Fish in the Boardroom

With Jürg Eggenberger

According to Harvard professor John P. Kotter, management stands for the perfect organization of processes, planning and controlling. Leadership, on the other hand, means inspiring and motivating employees with visions. Leadership thrives on creativity, innovation, meaningfulness and change.

Sustainable leadership takes this even one step further: it stands for living and working in a larger context and includes people and the planet in all decisions, in addition to profit.

In today's episode, I talk to Jürg Eggenberger, General Manager of the SKO, the Swiss Leaders’ Association, about the core skills and mindset that characterize a sustainable leader and the crucial role that diversity, equality and inclusion can play in all of this.

Sustainable Leaders Initiative : http://www.sustainableleaders.ch/de/home/

Article from Leader Mag: Inside SKO Swis Leaders – An der Transformation mitwirken

Book: Doughnut Economics – 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist „by Kate Raworth (ISBN: 1847941397 / EAN: 9781847941398)

Organizational and Team Development process & Feedback tool: We Coach

Jürg Eggenberger auf LinkedIN

Jürg Eggenberger auf XING

Jürg Eggenberger auf Twitter

Jürg Eggenberger studied economics at the University of Zurich and completed a master's degree in service management at the University of Applied Sciences of Central Switzerland and further training in organisational development.

Since 2013, he has been the General Manager (Geschäftsleiter) of the Schweizer Kader Organisation SKO, an association for managers and higher professionals with 10,000 members. Previously, he worked in education for 10 years, including as rector of an university of applied sciences. He has over 30 years of leadership experience in a wide range of industries and advises companies on leadership development.

with CORINA GRÜNENFELDER

Special thanks to EY in Switzerland for supporting this episode and advocating Diversity & Inclusion in Switzerland!

In Switzerland only 6,5 %, of the MINT jobs (Mathematics, Information technology, Natural sciences and Technology) are held by women, while in Swiss universities they represent less than 20% of students. This inevitably leads to the development of industries and professions that are clearly male dominated, including, for example, the Quant & Analytics division at EY.

EY’s challenge, like for so many other companies, is twofold: How to gain and retain more women and develop them into leaders and simultaneously how to create the best environment for women to step onto critical career rungs of the leadership ladder? How to support women’s motivation to lead and increase the likelihood that others will recognize and encourage their efforts—even when they don’t look or behave the way their bosses do?

I’m talking to Corina today about how it is for a woman to work in a male-dominated field, about how EY is supporting her in her career development and about where she still sees some progress to be made.

Further resources:

Corina Grünenfelder is a Director at EY Zurich with focus on quantitative Risk Advisory and Sustainable Finance for Banking and Insurance clients. She is a fully qualified Actuary (Swiss actuarial association) and studied Mathematics at EPFL. Corina is a diversity and inclusion advocate in the Swiss Financial Services EY team.

With Dario Cristiano

This episode is brought to you in cooperation with Advance.

Understanding that equality in the workplace starts at home, several companies offer parental leave programs for men that go beyond the current legal requirements of two weeks. Sadly though, such offers are often not used by men for fear of the professional consequences to their careers.

Yet, studies have shown that when fathers take paternity leave, mothers return to work more easily, female employment is higher, and the earning gap between men and women is lower.

And, as the French INSEE Institute analyzed, although men in 2010 spend more time with their children, so do women. Leading to inequalities that remain largely the same: and women still spending twice as much time on household chores and care activities compared to men.

P&G, the company behind brands like Pampers, Ariel, Gillette, or Oral-B, with Headquarters in Geneva,created the #Sharethecare program to address just that and has heavily invested in encouraging their employees to take advantage of this program. Dario Cristiano, the Site HR Director at the Geneva Headquarter of P&G, was one of the first to take advantage of this program that allows new fathers or domestic partners in same-sex couples, 8-week fully paid leave within the first 18 months of the child being born or adopted.

In my conversation with him, he talks about what it meant for him as well as what fears he had and how he overcame them.

“I was the first person in my whole family, my circle of friends, even at P&G I was one of the first to take [the parental leave]. It came with a lot of unknowns about what it would mean for me. But after I convinced myself, I had the feeling I had to convince everyone else around me, my manager, my colleague that it was the right thing for me.”

·  How taking parental leave can serve you in a professional setting by teaching you new skills, such as resilience, leading in uncertainty, problem-solving, patience, foresight, …

·  About the four key moments before and after the parental leave: The Decision-Making, The Request, The Leave, The Return to Work

·  Obvious things are underestimated in their impact

·  Listen more, be open to learn

·  Don’t let society dictate what is right for you

·  Get educated about Dominant Culture, Unconscious Bias, Privilege (see resources below)

About P&G and their #Sharethecare Program:

·  P&G - Shifting Cultural Norms - Gender Equality Begins at Home - We advance Cas Study

Other resources to continue the Equality & Inclusion journey learning on Dominant Culture, Unconscious Bias, Privilege

·  Blind Spot by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald

·  Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) by Eve Rodsky

·  Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

·  What Works by Iris Bohnet

Further resources can be found on the Fish in the Boardroom website

LinkedIn

Procter & Gamble

Dario Cristiano joined Procter & Gamble 12 years ago in his Home Country, Italy. Over those years, he has been working in Italy and Switzerland in a variety of roles in the Human Resources function. Dario is currently Human Resources Director for Geneva Business Center and is a committed partner on Equality & Inclusion activities at P&G.

With Christophe Barman

If culture is key when it comes to having more diversity, then companies following new leadership models, such as Holacracy, should be inherently having more diversity. But is this true? And what does it look like to have a company culture so strongly based on values and trust? A company where there are no hierarchies and spreading power amongst employees is truly lived?

To gain a perspective on these questions, I talked to Christophe Barman, who created such an organization. We talked about how diversity is lived a Loyco. About what self-directed and self-responsible employees need, as well as how decisions are made when there is no authority role.

“The workplace is the only place after your parent's home, where someone else decides for you when you have to come, what you do and how you dress.”

·  How giving full trust and authority to employees allows you to empower them to feel responsible and become responsible entrepreneurs within your company

·  How using roles rather than positions, allows you to spread power amongst the team and give the right people the right authority

·  The importance of feedback and coaching to truly enable people to live up to what is expected of them

·  Don’t compromise on your values, be clear about them and specific about the habits that such values bring. Give feedback on that.

·  Reflect on your vision of authority and trust. How do you feel about spreading authority amongst your team? Would you trust them enough?

·  What is your definition of performance and success?

Christophe and Loyco’s inspiration for Loycocracy :

·  Start with Why, Simon Sinek

·  Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux 

·  Holacracy, Brian J. Robertson 

LinkedIn 

Facebook 

Instagram 

Overview of Christophe’s roles at Loyco 

Loyco 

Graduate of HEC (MSc, Lausanne, Innsbruck) and holder of a certificate in risk management, Christophe Barman is committed to sustainability, participative management training and risk management.

Passionate about human adventures, mountains and sports, Christophe is very active in the associative world: president of Geneva Snowsports, vice-president of Ski Romand and of the sports commission of the Loterie Romande (Geneva), president of the IDDEA Award of sustainable entrepreneurship and of the Fédération Romande des Consommateurs (FRC) and a member of the Board of the Swiss Banking Ombudsman and of Promotion Santé Suisse.

Christophe co-founded Loyco in 2013, a service company in French-speaking Switzerland that has grown to over 100 Loycomates and CHF 14 million in turnover in 7 years, without sales force nor hierarchy.

With Georg Lange

When recruiting for an open position finding suitable candidates can be challenging. At the same time, with every new hire, you have an opportunity to shape your company culture. So how can you go about this hiring process and ensure that you hire the best candidate? The person that has the expertise required, but also the cultural fit that will ensure the success of both, the candidate, and the company.

Now add the challenge to recruit women in those male-dominated positions. This is the challenge that Georg Lange set out for himself. He used the DIER Model for his hiring process and observed how he ended up hiring 70% women and increased the number of women in his leadership team to 40%. Which in turn lead to stunning financial results in 2020 despite a difficult economic environment.

In this episode, Georg talks about how he consciously used diversity hiring to shape the EFTEC AG company culture, why he did so and the results that came from this.

"If there is all of a sudden, a woman in the meetings and [men] have to deal with women on a day-to-day basis. This changes the behavior of men significantly and for the better. It becomes much more precise and much clearer."

·  How to use the DIER Model in your hiring process to identify the right candidate for your company based on skills but also on cultural fit

·  Hiring women in critical positions might still require convincing of established leadership

·  How women influence a company culture to become more precise and effective

·  Focus on the results you want to achieve not on the profile of your ideal candidate

·  Consider the extra time investment in finding female candidates as an investment in the quality of your candidates

·  Be open, question the value system you are working and searching against

Article explaining the DIER Modell: DIER Modell: Perfect Match (German)

Detailed presentation of the DIER Modell: cmm360 im Gespräch: Das DIER Modell

Video Interview with Chris Holzach on the Health aspect of the DIER Modell: Das DIER Modell – Teil 2

LinkedIn

Georg Lange is focused on one of the most important areas in a company: its people, their leaders, and the results achieved. He has a total of 25 plus years of experience in driving strategic initiatives as well as daily operations in Human Resources. His tenures have covered all phases from Assessment, Strategy, Concept, Implementation, Operation, and Improvement.

Georg Lange has started his career in a Big 4 consulting firm, moving into global responsibility in HR functions in large international groups, as well as accompanying promising start-ups. For more than 10 years now his passion and in the meantime huge expertise is on digitalization and 4i amendments in the automotive, chemical, and financial industries. For virtually 3 years he led a scientifically based research project on how a company’s culture influences the overall success of a company. The findings formed the basis for the so-called DIER Modell, which supports finding the perfect match for an open position. In his current role as Global Head HR at EFTEC AG, he has implemented the model and uses it to find leaders and employees who not onlyensure the success of the company but also feel extremely well in their new position. In this case, 70% of all newly hired leaders are females.

Georg Lange holds an MBA and a MAS of HWZ. He has co-published two books about digitalization and 4i and written numerous articles. 

With Hajar EL Haddaoui

In 2020, the share of foreigners working in the service industry in Switzerland was 14.5%, that is 1 in 7 employees. In that sense, the Swiss workforce is already quite diverse, but how does Switzerland react to those foreign workers?

In this episode, Hajar EL Haddaoui talks not only about her challenges in entering the Swiss workforce but also about how she managed to empower women in her team to take on the leadership challenge triggering an improvement in her unit’s performance.

"I started in a way which is "I need to hire" without any clear vision about how I can empower women. And in the end, it wasn't the big result. Afterward, I started really to make a Diversity & Inclusion strategy. […] And in 3 years we moved from 13% to 25% in my unit."

●  Individual initiatives yield marginal results to your diversity metrics compared to the implementation of a comprehensive Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) strategy

●  What four areas of focus you can work on to create this strategy

●  How to create an environment to empower women within your organization

●  The importance of the leadership mindset for the success of an initiative shifting away from a “She’s a quota woman”-mindset to a “she brings value to the team”-mindset

●  Measure and compare the performance of your teams also based on their diversity

●  Sponsor women in your organization

●  Don’t only look at the added value for the business but catch -up with the human side as well

LinkedIn

Hajar EL Haddaoui is passionate about communities working with leaders and developers to help them deliver business values through KM.

Vice president for Sales and Retails channels fur region West & Ticino, member of the Advisory Board of MOD-ELLE, Member of the assembly of delegates of Vaud chamber of commerce, Member of the Global Campaign board of Cherie Blair Foundation for Women for the scoping of our Africa chapter. Frequent public speaker and Finalist of the Women IT Awards 2020 in the category "Business Leader of the Year "The combination of Law Background and IT experience give her a unique ability to bridge the gap between practice and theory in digital transformation and leadership.

With Deborah Halter

By law, men and women are equal, unfortunately, statistics show, when it comes to salary this is not the case. There has been lots of talk about this, but where do we stand today? What has been done and what can we do?

Deborah Halter walks us through the numbers for Switzerland and tells us about her experience working with companies.

“In 2018, 61% of all people receiving a monthly wage of less than CHF 4000 for a full-time job were women, whereas 81% of people earning more than CHF 16 000 for a full-time job were men. This nicely sets the picture we are looking at.”

·  Salary Discrimination starts in childhood, yet at the beginning of a career, both genders earn the same.

·  The pay gap starts when women have children and their career opportunities decrease, as single women earn the same as men.

·  The average salary gap between men and women has increased between 2014 and 2018.

·  Equal value can be measured even between seemingly very different positions such as nurses and policemen.

·  Ask for the results of your company’s equal pay analysis

·  Be aware of the different perception of value between care work and creation work and start building an objective salary system based on specific criteria not on people

·  Don’t be afraid to talk about salary with your colleagues and research Swiss benchmarks using for example the salarium tool

Statistics by FSO (Federal Statistics Office)

Federal Office for Gender Equality

Logib tool for the analysis of you're company's pay gap

Salarium, statistical salary calculator by the Swiss Statistics office

LinkedIn

Gender Equality Advising

Deborah Halter was born and raised in the German part of Switzerland where she studied business in St. Gallen. After her Bachelor's degree, she worked for multinational companies in Marketing and Key Account Management. The question of gender equality accompanies Deborah since her time at university and she has studied the topic ever since. In 2019 she founded her company Gender Equality Advising to support companies on their journey to more gender equality. Specializing in the gender pay gap analysis.

With Matthias Mölleney

Notes

Reduced to a minimum, talking about Diversity and Inclusion means talking about company culture. But what can you do to create a company culture where trust is the basis of a good collaboration? How can you improve this culture when gaps are visible, and collaboration has become difficult?

In this episode, Matthias Mölleney presents to us Beyond Leadership, a proven method that will change the team dynamics in just 6 minutes by increasing trust.

“Diversity means you have to be interested in the others. If you’re only interested in yourself and people who look similar, think similar, then diversity will not happen. Interest is the first step. Then you need to get to know them, really know them.”

·  How to build trust within an organization using the Beyond Leadership method

·  Why it is not enough to know the working identities of your colleagues

·  The importance of listening to identify real solutions to your team’s needs and be innovative

·  Start with asking yourself the question “Do I know the personal values of my employees and their motives” and answer the question very honestly

·  For the courageous ones, do the beyond leadership exercise with your partner

·  Listen and listen again to your team as things may change

[email protected]

Homepage peopleXpert

LinkedIn

After 20 years at Lufthansa, the last 8 of them at the top management level, Matthias Mölleney moved to Switzerland in 1998. There he was a member of the Group Executive Board and Head of Human Resources of Swissair, Centerpulse, and Unaxis.

In 2005, he founded the consulting firm peopleXpert gmbh in Uster. He advises and accompanies companies and managers in change situations and in challenges of leadership and professional human resources management.

Since 2009, he is also head of the Center for Human Resources Management & Leadership at the HWZ University of Applied Sciences Zurich, and teaches at other national and international universities, and is the author of the books "Die Zukunft möglich machen" (Huber Verlag, Frauenfeld, 2003), "Transformational HRM" (SKV Verlag, 2018) and "Beyond Leadership" (SKV Verlag, 2019) as well as numerous publications in the field of leadership, people management, and change management.

Matthias Mölleney is a director at the international think tank "The Future Work Forum" and a member of various foundations and boards of directors.

With Andrea Delannoy

As Marian Wright Edelman said, “You can’t be what you can’t see”. This quote demonstrates the importance of role models in creating our vision of what is possible. Andrea Delannoy has recognized this and has been engaged in making more role models visible to young women as well as children through her various ventures.

With MOD-ELLE, a Swiss nonprofit organization whose mission is to challenge gender stereotyping in molding and pursuing youth’s career aspiration. Andrea is convinced that bringing role models closer to classrooms will spark youth’s interest and open new perspectives in their career choices.

In this episode Andrea shares why it is so important to start building diverse role models at an early age.

“Children learn by watching us more than by listening to us.”

·  Why it is important to have role models in school

·  What the role of companies is in creating role models

·  What purpose role models serve and whether it is more impactful to have relatable role models rather than public figures

-  Engage in offering different perspectives to children about what futures they can have by being a role model for MOD-ELLE

-  Don’t think you are not famous enough to be a role model. Everyone is a role model.

-  Encourage your male colleagues and friends to challenge established role stereotypes by serving as role models

OECD Reports on youth and the job market, can be found on fishintheboardroom.ch/10

www.mod-elle.ch

[email protected]

Twitter @mod_elle_ch

Facebook @mod.elle.ch

LinkedIn mod-elle-ch

A former Auditor for the Romanian National Court of Audit, Andrea Delannoy moved to Switzerland in 2003 and she put her efforts since into promoting a gender equal workplace.

During her MAS at the University of Geneva Andrea became aware of the missed opportunities for women in Switzerland. In 2010 she co-founded "Expanding your horizons" an association in Geneva, whose mission is to promote STEM careers for girls.

Five years in the management of a company specializing in career counselling gave Andrea further insight into the horizontal segregation in Switzerland, which starts from early ages and heavily impacts the parity in the workplace.

In 2018, Andrea founded MOD-ELLE, an association based in Lausanne whose mission is to tackle gender stereotyping in career aspirations and choices for young people. MOD-ELLE offers to primary school teachers the opportunity to invite inspiring women from different professional backgrounds into their classrooms to talk to children about their jobs, feed their curiosity, break down gender stereotypes and open children’s eyes to future possibilities.

Mother of two daughters and passionate about the intergenerational learning, Andrea mentors Masters’ students of the University of Geneva since 2012 and is an Ambassador for Women International Networking, an international network of female leaders.

with Annabella Bassler

Internationally, males represent 82% of media coverage, whilst in Switzerland, this number is only slightly better with 75%. To address this discrepancy, Annabella Bassler, the CFO of Ringier AG, introduced Equal Voice in 2019. This initiative aims to increase female media coverage by using artificial intelligence. The tool analyzes the content of media and provides an objective factor, which indicates the coverage of women compared to that of men.

How do journalists and company leaders react, when they learn about this unequal reality? And how do Swiss Media like Beobachter, Schweizer Illustrierte, and Blick approach these initiatives?

In this episode, Annabella shares the particular steps they took towards increasing female coverage in Swiss media and the results they achieved.

“And we have great journalists. And we have great editors in chief. And they are aware of the framing. It’s like when they have their meetings and go through the articles and the pictures, it definitely helps that we have EqualVoice because it just pushed their awareness tremendously. Everybody can just say now in a meeting “Is Equal Voice in there?” And they don't have to make up a story about why they think it's about discrimination or why they think the woman was not placed or framed correctly. They can just say, it's not EqualVoice how can we make it EqualVoice.”

·  How to beware of your USPs, for example, for Ringier it’s journalist’s independence.

·  How to engage all actors and raise awareness.

·  How to take the emotions out and make Equal Voice a diversity bon-mot. This will reduce the friction of people voicing this issue and encourage more professionals to speak up.

·  Keep it as simple as possible.

·  Walk the talk. Firstly, ensure equal pay. Secondly, define your Diversity & Inclusion strategy. Then hire, retain promote.

·  Don’t delegate the implementation of the D&I strategy to HR. To gain the right momentum, this strategy has to be led by the board.

·  Include employees in you the discussion of D&I progress. They can bring new valuable ideas and you will increase their awareness of the issue.

Additional Resources on EqualVoice (German)

EqualVoice - Die Idee: https://youtu.be/In4jtOlOMtU

EqualVoice - Rückblick 2020: https://youtu.be/7mhiUJVBROs

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annabella-dr-bassler-6473b023/

Homepage Ringier: https://www.ringier.ch/en

Annabella Bassler (*1977) has been CFO of Ringier AG since June 2012. She began her career at Ringier in 2007, working in a number of financial roles. In addition, she has also been responsible for Ringier’s activities in Romania since mid-2014. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Ticketcorner AG, Ringier Digital Ventures AG, Ringier Axel Springer Media AG and is also on the board of the child welfare organization Plan International Switzerland. She studied economics at the European Business School in Oestrich-Winkel, Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, subsequently completing a doctorate. After gaining practical experience in consulting, Annabella Bassler worked from 2004 to 2007 in various financial roles for Hamburg Süd, formerly the Oetker Group’s shipping company, in Hamburg.