In November 2011, I interviewed Sir Philip Hampton for the 30% Club website. At the time of our interview he was chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, having taken that role after the bank had been bailed out. One of his immediate tasks was to appoint a new board. It is unusual for the chairman of a big company to have carte blanche and Sir Philip talked me through his thought-process. The previous 18-member board was far too big, as well as homogeneous. Sir Philip set about creating a 12-member board, with at least three women, some international experience relevant to RBS, and also, as he put it to me, a blend of experienced directors with fresher faces. He wanted diversity of character and background: 12 former CEOs would not make for a good boardroom dynamic.
As we were talking, he said he wanted to tell me something that he thought I would find encouraging. Every year, a group of FTSE-100 chairmen gathered for lunch. They had met almost exactly a year before, when the 30% Club had just formally launched. The conversation turned to the initiative, and there was a very brief discussion about whether this was something that should be supported – Sir Philip said that it was quickly closed down as ‘not really for us’. The same annual lunch had taken place just the week before Sir Philip and I were meeting. This time, the topic had been extensively discussed and there was no question over whether to support the initiative. Instead, the chairmen were asking each other what they were doing to actually meet the target. What a difference a year can make.
But it wasn’t just the zeitgeist or the combination of voices that made an impact. The 30% Club’s tactics were different from anything that had been tried before – in some respects deliberately so, in others more a stroke of luck.
Through both the campaign’s successes and failures, I learned a lot about how to effect change. I believe it’s a replicable formula that can help us reach our bigger ambition of gender equality.
There were seven success factors. I’ve mentioned five:
seizing the opportunity created by dislocation
focusing on the business aspects, rather than ‘merely’ the fairness issue
having a measurable goal with a deadline to create urgency
involving men with the ability to change things, and
being open to new ideas.
The sixth was something of a ‘fake it till we make it’ approach. The 30% Club took one step forward but we would act as if we had taken two. We talked up the progress, we celebrated good stories, we were confident. This did not always come easily. But I could see that people wanted to become part of a successful movement and that there was a circularity to that success. The more progress we made, the more progress we were likely to continue making.
The intriguing aspect was, the bolder I became in my requests, the more likely the response was to be ‘yes’. One particularly ambitious event was a Washington DC breakfast, generously hosted by KPMG, and deliberately planned to coincide with the 2014 IMF conference. The US chapter of the 30% Club had just been launched and while Peter Grauer, the dedicated and energetic founding chairman supporter, would be on the West Coast at the time talking to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about the campaign, we saw an opportunity to raise the 30% Club’s global profile just before the IMF’s official business got under way in DC. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and father of four girls, would be attending the conference so I asked Sir Roger (who was then serving as a non-executive director on the Bank’s Court – this is a tight-knit community) if he could see whether the Governor might be prepared to speak at our breakfast. The answer was encouraging but not definite. The Governor’s office explained they could not ‘mark-up’ his diary but said that Mr Carney was minded to accept if he was free. This left me in something of a bind. I wanted to encourage global bank chiefs to come to the breakfast, but they were much more likely to do so if the Governor was speaking. I spent a week of our family summer holiday hand-writing notes (which kept flying into the hotel pool) to invite CEOs and policy-makers to the event, indicating that we expected the Governor to be our speaker. Meanwhile I kept the Governor’s office up to date with the list of expected influential attendees, as that would surely increase the chances of his attendance. Brenda Trenowden of ANZ Bank, who later took on the mantle of leading the 30% Club, worked tirelessly to round up those acceptances. Finally, it was confirmed that the Governor would speak. Unlikely as it seems, this whole precarious plan, infused with a dose of bravado, paid off. The room was full of influential men and women and the Governor spoke openly and eloquently about the Bank’s 300-year traditions and the importance of diversity in creating a modern culture. The bank CEOs, seated at tables at the front, took turns with the microphone to contribute their own thoughts and ideas about how to accelerate progress around the globe. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
The 30% Club’s final key success factor was taking a feminine approach to solving a business problem.
The word ‘feminine’ divides people. Some object to the very idea that there are characteristics more generally associated with girls and women. Of course, there can be as much (or more) difference between individuals of the same gender as between the genders. That is, in my view, perfectly compatible with using the words ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ to describe traits more commonly found in either girls or boys. It certainly doesn’t mean that those words apply to every individual girl or boy.
I’ve also encountered the anxiety that by using the term we may perpetuate gender inequalities. In fact, I believe the opposite may be true. If we understand each other’s (average) differences better, we can develop more ‘gender intelligent’ strategies to encourage both men and women to thrive, rather than try to force everyone into a system that tends to motivate one or the other. It’s important to recognise that we can be equal but different if we’re really going to achieve progress.
To become equal, but to stay different.
Punch Magazine, August 1971
(© Punch Limited)
It’s a contentious topic, and we’ll explore it more fully in the next chapter. For now, let’s use ‘feminine’ as perhaps imperfect shorthand for the approach that defined the 30% Club. We were not looking to assume the traits of the group that we were aiming to join – not trying to simply replace a few men with a few women who were just the same. The goal was, and remains, more diversity of thought, of approach, of behaviours. The 30% Club’s approach therefore emphasised, not downplayed, difference and in particular the qualities associated with women and girls: empathy, social sensitivity, collaboration, kindness and gentleness.
Encouraging voluntary action rather than legislation or quotas to achieve our goal of more women on boards was the most obvious manifestation of this feminine approach. Forcing people to do something would have completely undermined what we were trying to do. Quotas are very much command-and-control, a confrontational rather than an empathetic approach. Few people seemed to understand this, focusing on the speed of attaining results, not what those results really signified. The 30% Club’s ambitious goal was that men and women would become unified in desiring boards with a better gender balance, and that this would help improve culture throughout their organisations, as well as increasing the numbers of women on boards. We wanted to ensure not only that the very best people serve on boards, but to open up the definition of ‘best’ so it did not mean ‘just like the existing directors’.
Another symptom of our feminine approach was to be open source, to partner not only with the Davies Committee but with many others who were already doing great work in this area. There was no sense of competition, helped by the fact that the 30% Club was not a diversity business, simply a group of business leaders focused on achieving results. Members of the Steering Committee included leaders of successful initiatives like the Professional Boards Forum, which introduces chairmen to women with the ‘undiscovered’ potential to be non-executive directors. The Forum stages events where candidates solve