The Glass Ceiling for Women (a Graph!)

What I do can be summed up in this graph. Some of you will already have seen this graph, but for those of you who have not, this devastating little number is a very sad indictment of the current state of our industry. The yellow line here shows the retention of women professionals generally in their career over time, from zero to 20 years along the X axis. That pink line is women in STEM.

Now, you can see, they're very far apart and that the pink line is devastatingly steep. Yuck! Everything that I do in my career with WIMDI and with my leadership coaching is to bring that pink line closer to the yellow line.

I find it really devastating, because I've been on this line. I lived on this line, right there at the 10 year mark, when I left the mining industry. I'm represented here because I'm somebody who left, along with probably, I don't know, 40-ish percent of my peers that had already left by that point.

This is the glass ceiling in a chart, in some ways. This is the reason why we don't see lots of women in leadership. By the time they get into the really high levels of leadership, they're already gone. I want that to change and one of the things we're going to talk about is a way to change that. It may not be all in the graph, but it will be some of it.

The Shift That Occurs as Women Move up the Leadership Ladder

There’s this interesting shift that happens in our careers as we move up the chain of command or the leadership ladder. When we move through this progression from individual contributor, through manager, to director, to VP roles, and into the C-suite, there's this interesting divide that happens early on just before you get into management. That is, that you stop creating results through yourself, and you start creating results through other people. This is an interesting time in a person's career, because up until this point, the world's kind of been your oyster in some ways. If you want to go and create an outcome, you just go and do it. You write the code or you create the mine plan that causes the rocks to be moved, or you do whatever it is that it is you do in your day job; you're able to go out, execute and create outcomes at work, but when you move into management, suddenly you don't have that ability as much –or, in theory, that's not how you're meant to do your job. Instead, you've got to cajole other people into executing things that you, otherwise, would be doing. This requires a completely different skill set and it's usually not one that you learn about in school.

Most of us in this room probably have gone to a four-year degree program, maybe not all of us, but it's quite common that we'll go and learn all these technical skills that we need in order to do our main, original job, as individual contributors. Then, we move into management and get nowhere near four years of training. A lot of us feel a little freaked out by this transition. Did you feel excited? Did you feel prepared? I know for me, I felt a mix of all of those things. I got my hands on every little management book I could read, read it until my eyes fell out of my head. I went in to face my team just terrified and hoping that I was doing the right thing with these lovely people without injuring them or screwing it up.

The Solution: Leadership Training (in Theory)

Lots of leadership trainings have different configurations, but I'll talk about one particular style of them that I think is the most common. In many leadership trainings, you'll cover the most essential skills which are:

Number one, inspiring and motivating others, because it's important that people actually feel like doing the work that you're going to give them, otherwise it's harder for them to get it done, and they tend not to. If you're trying to create outcomes for other people, they've got to be motivated to learn. You're also going to learn how to communicate your little butt off, because it's essential when you're working with other human beings that they don't feel upset with you and that they don't feel totally lost and confused anytime you tell them to do something.

Communication is an essential piece of the puzzle. You learn how to build relationships, because there will be times when you are not able to inspire and motivate someone to do something because it is boring or terrible, or not that good for them honestly, and you'll have to, despite your best communication, build a good relationship with that person so that they're able to do the things that are a little less than palatable, even when they'd rather not. They do it anyways, because you've put the work into building the relationship and creating a strong platform for you to create together.

You'll also learn about how to collaborate and foster teamwork because this is no longer an individual operation. You have to do this with other people, and there's lots and lots of work to prepare you for collaborating and working in a team. You'll learn some self-development skills, because most of us come into leadership, learning how to lead another group of people, and as we do that, we quickly learn that there are lots of things about us that need a little bit of work.
Maybe we get really offended when people don't take our well-intentioned advice as a manager. Maybe we get completely stymied when we try to speak up in meetings with people who are much more powerful than us. These things tend to show up when we are on a bigger stage; as a result, we do lots of self-development work in leadership.

We work a lot on developing other people because we've got this whole little team of minions under us and it's really helpful if we can help them develop their skills and level up the way that they're working, because then we can use them to go and get more things done.

How Men & Women Experience Leadership Training (with Examples & Stats!)

So how do we like it? How does the leadership training go? Well, the good news is most men really feel pretty good about it. This is a study from 2018, from an online learning company called 2DL asked people how they felt about the learning and development options at work. 75% of men said that they were either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their training options, which is a solid B, so not bad, good job corporate America –hitting those mid-high grades with men.

Of course, you can probably guess by now, based on the fact that this is WIMDI and I've split out this poll by gender, that the women's results are going to be worse. Whew, 55%, not so good, a C minus, yikes! Women did not rate their satisfaction with the training options nearly as highly and this is especially damning when you realize that it's a C minus at satisfied or somewhat satisfied. Like it's not even “really excited about it” or “loved it”, it's “it was kind of okay” and 55% of women, more than a fail, felt that way about the training options available.

What the heck right? Because this is supposed to be the solution to all of our challenges, this leadership thing that we never learned how to do. We now get the opportunity to do it, except that we kind of hated the training. What are we going to do about that? Well, here's the deal, leadership training is designed to meet the needs of its customer –just like any other consumer product, they look at who is likely to be involved, what their challenges are, and then they try to design to fit that. Who do we think our customer is here? Mostly dudes, right?

These are stats from the latest McKinsey and Lean In, Women in the Workplace Study, they do these every year and the numbers have actually gone up. I was quite surprised when I looked these up to make this presentation because these numbers were probably 10% worse two years ago or something like that. We've picked up some ground here, but leadership training is, by and large, still mostly men and has been mostly men for a very long time, ever since the early days back in the dinosaurs, (when we were all training dinosaurs how to be good leaders).
The leadership training then was targeted to male dinosaurs, and now they're still targeted to male dinosaurs, just a little less of them.

So, what do men need? What do these consumers that make up most of this market actually need? Well soft skills, mostly right? Men, as a group, (not all men) --#notallmen-- get socialized as early and as often in all of the soft skills that you need to be a leader, whereas women often do. When you think about how boys are socialized, they're often socialized to be competitive as opposed to collaborative. They are often socialized to not be very good communicators. I think most women who have been in a heterosexual relationship before, or at least in a relationship with somebody who was socialized as a man when they were young, can attest to the communication being like a little less prolific, precise and not very emotive; communication can be a bit more of a challenge and they don't do nearly as much self-development work. I'm not trying to say that men aren't interested in self-development work, but that the patriarchy doesn't require it from them in the way that it does require it from women.

When we look at this list, these are things that women actually learn from a very young age as a way to cope with the way that the patriarchy kind of hems them in. We don't often have access to a ton of explicit power. We are often using communication or informal channels to create the outcomes that we're looking for, rather than command and control power from the top down. We have to communicate excessively well to make sure that nobody's feelings are hurt, because we are often socialized to be the caretakers of other people's emotions. We work really hard to build relationships, because that is a lot of how we get things done, because again, command and control are less available to us.

Along the way, we end up doing quite a lot of development of ourselves and development of others. Development of ourselves because without a position of power, without a position of privilege in society, we often have to mold ourselves to the situation as it is; we get early practice from a young age. In terms of developing others, we are often held as kind of the therapists of the entire world, right? The concept of emotional labour is in some ways, just holding the emotions of other people, but there's also a piece of it that is about “man training”.

We often get a crash course in this early on and men don't and then when it gets into leadership, where we all have to play nice, men need some training and therefore we get some training. How does this go? Well, my fabulous client put it best a couple months ago. She attended a two-day leadership training and she said it was “basically useless”. She didn't learn anything because she's been doing it all since she was five. It was interesting and it was done at a very prestigious place with a good name to it, but it was all kind of old hat for her, yuck!

There was a study done in 2019 by Zanger Volkman that looked at 360 reviews and how men and women were rated in different leadership competencies and the short version is, women absolutely crushed it. They beat men on 17 out of 19 measures, which is a very, very, good percentage to win by. Across the board, they were better at a bunch of things, which is fascinating because only 42% of women reported having access to leadership training at work versus 56% of men. We kicked their butts! Even though we were less likely to get training, we still came out on top, which is very sad, but speaks to the power of that early stage training that we get from our parents and from patriarchal society in a lot of these skills.

Why Aren't More Women Represented in the C-Suite? (with Stats!)

So damn, if you are sitting in my shoes, then obviously women are winning! Get all this in the C-suite immediately; it's clear that we should be running the whole world like Beyoncé says but obviously, the depressing truth is that no, that's not true at all. When we look at the C-suite, again, from the Women in the Workplace report, we see that it's 80% men, far worse than it is at the individual manager level and only 20% women. The interesting thing about that, is that it can get even worse than this; if you look at the Fortune 500, it's actually 92% men.

We have a new record this year! In 2021, we have 8% of women in leadership, which is higher than it's ever been! This year we've got 41 women out of 500 in the Fortune 500. When I started 15 years ago in the mining industry, we had 1/4 of that, 10 women, 2%. Hooray, we've done it! We've really arrived ladies, good job. It's still 92% dudes in the Fortune 500. Usually within a couple months of the list coming out, we'll see some headlines about how there's more men named John or Michael (insert common white men's names here), than there are women on the Fortune 500.

That's the state of leadership at the tipity-top of corporate America. All dudes, all the time. So why is that? I'm going to say, *why is that* because actually I could talk for like 75,000 hours about the many reasons, but tonight, we're going to talk about just one --well two, we're going to talk about this graph.

Why Leadership Training Isn't Helping Women (a Graph!)

I have decided that I am now only interested in talking about leadership initiatives that move women towards the upper right hand corner of this graph. I am no longer entertaining any discussion of things that move us towards the bottom left side, because I feel it is useless. We'll spend most of the rest of the conversation tonight talking about why this is the case and to put this into context, the bottom left here is mostly where leadership training puts us. It tends to move us in this direction that I'm no longer interested in, and it does not move us towards the side that I am.

Career-Killing Trap #1 - The "Natural Skills" Trap

All right, so there are two career killing traps that we're going to explore tonight in relation to that graph. Number one is called the natural skills trap and you can probably tell from the quotation marks how I feel about this. I am going to tell you a little story about a client of mine, (This is not my client's real name, we always change people's names and make sure that you don't have every single detail about them published on the internet for everybody to know).

Okay, so this is my lovely client Lana. Lana is an engineering team lead at a tech company, and she is wonderful. In fact, Lana, you have already kind of met because she is this person. Lana is the one who attended the leadership training and didn't learn a single thing because she kind of already knew everything that they were teaching. As you can tell, Lana is amazing and very powerful and exactly my kind of person. Her boss also thinks she's pretty great. She thinks that –like we've already discussed in this presentation—she's basically natural at all that kind of “HR stuff”, he would say—all that people-y stuff, and then he reaches a dangerous conclusion. He goes, "Yeah, I bet she probably prefers that to technical work anyways, right? Like with her woman brain, probably true I guess." And then he goes and has a conversation with her and says, "Hey, we love your leadership." She says, "Yes, amazing news." "So why don't we re-org you into a non-technical management role?" Sounds good, right? You can tell from Lana's face that we are excited about this.

Well look, this is some patriarchal bullsh*t, friends. I hate it, I hate it so much and it happens all the time. Let's talk about why this is likely to be the case and is often the case. It's because it fits what we're, “supposed to do”. According to society, we are meant to be caretakers. We are meant to be people who serve other people's interests. We are meant to be people who are incredibly team-oriented, who care a lot about other people, who facilitate other people into greatness as we've already talked about.

There's a huge societal narrative about how much women love dealing with “people” stuff, which I'm not saying is untrue about us, but not necessarily true for every single one of us. #notallwomen. Oh, and they're not wrong—research bears it out—yeah, we are pretty good at this stuff. We've been working on it for our entire lives and it's incredibly common for this to happen; many of us have already seen this.

In my career alone, this has happened so many times. I have, over the course of my 10-year career in mining, had people decide that rather than being a mining engineer, I should be a product manager. I wasn't interested in that, great job, but not for me, and definitely a poor use of my mining engineering skills. They wanted to put me in maintenance engineering. They wanted to make me an HR business partner and then—my favourite—they actually offered me an investor relations job at one point for $50,000 a year less than I was making as a mining engineer.

They were like, “it’s part-time, so that you can have a great life and work-life balance” and I was like, "I'm not interested." "Never call me again, I'm incredibly insulted." Not that investor relations isn't an important job, but it is not the thing I should be doing with 10 years of mining engineering experience.

Now if you look at this list, you will probably detect a trend here, which is that these are, by and large, way more people-y and way less technical than they used to be. Some of you might be going, “well, maintenance, that's pretty tech—not technical, but it's not really ‘girly’.” In the mining industry, that means you're working with mechanics, dealing with giant pieces of machinery all the time and the cool news about the maintenance engineering is that they wanted me to do that because I had gotten really, really good at manipulating the man babies who ran that department to improve their forecasting so that I could then go and do my budgets.

I was very, very good at talking to them and stroking their egos and making sure that they could go and change what they were doing, so that they actually got better at their work. They wanted me for my people-y way of handling maintenance engineering, lovely, and as a reward, the men called me and my colleague, Sabrina, "Miss Pushy-pants", so that was fun too.

What's going on here, is that we sort of start leadership training –If you imagine us like a city where we've got a more developed set of skills than most of the men around us—we would be the lonely skyscraper amongst a series of under construction mid and low-rises that are still working their way up to their people skills. After they do some training, and the guys kind of level up their skillset, we might level up our skillset too, but we're often still, as we can see from the results of that survey, head and shoulders above them. The tough thing about that is that when someone comes looking to fill a people-focused management role, then we often get hit with what I call “the non-technical job track lightning”, yikes! Because we are the highest thing around, and we have been for some time and so they go, "Who could do this?" "Ah! She can, she's really good at it." "Put her in the job," yuck!

Core Business vs Support Business Roles (an Explainer!)

The non-technical job track lightning is very deadly, it's not good. Not just because I've likened it to electrocution, but because it puts us on part of this graph that I really don't love. When we look at the work that we're doing, we can classify it in two categories along a continuum between “things that are really core to the business”—central to what we do, the way that we make money, or things that are supportive of that; not directly connected to revenue generating activities, but they help them occur. Some examples of that, on the core of the business side, will have things like if we're working for a tech company, creating an SAS product. If we're sitting there writing code to code that SAS product, it is literally the thing that is sold. We are working on the direct product that the customer buys, so it's very related to the core business. The same is true of operations generally. If we are delivering product to clients, then we're very close to the core business—and on the other side on the support angle, we're talking about things like HR and legal.

These are essential components; you probably can't do business without them to some extent, but they're not the main point that we're there for. Most of the time, unless you're running a law firm or some kind of HR consultancy, HR and legal are there to support all the activities that the rest of the business does, rather than being the main point. When we are shunted into these more supportive roles, as opposed to sort of more technical, more core business roles, life gets less good for us.

How can we identify whether something is part of the core business? Clue number one: is if it is the main product of the business that you are working on. So again, if you are coding the thing that you are going to sell, then that is probably part of the core business. Another test that you can do is ask yourself: “Is this function something that would be an early hire?” If you were working on the main product, you could be Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak—any of the Steve's really, sitting in a garage building Apple products. You could run a company with just the Steve's in the early days, you wouldn't need anybody else—and then you might, as you grew the company, build a few more hires in, but those first few hires would probably be somebody like sales or you might have somebody who's involved in AWS or something like that in a tech company. Your second hire would probably not be an HR person, it would be unlikely because there's not enough H's to R. You don't have enough humans that need human resourcing yet in the company and certainly you couldn't have just one HR person and call that Apple because there would be no product to sell.

So, if you are working on the main product or if you're one of those early hires like sales, then you're probably pretty close to the core business, but if you're somebody that would be hired once the company reaches 50 people or three years in, then you're still important, but it's not that core business stuff that we're talking about here.

A final clue for us is whether or not there's P and L responsibility. When I say P and L responsibility, P and L stands for profit and loss. Are you responsible for how this place makes money or not? Are you responsible for turning a profit within your department? Again, something like sales has P and L responsibility, something like operations often has P and L responsibility, whereas HR and legal don’t. If you have somebody in accounts payable, they're very responsible for a lot of monetary transactions, but they're not necessarily out there driving revenue. The P and L thing, by the way, is the most core of core business responsibilities there can possibly be and the reason why I say that, is because pretty much all businesses, with the exception of non-profits or other specific businesses, their whole point is profit. So, if you have profit and loss responsibility, regardless of the technical specifics of what you're up to, you are responsible for the thing that matters most.

In a publicly traded company, this is what shareholders are investing for, for you to go and make them more money. We can use P and L responsibility as a pretty good proxy for whether or not we're actually working in the core business—are we responsible for profit and loss? Well the cool news friends, is that women have way less responsibility for profit and loss than men do. Overall, we've had 9% less profit and loss responsibility. This is from a 2020 survey by a group called DDI and they recognize that P and L responsibility is a thing that is heavily recruited for in C-suite roles, especially CEO roles. Go figure, at the top of the company, you need to be able to make sure that you can turn a profit.

This is one of the main things that the C-suite is working on, because they really struggle to recruit people who have had P and L responsibility. It's a highly, coveted skillset in that tranche of leadership within a company and women have this huge disadvantage, which gets worse the more senior you get.

As you can see at the individual contributor level 31% of men have P and L responsibility and for women that's 22%, so a gap of 9%. That same 9% gap also exists at the manager level, but men have a lot more responsibility for P and L, 46%, and women have 37%. When you move into the C-suite, this change is pretty drastic, suddenly the gap widens to 18%. So 81% of men who are in the C-suite have some sort of P and L responsibility. That's a huge number, versus women, who only have 63%.

This is interesting because I think it really shows how stratified the roles can be. We talked earlier about whether you're a core part of the business or not, so probably what we're seeing here is that women tend to rise to the top of the C-suite in supportive functions. They'll be a chief human resources officer, or they'll be maybe CFO or something like that. I think CFOs are still pretty dominated by men but they tend to be more in supportive functions as opposed to in those key P and L rules and so that's also part of what we're seeing here.

The challenge is that there are fewer and fewer women the higher you get up, because of that wonderful graph that I showed you earlier, where the pink line goes careening down. It's, but also because they don't get into those P and L roles early on, they don't develop the experience that they'd need to run with these 81% of boys who are in those C-suite roles with their P and L experience.

This is actually a huge problem and I think whether what you're doing is core to the business, P and L responsible is this hugely under-talked about thing in leadership. People talk all the time about keeping your team happy and making sure that you're inspiring everybody and creating a strong vision and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, but what matters, at least according to this survey and I agree with it, is whether or not you get the experience that you need to support you moving into these roles and by and large, women don't.

That's why it's 80% dudes, or at least that's part of it, the problem here that leads you into this “natural skills trap”, is not working in core areas of the business.

Problem & Solution - Not Working in Core Areas of Business (with Examples!)

This is basically what happened with Lana when her boss said, “Let's re-org you into non-technical management”, he was like, "Hey, how about we take you away from P and L and stick you into a support role, wouldn't you love that?" Now, she's still working technically –she's still going to manage software developers—but she's going to do the HR side of that. She's not going to have any technical oversight of them. That was their proposal. So, this is a support role, even though it's in this area that's, in theory, close to the core of the business, it's support. There's no responsibility over what is being built, how it’s being built, it's just—"Have you had your vacation?” “What's your performance review like?” Yuck!

The solution here, obviously when you've got a boss who's trying to do this to you, is to fight like hell to stay in core areas of the business. Now it was interesting because with Lana, initially when this happened, she wasn't 100% opposed to this. I was very 100% opposed to this, I did not like this when she told me, but although she had a sinking feeling in her stomach about it, she was like, "I don't know, I think this might not be good." There were pieces of it that kind of added up for her. She was like, "You know what? I do like that." "I am good at it and I do like supporting my team, and I think I'd be really great at that and I think I'd add a lot of value to the company." There was a piece of her that was kind of tempted, right? She was like, "Oh, maybe I'll do this," but the more she and I talked about it, the more we realized this would not help her get where she wanted to go, because Lana wants to become a director of technology and then eventually a CTO and so she knows that if she took their offer, it would be an off-ramp from the very thing that she's trying to create.

If she took time away to go and do this very people-y role that her boss has helpfully suggested to line up with her skillset, (which is what she's meant to be interested in as a woman), that would mean that she’d lose touch a little bit with what's going on technologically, because the pace of technology is so quick. It would mean that she wouldn't be able to backfill certain skills that she needed, certain technical skills that she needed to build that really strong base that’d move her into a CTO type role eventually. The more and more senior you get, the harder it is to backfill those things.

So, she had to get in a big fight with the entire management team about this re-org to not end up in a situation that would've put a huge glass ceiling over her head. She would've been stuck there, she wouldn't have been able to get out, right? She fought them hard for months and months and months –and when I say she fought them, I meant she spoke to them very politely and influenced them wonderfully because she has all those skills that we talked about before—but she was very persistent. Hooray for Lana!

She eventually convinced them and now she is a manager, but she has technical oversight and she's also got the mentoring and support she needs to move into that technical director role that she's looking to move into eventually. This was only possible because she had that conversation with them again and again and said, "Listen, one, this isn't what I want to do." "But two, I actually don't think it's best for the business." "It's important for me to retain a foot on the technological side, on the side of the business that makes the trains run on time and not just shunt me over into this pure people role because I won't be as good of a manager, and I don't think I'll serve your interests as well." It was really good work on Lana's part and essential because if she hadn't done this, it would be very hard for her to build her career from here on out.

We've talked about the bottom half of this graph, this, “natural skills” half of the graph, which puts you in support roles as opposed to core business roles or P and L roles at the top. Now, it's essential for us to understand how the leadership training that we take pushes us down here, because we don't go to leadership training and hear them say, "Never do this, don't do this…" But what they do, is they explicitly don't mention it; it doesn't come up.

Leadership training is not focused at all on where you should position yourself within the company structure and in fact, it has such a strong lens about leadership being all of these people skills, that it actually pulls focus and sort of puts a magnifying glass over that one area of leadership. Leadership is not all just people stuff, but it puts this magnifying glass over this one area of leadership, such that you can kind of forget about all this stuff around it. And so that happens to us, but it also happens to our bosses and that's how our bosses tend to understand leadership.

If you watch leadership training or if you read articles about leadership online, you'll find pervasively that they tend to go in this direction. Part of that is because they're all written by coaches, and coaches are obsessed with people stuff. That's why they go into coaching, right? For sure, there's a piece of that, but it's also because we have this concept of leadership that it is this primarily people skills-driven enterprise, that is really underpinned by the fact that those are the skills that men have needed to learn to move into those roles. So, men have to focus on that to become kind of balanced professionals and when women focus on it, because they're already so strong in it, they end up a little bit lopsided. Society loves to view them as extra lopsided, so that adds to the problem and then there's no effective counter to it, because nothing else is ever discussed.

Career-Killing Trap #2 - The Backpack Trap

We talked earlier about how there's this dividing line between the individual contributor level and manager level, where you stop creating results on your own and you start cajoling other people into doing the things you want. Well, the other thing that happens as you move up, is that you increasingly move into strategic roles and out of execution roles. Now it's not to say that execution doesn't matter at the top, but your work tends to become more strategic the more you move up. You have a broader purview, you're more responsible for setting direction as opposed to just executing a plan that already exists. There's certainly some of that, but increasingly, you're in charge of setting the agenda and you'll notice when we look at this list that there is yet another thing missing. Not only is it missing (the thing that we talked about earlier, which is not just how should you lead your team, but in what and to where, around P and L or around support rules?) But also, we're missing strategy and here's the deal:

Remember I said that women were killing it, 17 out of 19? Well, here's one of the ones that we did not beat men on, developing a strategic perspective. They beat us by 1%, so sad, but also that's the same percentage that we beat them on by communication. We are rated by our peers as less good at developing strategic perspective as men are, which is very sad, because it's essential to moving up the chain. Just like those P and L rules are developing our strategic perspective, this is a really important thing we have to do as we get more and more senior.

So What the Heck is Strategy & Why is it Essential? (an Explainer!)

What the heck is strategy? What do I mean by this? Why am I talking about how important it is? Well, I had this amazing client years ago who worked as a VP at a Fortune 500, and she was working on this shift herself. She was an established leader and had had a lot of experience making her team function like a well-oiled machine, but she really wanted to move into higher levels of responsibility with more interesting problems. She was working on this shift between this execution focus that she was so good at—that got her where she was—and moving into this more strategic focus. She described the difference between these as being like going on a hike.

She said that for years, she had been really, really good at leading a team of hikers in the forest or on the mountain or whatever and she was really good at supporting them and making sure that they had everything they needed to successfully execute this hike; she could make sure that there was everything in the backpack that they needed; she'd make sure there was the compass there; she'd get the bug spray; she'd get the tents; she'd get the sleeping bag; she'd get the trail mix. Anything that was needed for her team to have a happy and healthy and productive hike, she would be the one to provide, which is exactly what you learn in leadership training—how to make sure that everyone has a happy, healthy, safe, productive hike.

The thing that you do while you're doing this, is you follow somebody else's map. Somebody else gives you a map and you follow it along and lead your team along on the hike, but what she said she wanted to get better at was something that she loved to call “putting flags on mountains”. By that she meant, picking a point way off on the horizon and saying, "We're hiking all the way over there. It's not going to happen today, it might not happen this month, but that's the direction that we're going in." That's a really different can of worms, going “let's summit over there”, as opposed to, “we're following this little map that we have in front of us”.

Strategy work like this is essential, because there are a lot of questions that you have to answer when you're going on a hike. If you've got a map in front of you, it's relatively easy, but without the map, you need to understand a little more about where you're actually going and why you're actually going there.

Are you going on a hike that is going to be fun and wonderful? Or are you going on a difficult but necessary hike in order to get somewhere really good in a couple of days? What’s the overall point of all of this hiking? Is it for the joy of walking out and about in the woods? Is it because you're training so that you can eventually summit Mount Everest and be part of that whole history of the world? Or heck, do you want to go and hike eventually the entire, whatever it's called, Pacific Coast Trail and discover yourself again and write a memoir and have it become a best-selling book and eventually sell the movie rights and become BFFs with Reese Witherspoon or something.

There are all kinds of different reasons that somebody might choose to be hiking; you would probably choose different hikes to meet each of those needs. It's really essential that you learn how to put flags on mountains, because otherwise you're just sitting there reading somebody else's map. And eventually, as you move up the chain of command, the maps become, one, less plentiful—people don't tend to give you as many maps and, two—to the extent that they give you maps, they have way less detail and so, if you don't get good at putting flags on mountains, eventually you're going to find yourself lost somewhere in the wilderness, unclear where you're going, looking for help with no real guidance. This is pretty rough, especially when you've got a CEO that's asking you to define the next quarter's, “where are we hiking” strategy.

Eventually you stop getting promoted because you can't put the flags on mountains. Yikes! Not good and then it can get even worse because you could be Peloton. Peloton has recently had a small struggle with their strategic direction setting from the C-suite. Early on in the Panini, as people I understand are calling it—the pandemic—Pelotons were a hot commodity. Back in the early days when we were all locked down, everyone was having a real panic that they would never be able to exercise again and they had to come up with an at-home workout routine, Pelotons were like a black-market commodity; everybody wanted one. They were selling so fast that they had a huge back order and they couldn't fulfill the massive amount of demand that was going on for their products.

They decided that they had to do something about this, and they made two big moves, and then a third later move that we'll talk about in relation to this. Thing, number one that they did was they purchased a company called Precor, which is an exercise equipment manufacturing company. They bought this with the hopes that they could increase their own manufacturing capacity and also so that they could sell some of their equipment to these new "Pelotonites", that were obsessively buying their products. They did that in April of 2021, once the pandemic was kind of already going. Then about a month later, they decided they would invest in a huge new manufacturing facility in Ohio, again, to increase their ability to deliver their core products. They made these two announcements in close succession, early in 2021 and then promptly stopped production in January of 2022 because they had way too much inventory and demand had softened because the world was opening back up and it turns out that people would rather work out at the gym or at a yoga studio or even outside, rather than ride a bike at home that costs $2,000 or more. As a result, their demand softened and they had increased production so much that they had a huge challenge where they actually just straight up ran out of place to put the bikes.

This was some poor decision making from the CEO, John Foley, and for those of you who have not already read this, you'll notice in the last couple days that Peloton has been absolutely eviscerated by an activist shareholder who was very upset about these decisions, amongst other things, to do with a poor old Johnny boy. They released like a 40 page PowerPoint about why John is a terrible CEO and should be ousted and they were successful—he did get ousted—and here's some of why:

When they made these decisions, they cost a lot of money; the Precor purchase cost $430 million and the Ohio factory was $400 million. Overall, they spent $830 million on dropping their stock price by 24%. When they made these announcements that they were moth-balling production. Yikes! Not great a return, John, on your investment of $800 million just to lose a whole bunch of market cap. Over the course of the last year, Peloton lost $29 billion worth of market cap on their bad decision making and this is because the CEO, John Foley, didn't have a good handle on the strategy. He could not figure out what mountain they should be climbing and where to plant the flag, or rather, he planted the flag and he planted it in a deeply silly spot and the execution wasn't good.

John basically rode one of his little Peloton stationary bikes all the way down these mountains, instead of in the directions that the shareholders hoped for and then eventually he got turfed. Strategy's really essential for CEOs—that's clear—especially if you run an electric bike company in the middle of a pandemic, very important, otherwise you'll tend to get fired and won't have a lot of future in your career.

You Should Learning About Strategy Early on in Your Career

You might be thinking, okay look, I'm not a CEO—can I just like wait a couple years and get an MBA, isn't that what this is for? We're sitting here talking about leadership training, but does leadership training really supposed to teach us all this, isn't that why I'd go to Harvard or SFU or something? And yeah, you can do that, but actually you need strategy a lot earlier than this. It's not something that can wait until you get to the director level or the VP level.

You actually need it way early in your career. I think you need it at the IC level, when you're still working just yourself on work. You need to be able to put flags on mountains, even if they're smaller mountains at that point; you still need to be able to do that, or at least understand how and why people are putting flags on mountains.

It's essential basically everywhere along this timeline. What happens if you don't learn it? Other than the massive flame out of poor John Foley at Peloton, what'll happen to you earlier in your career? Here is the backpack trap that I mentioned we were going to talk about:

This is another client, we will call her Wanda and Wanda is an engineering manager. She's a relatively experienced engineering manager; she's not at the stage anymore where she's going into meetings just white knuckling it, hoping she can survive giving a performance review to her staff without one of them crying; she's got all that down pat and the team is working, the team is humming along and doing great.

I was coaching her a little while ago and she said, "You know, today for my coaching class, I want to talk about what I should do next." "Now that the team is working great and everything is going well, what do I focus on, what's my next big gig?" And she had a whole bunch of ideas. She said, "Well should I revamp my one-on-ones and try to make those better, and more efficient for the team and more supportive?" "Should I build a brand new schedule for my teams so that we've got like meetings all clumped together on certain days and long periods of focus time on other days, and maybe entire days without meetings so we can all be more effective and efficient at getting our work done and maybe produce more?" She said, "Maybe I should sit down with all of my team and ask them what their goals are and try work with them on whatever those are, so that they feel more fulfilled and more like their career is developing in an interesting direction." Or maybe in service of the exact same thing, "I'll work with HR to build a career roadmap for all them so that they can see if they stay in this company for three years, what role are they going to be in? What's the path from junior developer to senior developer? And what skills do they need to have to do all of those things?" And you can see on the right side, my expression is getting increasingly shocked and concerned.

It's not because these aren't good ideas, these are interesting ideas and they're ideas that would probably be really supportive for Wanda's team.

What is the Backpack Trap? (with Examples!)

She's packing her backpack here, these are all backpack ideas. She's stocking up on all the things that will make for a happy and efficient and lovely hike for her team members, but there's not a lot in here that focuses on those core business things that we talked about earlier—none of this is particularly strategic. There’s some process improvement stuff in terms of the meetings, but none of it feels really big picture.

We could do any of those, but why these things? Why are these the ones making the list? And then she said, "Oh, because it's my job to keep the team happy. I'm the manager, that's my job." And then I almost fell off my chair. I almost died, I was so tragic about it because it's a lovely thing that she said, right? It is her job in some ways to keep her team happy, but in a very real way, that's not the job. That's not the manager job. It's a piece of the manager job, but it's not it, right?

The manager's job is not keeping the team happy. In fact, sometimes it's actively upsetting the team, hopefully not maliciously or on purpose, but the manager's job is actually to do the thing that moves the business forward. That is not always the thing that keeps the team happy, number one, and number two, the thing that keeps the team most happy is not always the thing that's best for the business. And so, because she had this lens on of—my job is to keep the team happy—where do we think she got that? Leadership training, of course!

The way that we hold leadership, is mostly about empowering our team. Because of that lens that she held, she was entirely focused on the backpack and not at all focused on all of the cool mountains she could be summiting; she wasn't even looking up; she was like head down, packing the backpack, no visibility whatsoever into all of these amazing peaks that they could climb and all of the peaks that management would be excited about and that would feel exhilarating and amazing, that would be great career development for her to climb.

It's not a bad thing to hold a lens that you want to support your team, but you can also support your team by getting them to do exciting, strategic work. You can pick a peak that management cares about that you're interested in, that will be a stretch goal for a team and you can support them in getting there.

None of this was what was showing up on our list; she was so focused on the backpack that she missed all the amazing mountain climbing. It wasn't that her managers were going to get in the way; they weren't going to try to shunt her away into some people only management thing. She was kind of shunting herself because she was so focused on the backpack.

What ends up happening, typically in these scenarios, is the boss goes, "Well she's not very strategic, maybe she needs another year to develop" "She's doing good at managing, team's executing okay. I'm not seeing a lot of strategy out of her, so I'm not quite ready to promote her up another level. I don't know if that's actually going to be in her skillset, but you know, we'll see how it goes, wait a little longer". And then 20 years later, when she's still stuck in the same job with white hair, she's completely bored being a people focused manager and it sucks. She's there because she never got her eyes out of the backpack because she understood the backpack to be the job, and nobody corrected her, because they go, “That's just how it is. That's what she's good at.”

Problem & Solution - Leadership Training Seeds the Backpack Trap (with Examples!)

This is a tragedy for me and the problem here is that she did exactly what she was trained to do. She did what she understood the role to be as people had explained it to her, and that sucks. If this wasn't what she was supposed to do, if people tried to warn her out of it and then she did it anyways, you might be able to understand it. But the sad thing is, she ticked off every box, she did everything right and then she still ended up in this place where the glass ceiling was right above her potentially. She was so busy supporting and executing alongside her team that she didn't have any time for all the flag-putting on mountains.

Our leadership training, the way that we talk about this really seeds the backpack, right? It makes it so that's what we focus on instead of the bigger picture, because we don't talk about the bigger picture most of the time in leadership training. We talk about those micro interactions, which is important because we need to learn those skills, but to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else is harmful to women because they miss that message.

Like we talked about earlier with Lana, people tend to funnel them towards that people-only lens anyways and so it never changes or gets corrected, or often doesn't change or get corrected. The solution here is to go and create some strategic projects for yourself. Go find something good that's aligned with company strategy to do.

Now with Wanda, this was not something that was immediately obvious; she had spent so much time focused in the backpack that she didn't even know how to look for a mountain. It was not in her vocabulary, and she wasn't sure what was important to the company and she didn't really know where they were trying to go, or what they were trying to build. It wasn't something that got talked about with her very often.

I gave her some homework to go and find out—go and talk to your manager and your manager's manager and eventually the CTO, and find out what the heck they're up to. And the interesting thing is when she did that, what she discovered was they also didn't know. That they didn't really have a clear strategy either. They were in that kind of like startup-y phase where they've had some success and now it's all chaos and they're growing and like throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying to execute, trying to catch up and see what works and barely survive the thing. They hadn't stopped to look around and go, hold on, what mountain are we climbing? What mountain do we want to be climbing? So when she asked, a couple of really interesting things happened. One, she got to find out the answer and they got to find out the answer and they found it out together.

She got to be involved in those discussions about what would come next, and what that would look like. And not only that, they got to be able to see her as a resource. She wasn't somebody who was asking because she didn't know, she was somebody who was the one to pull their heads up so that they could look around. It actually made her look more strategic that she went, hold on a second, where are we going and why are we doing this? That was a really good look for her and it helped them see her as having more strategic skills than she otherwise would have if she had kind of waited for direction.

When I say create some strategic projects for yourself, if you know what they are, great, go do them, but if you don't know, go start having conversations and find out what they should be so that you can create them, that works great. And the amazing news here with lovely Wanda is that she's now a senior engineering manager, hooray! And she got to do some interesting strategic projects along the way, once they figured out what the heck the strategy was supposed to be. She was able to shift her focus away from the backpack entirely, still a lovely manager, still wonderful to work for, but she's got the team repositioned to working on something more interesting, which I think is great.