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SMG program teaches women to break through glass ceiling
By David J. Craig
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Cindy Crowninshield-Davies, associate director of executive programs at SMG's Executive Leadership Center, is directing a new management program for women called Leading the Brand Called You. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Every business executive knows that climbing the corporate ladder requires cultivating mentors in higher positions. It's also no secret that female professionals, who hold almost half of all managerial positions in the United States, have difficulty finding female role models, since only 12 percent of senior executives in the country are women.
Yet, according to Cindy Crowninshield-Davies, associate director of executive programs at SMG's Executive Leadership Center, most management training programs for women don't teach social networking skills and instead focus on fine-tuning one's leadership style.
A new SMG program called Leading the Brand Called You will teach women skills such as social networking, goal-setting, and balancing work and family obligations, in addition to traditional management techniques. Aimed at managers and entrepreneurs with at least 15 years of experience, the program consists of three training sessions, June 20 to 22, August 23 and 24, and October 18 and 19. It's sponsored by SMG's Executive Leadership Center, Council for Women's Entrepreneurship and Leadership, and Executive Development Roundtable.
“The program is for women who have been in positions of considerable responsibility and authority and are looking to push their careers to the next stage, but aren't sure what new skills they need or on whom they should rely as a network and support system,” says Crowninshield-Davies, who directs the program. “They also may be struggling with questions about how to balance the demands of a professional life and a personal life. Women should leave the program with confidence, a vision of what they want to achieve, and a clear plan for how to accomplish it.”
The program will include lectures, group discussions, team-building activities, and long-term individual projects designed to develop participants' management and social networking skills. Leading the training sessions and advising women on their projects in between sessions will be Candida Brush, an SMG associate professor of strategy and policy, Douglas Hall, an SMG professor of organizational behavior, Kathy Kram, an SMG professor of organizational behavior, and Mary Gardner, president of WorkVision, a management consulting firm in Marblehead, Mass., that helps organizations increase the number of women in management positions.
As part of the program, women employed at a corporation will enlist their boss to oversee a management project of their own design that must offer tangible benefits to their organization. “That could involve rolling out a new marketing plan or redesigning a job in her office,” says Kram. “The woman's boss will help to set the parameters for the project, and she'll get coaching from one of the program's faculty members and from a small group of peers within the program.” Participants not employed in a corporate setting, Kram says, might design a business plan for a new venture.
What sets apart Leading the Brand Called You from other management training programs, say its organizers, is its emphasis on teaching women how to build the interpersonal relationships necessary for breaking into the highest executive positions. According to Kram, it is especially important for women to perfect their social networking skills, because male executives dramatically outnumber their female counterparts in most companies.
“At some point, successful women inevitably find themselves in the midst of a male-dominated culture, and then may experience feelings of isolation and have a hard time building the kinds of networks they need to further their careers,” she says. “We want women to leave our program with a strategic plan for building the kinds of relationships they need.”
That could involve developing contacts — male or female — through the program's faculty advisors and participants, or even cold-calling potential mentors. A common mistake made by many professionals, Kram says, is developing homogeneous social networks and relying on a single mentor for professional and personal support. “A woman might think it's sufficient to have that one female senior executive she knows is looking out for her,” she says. “It is very important for women to build relationships with other women, and one goal of our program is to form a community of female professionals. But research has shown that diverse social networks are most effective in today's global economy, where corporations transcend traditional organizational and cultural boundaries and employees move between jobs a lot.”
Program participants also agree to take part in a long-term research project, in which Brush, Hall, and Kram will study “how women manage important transition points in their careers,” Brush says. “Partly because the numbers of women executives are so small, not much data exists about how successful women made it. We're going to track the participants through this program and for several years afterward, and study their progress against a control group. That hopefully will tell us what encourages or discourages women to move forward in their careers, as well as what the impact is of our program.”
To learn more about the program, e-mail cdavies@bu.edu, call 617-353-3910, or visit http://management.bu.edu/exec.
9
April 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations