Women in supply chain: a bias for action

This week at our SCM World Live event in Miami we dedicated an entire day to the issue of what needs to change to bring more gender balance to the top of supply chain organisations. The publication that morning of an excellent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal by Beth Ford, Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer at Land O’Lakes and a member of our Executive Advisory Board, gave the proceedings an added sense of momentum and valuable exposure of the issue to a business audience of millions.

Our programme comprised keynotes from Christina De Luca, VP of Procurement and Supply Chain for BP, and Eva Wimmers, SVP of Group Procurement for Deutsche Telekom, as well as panels featuring VPs and SVPs from Cisco (Karen Ashley), Mars (Sandra MacQuillan), Colgate-Palmolive (Linda Topping), Starbucks (Sylvia Wilks), Beiersdorf (Daniel Weber) and Land O’Lakes (Kevin Shriver), plus academics from Michigan State (Judy Whipple), Penn State (Matt Davis), and the University of Wisconsin (Verda Blythe). The event was an experiment in large group problem solving that I think exceeded expectations.

Working group

Unlike the typical ballroom conference format, this session was more a discussion than a string of presentations. The lights were up for at least 80% of the time and audience participation was intense. In total, the room had 47 women and 71 men representing companies as diverse as Kellogg’s, ExxonMobil, Hallmark, Oracle and Merck, and including no fewer than 10 board-level leaders. The idea was open, honest discussion of why women – despite making up 30-40% of entry-level supply chain positions – end up holding no more than 5% of top-level jobs. The aim was to identify what can be done.

Here is what I took away:

• Quotas – This challenges traditional principles of merit-based advancement, but it was nearly universally agreed that some form of specific numerical target was probably required to make change happen. Deutsche Telekom, Mars, Cisco and others have specific targets (40% is typical) for women in leadership positions, and while blindly filling these slots won’t really work for anyone, the rigour of data is essential to action.
• Systemic support – Organisations like iWise at Cisco, Women Leading Powerfully at Mars, WILL at Lenovo, and many others, provide an ongoing institutional base for companies to assist with career planning, advocacy and support. These groups can help to keep women on track at the critical director-to-VP transition where many are lost either to poaching by other companies or to family pressures that force compromise.
• Structural support – Certain countries have better gender balance in leadership than others, due in part to work-life management tactics. Eastern Europe and Scandinavia are especially successful. In Finland, according to Nina Anttila of Konecranes, parents of either gender have up to three years’ leave by law, even though most take no more than one year. Men also increasingly play the stay-at-home parent role. In fact, our group was asked how many had husbands who had yielded to wives’ careers to enable upward progression. I counted at least 12 hands among the 40+ women in the audience.
• Advocacy – Senior leaders can help by specifically identifying and helping top emerging female talent. This topic can be touchy and word choice matters. “Sponsorship”, for instance, can be taken as favouritism. “Mentoring” can imply servility, and the clichéd website image of an older man providing fatherly encouragement to a younger woman risks reinforcing an atmosphere of condescension. That said, promotion usually requires a champion at the next level and this means someone prepared to fight.
• Fill the front end of the pipeline – This can start way up front, as in the case of Michigan State’s K-12 outreach programme, which targets kids with education about what supply chain is and why it might be a fun career. It includes positioning the supply chain discipline, as Wisconsin does as part of the wider business school with explicit ties to marketing. Finally, this means insisting on candidate pools that are reasonably gender balanced, which may require some extra work by recruiters to keep looking until that mix is reached.
• Look laterally for talent – Alistair Hirst of Kellogg’s proposed looking at military drawdowns for people with the maturity, discipline and technical training ready to contribute quickly. Sylvia Wilks confirmed that Starbucks has had great success with its Armed Forces Network, pulling large numbers of high-potential women from Fort Gordon and Fort Bragg in Georgia into its Augusta facility.

These are a few of the ideas tabled in Miami. I hope it’s just the beginning.