Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com September 14, 2015 • Hartford Business Journal 37 BIZ BOOKS Technology can make workforce less productive "S hadow Work — The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs that Fill Your Day" by Craig Lambert (Coun- terpoint Press, $26). Soaring personnel costs and new tech- nology have shifted jobs from employees to customers. In the not-to-distant past, mak- ing travel arrangements involved calling an airline's reservation customer service rep. Now, you make them online because you'll have to pay extra if you have a custom- er-service rep make them. We don't complain much about doing the work previ- ously done by others because Internet sources offer mul- tiple choices and find the best deals. We know jobs have been displaced; we also know that adding multiple choices for consumers has spawned job growth in other areas. The Internet also offers trans- parency because it democratizes expertise. How? 1. By making their tools available. Example: You can obtain many fill-in-the-blanks tax preparation and legal documents online. 2. By showing you how to repair and build things. YouTube is filled with instructional videos. We're willing to spend our time to save our money. 3. By demystify- ing their jargon. Example: You don't have to rely on the expertise of your doctor to explain ulnar neuropathy and treatment options. A few mouse clicks find a wealth of informa- tion. While this can help us make informed decisions, it can also open up Pandora's Box because we're not knowledgeable about ancil- lary health factors that influ- ence diagnosis and treatment. In the workplace, democ- ratization of expertise means that we're doing jobs that were once the domain of lower-level administrative support staff. Software allows us to type and send documents, sched- ule meetings, make copies, etc. We screen our calls via voicemail options. Does the shadow work that's crept into our jobs make us less productive? Prob- ably. In my corporate days, my administra- tive assistant took shorthand dictations and quickly typed up drafts for review and final versions — leaving me free to move on to other meaty tasks. When that position was eliminated, I had to hunt and peck at the keyboard, which took time away from those other meaty tasks. As a result, work/ life balance was affected. I spent more time at work and less time at home. The bottom line: Time isn't fungible. Some shadow work saves time and money; some wastes time and money. • • • "The Ignorant Maestro: How Great Leaders Inspire Unpredictable Bril- liance" by Itay Talgam (Portfolio/Pen- guin, $26.95). Talgam applied the principles learned as orchestral conductor to a new career as a leadership consultant. He dissects the lead- ership styles of six world-famous conductors (Bernstein, Kleiber, Muti, Strauss, Toscanini and von Karajan) to show how different leadership styles affect the control over the music and the degree of creative freedom granted to the musicians. At opposite ends of the c o m m a n d - a n d - c o n t r o l scale are Riccardo Muti and Leonard Bernstein. Muti's gestures controlled the start and stop of every note. Mistakes weren't tol - erated. Muti denied his musicians the creativity of self-expression by forcing them to adhere to his view of how the score should be played. As a result, the musicians followed his directions; the music was executed — but it often lacked "a continuous life, full of inten- sity and direction" within the score's con- text. His micromanaging style only worked well when the musicians lacked discipline. Bernstein, on the other hand, viewed music as much more than a process. It had to have meaning; Bernstein wanted musicians to focus on the "why" behind playing and listening. When their "why" was clear, great music resulted. Before his rehearsals, he would spend time talk- ing individually with the musicians. The music sim- ply extended the give and take of those conversations to the audience. Check out Talgam's TED talk on leadership styles at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=R9g3Q-qvtss. n Jim Pawlak is a nationally syndicated book reviewer. Jim Pawlak OTHER VOICES Women underrepresented on corporate boards By Lucy Gilson T he role of women in leadership has, over the last few weeks, received a great deal of media attention. For example, is Hillary Clinton a presidential candidate, or a woman running for president? Should she play the gender card? Would Donald Trump have reacted to the GOP debate moderator in the same way if Megyn Kelly had been Mike Kelly? A recent article in the Huffington Post by Emily Peck sparked much debate when it likened women CEOs to shark attacks, "extremely rare, but so well-covered by the media we think they're pretty com- mon." However, CEOs, t e l e v i s i o n - d e b a t e moderators, and pres- idential candidates are all women in the lime- light, but what happens behind the scenes? What is the role of women in leadership positions that are less visible, like being on corporate boards? Unlike a shark attack, women on corporate boards are more like the elusive Great White. We know they are there, lurking under the waters, part of the inner workings of many cor- porate machines, but are there many of them or only a few? Are they found in groupings or do they work alone? Because we so rarely see them, we keep searching with the hope of better understanding who they are and how they got there, and which organizations have women chairing key board committees. But do we really know what the numbers look like? Unlike presidential candidates or even CEOs, most people are not reading corporate prospectuses, noted Kathy Caprino, an execu- tive women's leadership coach, in an Aug. 8, 2014 Forbes article. She began one of her train- ing sessions for women executives by asking, "Where in the pipeline are your emerging female leaders falling out, and why is it happening?'' and there was dead silence. We just don't seem to know where the next generation of senior women leadership is going to emerge. Can this, in part, be attributed to the fact that so few cor- porate board positons are filled by women? According to Catalyst only 16.9 percent of U.S. corporate board seats are filled by women, ranking the United States behind Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Great Britain and South Africa. Germany, where 14.1 percent of board seats are currently held by women, has mandated a national quota system stating that by next year, 30 percent of supervisory seats must be filled by women. Norway, Spain, France and Iceland already have quotas set at 40 percent (which only Norway has achieved with 40.5 percent). Interestingly, Great Britain has a voluntary arrangement, more of a "gentle- men's agreement" if you like, called the 30-per- cent club, which has been in place since 2010. The debate as to why having women on cor- porate boards is beneficial for business gets surprisingly contentious. There are those who argue that the importance of women is good for bottom-line business results, while others argue that the benefits are rooted in having organiza- tions that engage the entire work-age population with more family-friendly policies. Management professors will further argue that a diverse lead- ership team will result in better conflict resolu- tion, decision making, creativity, and innovation. However, one of the strongest arguments to be raised in recent months is that of generating unconscious awareness that women can hold these roles. Another reason the absence of women on boards receives less attention is the compo- sition and size of boards themselves. Many boards have fixed numbers of members who, once elected, can remain in office until age 75, indicating that turnover takes a long time. Many women today who are in their 60s, prime board member age, were not CEOs of public companies. What this means, is that the pool of board candidates is a small, "closed shop'." So, how do women break in? Beyond political capital and CEO expe- rience, people get asked to join a corporate board based on their functional expertise. Boards need people with specific skills such as finance, compensation, risk, turnaround or governance. Boards of public companies are hugely regulated by Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley so they need members with the expertise to advise the CEO. Women with such functional expertise are prime candi- dates to join boards, but they need to network and market themselves better. Here, research tells us that many women are potentially at a disadvantage, taking gener- alist, middle-management positions too early in their careers and thus, never gaining the functional expertise necessary to rise to the top of a company or to be asked to join a cor- porate board. We continually read that women are better at dealing with diverse individuals at work, arriving at consensus, and enabling a group to work together — but, it is precisely these skills that are holding them back. In fact, it behooves women to reject middle management positions early in their careers, or the lateral move to help a department that is struggling to get back on its feet. By devel- oping functional expertise, women will place themselves in a positon to be part of the net- work that is the next wave of corporate board members. n Lucy Gilson is the head of the management department and a professor at the UConn School of Business. Lucy Gilson ▶ ▶ In the workplace, democratization of expertise means that we're doing jobs that were once the domain of lower-level administrative support staff.

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