The Longest Climb

How powerful womenget to the top.

By Lisa Mainiero, published on November 01, 1994

For a third of the women, building credibility meant performing remarkable feats of management while working within the system. One woman told me of her request to be placed into a commodities trading group. At the time there were no women in any such group. Still her boss agreed to do it. "The gentleman who ran the group was not pleased, although today he is one of my good friends. My attitude at that point was key. If I had taken the view that this man would have to just take it, I could have been heading for trouble," she relayed. But she was grateful and sympathetic. "I wasn't pushy or masculine; I had definite ideas about what I wanted to accomplish, but I did it in a more subtle way."

Others told me they took serious risks or were involved with corporate innovations to build credibility and jump start their careers. One woman from an electronics firm was given the opportunity to run a division in charge of developing a new device. There were people around her who had much more seniority--she was 26 years old at the time--and who knew a lot more about managing a factory than she did, but she was offered the job. Her manager took a risk on her, knowing she had significant people, organizational, and management skills. She accepted the job. Though she woke up every morning dodging fears of failure, she managed to pull it off. They took a risk on her and she made it happen. That device has since become a household name.

I also heard a lot about gaining credibility through managing people. Some women focused on developing a team-oriented participative style among their peers. They made sure their work was done and done well. As a result each developed a network of people who would say readily that she worked hard and deserved a promotion.

In the third stage, which I call refining a style, my interviewees had reached Division Manager level. That meant they were dealing with multimillion-dollar accounts, with several hundred employees under them. In describing this stage, they got philosophical on me because the nature of their job at that point gave them a new lens on their careers.

Eighty percent of the women told me they were very concerned with honing the team-building style they developed in the previous stage. These women were not tokens who felt territorial. Though persistent and tough, they had learned how to create a management vision, share power, and give others responsibility. The highest ranking woman in a clothing-manufacturing corporation describes her style this way: "Define clear objectives, give your people lots of leeway, stay informed on their progress, and especially, delegate and empower others to do what they need to do. My job is to get them the resources they need so they can be empowered to do the work."

Knowing these women were managers willing to give people a chance, employees vied to get into their area. Suddenly these women found a ground swell of support from below, as well as the support engendered from above and with peers from the previous stages. Here they sealed their credibility and management style.

Apart from empowering, a major component of that style was what Judith Rosener, in a classic Harvard Business Review article on the ways women lead, termed personal influence. Because women historically have not been in positions of power in the workplace, they were forced to step behind the scenes and manage through sheer personal influence. For example, one woman told me how she once drove an hour and a half to another manager's home at night, sat him down, and had a heart-to-heart about a project he was obstructing. The next day, everything was fine. So, in addition to learning how to be direct early on, they learned how to influence others on a very personal, covert level, to make things happen.

Some women described the level of responsibilities at this stage as overwhelming. To be effective, they had to make tough decisions. They faced the fine line between aggressive and pushy and managed to create a unique brand of assertiveness. A senior vice president of a beverage company captured it well: "There are some differences in the women who succeed. They tend to be better listeners, to have more insight into people, to come right out and say what they think, and not pull any punches. And very often they are right."

Enter stage four, the top floor, aptly called shouldering responsibility. Now in charge of huge subsidiaries and divisions, the executives' decisions touch thousands upon thousands of lives. And they feel the responsibility keenly. They put in long hours and when they do come home, work comes with them. They can't shake the thought that if, for example, they decided to stop one product line, 5,000 people might lose their jobs. And they have the added responsibility of being the sole woman (or one of two) at the top. Many admired straight out that they thought their careers had been jump started because they were women, so they took on the role of mentor, publicly and personally, for other women on their way up.

As the resident female executive, they were the ones trotted out for dinner speeches and other public relations events. And they often had open-door policies for men and women who needed career advice. They were very accessible and willing to give of their time. One woman told me that on some days she and her secretary joked about putting a "Now serving..." sign on her door because so many people were lining up for just five minutes of her insight.