I Love football. Show up with a ball and I will want to play, full well knowing that I will be hurting tomorrow. Having passed 50 years I have to accept that every collision hurts. But that is nothing compared to being hooked from behind or tackled into the fence. Old men like me have seen a lot of Champons League on TV, and then we try to do what they do.  The result is far from graceful.

Add two women to the match and everything changes. Nobody gets hooked and nobodys face gets printed into the fence. I could even leave the game unbruiced. Even at ten men and two women the game is respectful, and we all have so much more fun.

As you may have suspected, this effect does not just apply to football. Netsurvey data leaves us no doubt. Companies with mixed management groups have more respectful working climates.

More respect for colleagues in companies with gender mixed management groups

Respect from colleagues in 97 companies. r2=0,12,  p=0,000 which means this relationship is significant on the highest level, usuall ycalled 99 percent. Respect from manager is significant on the 95 percent level.

A more respectful attitude towards each other makes work more fun in these companies (r2=0,25 but only 10 of the studies companies have this issue) which makes people in these companies more motivated and they also feel that their work has meaning (r2=0,28 p=0,13). Time will give us more cases on these issues, but the pattern is very clear.  The same applies to balance between work and spare time.

My conclusion is obvious. I say no to football unless there are some women on the field. It just hurts too much.  For pretty much the same reason I will not work for a company with an all male management team.  

My first job in Sweden was a trainee position in a large insurance company. We were eight trainees who got lectures from every manager or high ranking specialist the company had. This gave us an enviable overview of the company and how all the functions relate to each other. After half a year we got to run projects. One of my first suggestions was to set up a job rotation program to give this overview to others and to lower cooperation thresholds.  

At first there was enthusiasm all around, but then I stumbled on “the Lars Wars” for the first time.  One of the HR managers explained to me that he liked the project, but that loyalty prevents him from participating. The manager of his manager, called Lars, was in a cold war with the manager of my division, also called Lars*.

A widely held notion is that all female work groups often end up running into unresolvable conflicts. As the Lars Wars shows this is not unique to all female groups. This top management group was all male.  

The diversity analyses of Netsurvey has run show that one gender groups often function well in simple straight forward work like factories and customer service. But complex work and decision making is different. The more evenly mixed the group is, the better the inclusion. Inclusion is key health indicator in group decisionmaking and innovation.  

Mixed management gorups do not necessarilly have fewer conflicts. If anything, the opposite. Also, management groups often have more conflicts than other groups in the company. This comes with the territory even in highly profitable companies. It is the unresolvable personal conflicts like Lars Wars you do not want. These are destructive.  These seem to be less frequent in companies with an evenly mixed top management group.    

The gender makeup of the top management group of 37 Swedish companies and the percentage of high ranking managers that strongly agreee with the issue “do you have good cooperation with other working groups?”

Gender mixed management teams seem to have an easier time cooperating.  Having more perspectives represented in the management group may bring a fuller understanding of consequences into the management team.  It is also possible that managers on the strategic level have an easier time taking in the decisions made by a mixed management.

Cooperation on the strategic level also means things get done on the strategic level  (r2=0,58) and in the company as a whole (r2=,21). I think my story about Lars Wars explains these relationships rather well. All development suffers where top management is not cooperating.  

My first blog in this series showed how corporate values were disseminated better in companies with mixed management teams. Common values drives alignment and makes cooperating easier.

Which brings us to the question: How much is improved cooperation worth to you?

PS* This was in the days when the top companies in Sweden had more men called “Lars” than women in their management teams. The chairman of the board in this company was another Lars, as was the next president.  There are still 66 290 “Larses” in the management groups of privately held Swedish companies today. But there is a quarter of a million ”Larses” in Sweden. 5 percent of the male  population.  That makes Lars an imperfect choice for best career name today. The same is true for very common names like Anders or Johan. Of course, these are much better career names than Maria or Muhammed. Let us all hope for that to change soon.

The best career name right now is Claes. There are just 40 000 Claes but eight of them are presidents in one of the 258 Swedish whose stock are publicly traded. If you want your baby to reach this elite and you name it Claes the chance is about two hundeds of a percent. Obviously, as Claes is a boys name, being a boy would help. A little baby girl has the best chance with the name “Susanne”. This chance is about a seventh of a boy named Claes, but in 56th place Susanne is still the best girls name.

The top career names in Sweden are:

1.       Claes

2.       Jörgen

3.       Georg

4.       Alf

5.       Magnus

6.       Anders

7.       Christian

8.       Peter

9.       Johan

10.   Hans

This list reflects what Swedish upper class boys got in their 1960s. Other lists of names of Swedish presidents simply show what the most common Swedish boys names are.  As a career obsessed parent your best bet would probably be to find out what names upper class kids are getting in your country. For similar US lists  look here. 

I believe and hope that a return to this analysis in 20 years would not produce any name as grossly overrepresented as Claes is today.

Have you heard of Facit, the Swedish world leader in mechanical calculators?

Then you may also have heard how two engineers disturbed management with their insistent warnings about the Japanese transistor revolution. This, they said, will lead to far better calculators at a fraction of the price. Top management sent this anoying duo off to a remote office of this multinational corporation and was caught entirely by surprise a few years later, when the market disappeared to Japan. 

Openness starts at the top. The top management of Facit was a group of middle aged men. All management groups were at this time (the late 1960’s). The board of Facit should have been in a state of panic, but had “calm enjoyable meetings followed by a good meal, topped off with coffe and cognac” according to Lennart von Kantzow who became president in 1970, when sales peaked right before the catastrophe struck.

 
This story is told often in Swedish business circles. It is a good lesson to remember. The factors that gave you success yesterday do not necessarily give you success tomorrow.  Karl Weick describes how success freezes our thinking. Facit had been so successful for so many years that management basically had developed tunnel vision or success-induced blind spots.  Openness to discuss difficult issues is simply crucial to the survival of any major organization.

Interesting enough, openness to discuss open issues is also beneficial to your health. We ran the data from an engagement survey with the data from a health survey and found that people that felt free to discuss difficult issues at work were healthier.  They experienced less stress, better sleep and fewer heart related ailments.  Not being raise difficult issues at work will hurt your company and your health. That is not the end of it. It is also a wet blanket over your motivation. Look at the graph below.

Openness to discuss difficult issues is key to motivation and to enjoying work

 No openness no motivation and also no enjoyment of work. Those who have openness  are both motivated and they enjoy their jobs.  This relation is very robust and based on 145 000 (motivation) and 70 000 (enjoying work) responses.

The key question is how to open up for difficult discussions. Research points to diversity as a given starting point.  Management groups and boards with a healthy spread of backgrounds are much less likely to behave the way they did at Facit. One way to open up the eyes at Facit could have been the introduction of female members in management and board.  Recent research shows that this is a simple way to activate passive board members. This could possibly have alerted them to the Japanese development.  We see a similar pattern when we look at the responses of 12 companies on the issue of “openness to discuss difficult issues”.

The more evenly mixed executive comittee, the greater the oppenness to discuss difficult issues throughout the entire company

Openness to difficult issues is clearly better in companies with an even balanced management group. The gender mix of the top management group explains nearly 1/5 of variance in openness to discuss difficult issues. Perhaps that is another reason why companies with an even gender mix in their executive committee have performed better financially since 2008?

What do you think?

Ps. Did you read Glass Ceiling one and two?