Engendering productivity

Do women managers enjoy gender-based advantages over male colleagues (and rivals)? Are those advantages particularly relevant in certain industries? Is telecommunications one of those industries?

Some successful women executives outside the telecom industry recently answered "yes" to the first two questions. If the logic behind those affirmative answers is correct, then telecom would be one of the industries where women managers would enjoy an advantage.

Ken Auletta is the leading journalist covering the entertainment and mass communications industries. Auletta's work examines the intersection of business and personality (or money and creativity). He specializes in descriptive, insightful pieces about a world driven by creativity, mergers, money and mania. For the April 20 edition of the New Yorker, he talked to leading women executives in the entertainment and information industries about their careers and futures.

These pioneers described an up-by-the-bootstraps-in-a-hostile-land experience, a triumph of will and brains in a world predisposed to devalue their brains and smash their will. A few went further and connected their success to advantages unique to their gender. The business world, they argued, now treasures characteristics that women seem to possess at birth-and that men are born without.

Napoleon in pinstripes is no longer the corporate ideal. The business world has moved from a rigid, hierarchical model to a partnership model. Executives now lead by mentoring, not by hectoring. Partnership has replaced ownership, team building has succeeded the heroic individual. Organizations are families, not armies.

Long burdened in the business world by the assumption that women are more emotional than men, and correspondingly less objective and productive, some women now have appropriated the assumption-and argue it is a management strength rather than a weakness, particularly in industries that prize personal creativity and teamwork.

Sophisticated emotional responses are productive in today's business world because emotions are central to effective team-building.

The telecom industry does not prize personal creativity. But in direct response to competition, the telecom industry also has moved from a hierarchical, bureaucratic model to a partnership model.

Observers searching for the organizational future of the industry look at new carriers, not the RHCs or AT&T. Executives at the traditional carriers are looking at the new carriers not just as competitors but as models in how they approach the market-and organize themselves to maximize their assets.

Unlike traditional carriers, new carriers from their inception have business plans built around partnership, not domination. They pride themselves on entrepreneurship, but it is an entrepreneurship of small, flexible, talented groups, not of the corporate pyramid dominated by a single herculean figure.

If women enjoy gender-based advantages as managers, telecom should be one industry where women executives do well, particularly at the new carriers.

Right now, women are not thriving in the telecom industry, as a Telephony analysis by News Editor Joan Engebretson recently demonstrated (see her story "Women at the Top," Jan. 19, page 23). More women are moving further up the telecom ladder, but women are underrepresented in senior management.

Even a casual observation of most telecom gatherings would support that conclusion.

Several sources in Engebretson's story shared experiences involving double standards, and although most said that traditional carriers have become more egalitarian, few of her sources argued that women managers enjoy gender-based advantages.

The telecom industry in the next decade inevitably will have more women senior executives for a variety of reasons. More women are entering the industry as managers, contributing powerfully to their companies and moving into middle management ranks. Managers who exclude women from consideration for senior jobs are less productive managers and thus tend to be flushed from the system as the system becomes more demanding.

Excluding all other factors, those two factors guarantee that the next generation of senior telecom industry managers will have a significantly larger proportion of women than any previous generation.

The need to maximize productivity will impose gender equity on telecom organizations that would otherwise resist it. Smart telecom companies will recognize the curve and get ahead of it by ambitiously developing the talents of their capable women managers-and aggressively recruiting their rivals'.