This year’s ILM report ‘Ambition and Gender at Work’ explores the hurdles women face along their career path and the factors that create the ‘glass ceiling’ effect that many women managers encounter. The research found that 73% of women believe there are a number of barriers preventing them from progressing to top levels of management. Alongside the well known obstacles of maternity and childcare-related issues, other critical factors included lower ambitions and expectations.

Compared to their male counterparts, women tend to lack self belief and confidence, with half of women managers surveyed admitting feelings of self doubt, compared to only 31% of men. Women had less clarity about career direction, lower expectations about becoming a manager, and were on average 3 years behind men in moving in to management roles.

The ILM’s recommendations (reinforced by the Governments’ independent review in February this year) focus on a business-led approach, where organisations set their own targets and act decisively if they are to avoid the introduction of government impositions or quotas.

They suggest recruitment practices, talent management and work-life balance policies have an important part to play and place a strong emphasis on training and development.

How can training and development help?

The research suggests employers should target their development spend to both address gender imbalance and maximise the impact of their leadership development by tailoring it to the differing needs of individual managers. Coaching and mentoring were identified as being highly effective ways of encouraging women to realise their leadership potential.

Coaching stands out as an ideally flexible solution which can address the more emotional aspects of leadership development and can be a powerful way to build women managers’ self belief and encourage them to take measured risks.

Mentoring programmes can also be instrumental in raising women managers’ aspirations. Employers should look at using networking and development events to raise the profile and visibility of successful women. They should also identify successful leaders of both sexes to serve as mentors to female managers, providing advice and encouragement based on their own experience and encouraging them to seize career opportunities.

Only by taking such proactive steps to development will organisations help women start to break through that glass ceiling.

Part of the Equalities act which came into force last year is that it is now possible to use positive action at the point of selection in a recruitment process.  On a practical level this means if there are two equally qualified people at the end of the recruitment process, then it is lawful to choose one over the other, if they are from an under represented group. There is a great article by Emma Bartlett explaining this in detail http://www.recruiter.co.uk/positive-action-in-recruitment/1009192.article

This is a key step in encouraging a more diverse workforce, although has inevitably caused strong feelings both for and against.

The “pointless legislation” group see this as over complicated and even “unfair”, as in their eyes it potentially discriminates against groups who are not under-represented eg white males. But surely this is missing the point? It is easy to bemoan anti discrimination legislation when you have not experienced what it is like to be part of a minority group.

If we had a situation where all recruitment was done on merit then we wouldn’t need such legislation – but we don’t!

Even now we come across managers, who ask at interview whether a woman intends to have children, businesses who ask what a candidate’s parents do for a living and we even see interview notes making inappropriate comments about why someone should be hired or not hired – often based on looks or perceived sexual orientation.

We need legislation to drive a change in behaviour and anything that makes our business world fairer is surely worthwhile?

I have recently been in the fortunate position of being able to recruit two new members of staff for my small organisation. I have been struck yet again by just how important the right recruitment and selection process is – get it right and you will reap returns far in excess of the financial investment you make, but get it wrong and it can be an expensive and time consuming mistake.

For both roles we received a large number of applications, so using a clear and specific person specification as my criteria to score against was key. I was disappointed at how many of the applicants failed to describe how they met the specification, but fortunately I had more than enough good candidates to interview, so I looked for the ones that also had some added value to give to the organisation and my team. Those were the ones that I wanted to see in person.

The interview itself was vital in testing the candidates to see how well they could evidence, with practical examples, the statements on their application form. It was also a chance to see characteristics that cannot readily be demonstrated on paper – enthusiasm, aptitude and flexibility. I needed to give careful thought to my questions, in order to give the candidates a fair chance to demonstrate the qualities I was looking for. I also never interview alone, preferring to have one or two colleagues who may look at the candidates from a different perspective.

In both processes, we were faced with a difficult decision between two strong candidates. This is where understanding the added value that candidates can bring, together with the ‘fit’ with the philosophies and values of the organisation, helped to steer us towards our final choice.

So, I now have two new members of staff to induct and that gives me a sense of anticipation and enthusiasm. There are no guarantees that I have got it right – that’s where making the best use of the probation period comes in – but I do know that I have done everything I can to make the recruitment and selection process a success.

At Focal Point we are about to embark on the Investors in People journey so this area is very close to our hearts!

The Department for Business (BIS) in a recent independent review, stated that a wider take up of engagement approaches would have an enormously positive impact on UK competitiveness and performance.

The agreed definition of Employee Engagement is;
‘A workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisations goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being.’

The report suggests, however that engagement levels in the UK are currently low, so it is clearly an area that many organisations need to be tackling.

http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/employment-matters/strategies/employee-engagement

But it is a tough call. The Guardian recently highlighted how the traditional career ladder is a thing of the past; success is no longer measured by steps up the ladder, as organisations are so much flatter in structure. This means fewer opportunities for promotion and a career nowadays will mean multiple changes of direction, more of what the article calls a ‘career carousel’ whose direction is often a step sideways rather than up. http://careers.guardian.co.uk/careers-blog/time-to-step-away-from-the-career-ladder

This lack of traditional career progression can contribute to a lack of engagement and managers now need to work harder than ever at identifying what is important to their people.

Welcome to the world of ‘Career Management’, where it is vital to align organisational and individual needs.

But how to tackle this? As a starting point consider the following points…
• How clear is the vision of the company?
• Are all your managers engaged themselves and committed to the organisation?
• How clear are individuals about what is expected of them?
• How much do managers understand about what their employees want from work?
• Do your managers show appreciation and offer feedback?
• Do they treat staff as individuals - with fairness and respect?
• Do they enable employees to have a voice?

Companies which challenge themselves in these key areas and examine how they can be improved, will be the ones that create a genuinely motivated and engaged workforce and reap the benefits of increased loyalty and performance.

I was about to have a rant about The Apprentice’s penultimate episode – the interviews - when I read the article by Emma Haslett in Management Today which summed it all up very succinctly! http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/bulletin/mtdailybulletin/article/1047032/the-apprentice-interview-round-smell-rat/

The episode did make good telly, but was a million miles away from good, fair interviewing. Interviewing should be about getting the best from someone, not playing power games and trying to trip candidates up. I really thought those techniques had gone out with the 80’s!

Alan Sugar should be holding himself up as a role model for aspiring business people and setting high standards for people to strive for.
But the way Claude Littner and co interviewed was aggressive and highly subjective, with no level playing field from which to evaluate candidates.

If in any doubt, best practice interviewing should

• Be a two way process – the candidate is making a decision about your organisation as much as you are about them
• Be objective and fair – not a bit of a chat, where the interviewer chucks in a few favourite questions and then decides if you “fit” or not (for “fit” usually read “are a clone of what already exists in the team” or “you like the same football team as the interviewer”)
• Use a clear person spec to measure candidate’s suitability against
• Use questions that test a candidates’ suitability against the agreed person spec – and avoid asking about things that have no bearing on the candidate’s ability to do the job  (how confident are you and your team about the implications of the Equalities Act for example?)
• Use opening questions that are the same for each candidate – to give that level playing field

As we head into 2011 and the war for talent continues to be waged across every sector, this would be a good time to review your managers’ interviewing skills and ensure that yours is a truly fair and objective process that gets you the best candidates … and not “just a chat” or a chance to play “good cop bad cop”!