know what they want and will easily walk away if their requirements are not met.

In these difficult times, there are few people that have not felt the pinch. So, I would, like the author of the http://creditcrunchersdiary.blogspot.com/ blog Paola Bassenesse, believe that banks should be out to support, delight, enthuse customers and thus achieve recurring business by offering irresistible service.

I believe, like with all diversity training I deliver, it is important to see things from the customer’s point of view. Stand in their shoes (or stilettos), and try to understand and feel what they may be going through.

Consider the last time when you, as a consumer of a product, got on the phone to speak to your bank. What is it you wanted in relation to your specific problem? Were you looking for someone to read a script back at you and tell you that there is no way to look into a solution to that given problem? How did you feel?

So, my question is, why do companies insist on doing that: speaking to us like we are sorry scum for inconveniencing them?

For those companies that want to avoid this pitfall, here are some tips to consider:

1. Understand Customer Motivators

Identify what customers want from the relationship with you at that specific moment. My guess is that it is likely to revolve around options to make something happen or avoid something else occurring. In the credit card repayment scenario an example could be payments of part of that which is owed, even to the amount of £1… best to get £1 a week for a few months than a disgruntled customer.

We invite the staff to consider that customers may not have chosen to get into such financial difficulties. Nor have they chosen to have to tell a complete stranger that things are financially dire for them. Having faced the personal blow of losing a business and all my money with it, I can tell you, it is hard.

2. Listen, listen, listen!

Listen to what your customer is saying and reassure them! Repeat what the customer has said to you, using their own language. Ignore the little voice in your head that is telling you how unreasonable the customer is being. But repeat what they have said, such as “So, you would like us to freeze your overdraft charges and remove them completely? ” This goes hand in hand with the next point…

3. Use a gentle, understanding tone of voice and language of empathy

It does not hurt to say the words “I understand, it must be difficult, Mrs Ioannidis, we will look into what we can do for you”.

Even if you have to resort to a no. at least then the customer has felt that he has been listened to, rather than out rightly ignored. Empathy is key.

4. Empower customer service staff

Allow flexibility in your company processes and empower customer service assistants to use their discretion in solving customer service issues. Unfortunately, this is an anathema for most companies. However, it is critical to be able to support changes to company processes for the benefit for keeping a seriously disgruntled customer.
A great example of this is a personal experience where I received a phone call from what I believed was my mobile phone provider. I was offered to buy mobile insurance following a mobile upgrade. I signed up, and asked the persistent woman on the phone to send me the paperwork. Two weeks later. I had not heard from the company nor received the policy in the post, so I called my mobile provider, Carphone Warehouse. After a lengthy conversation, I was told that they had not contacted me, that it must have been one of the rogue companies that pass themselves as Carphone Warehouse in order to get client account details. I was shocked – I had been unaware that any such companies existed. But the most astonishing fact is, is that when I said I still wanted to sign up for the insurance, I was told that I was over the 14 days in which to do so, and that they could not do anything about it. I wanted to buy the service, but was told I could not!   Inflexibility ruled their processes, so they have jeopardised my relationship with them. What a waste. 

5. Keep Marketing informed of Customer Service Issues and Remedies

The Marketing and Customer Services departments should be on the look-out for specific trends that could lead to a new service or proposition that could help gain customer loyalty in the short term.

How about a credit card freeze, where yes, interest may be charged, but the customer only needs to pay that £1 per month minimum payment? Or a payment holiday? These are now commonplace in the mortgage market.

In a time like this, any bank or institution that was seen to behave in a humane way would reap the benefits – yes, this involves a certain financial investment; however, they would then have earned their customers’ loyalty and the positive word-of-mouth which would, in the long-term, compensate their short-term exposure.

But perhaps that is where the deep-rooted problem is – the apparent inability to consider the long-term implications of actions taken on real people, their customers and stakeholders. This has been the great determinant for banks and financial institutions being in the mess they are in in the first place…..

We hope that the lesson has been learnt and ask the business world at large: So how exactly are you delighting your customers today?