But evangelism does not necessarily lead to results. Another newspaper wrote at the time that the 30% Club had a worthy ambition but ‘was very vague about how it was going to achieve it’. I soon realised that this vagueness was in fact an essential ingredient. Nothing had worked before so we needed to draw up a new map to reach our destination. We were wholly open to fresh ideas; we listened and adapted quickly as we made progress or encountered setbacks. Most of the time it was like driving in fog: we could see the immediate few feet in front, but the rest of the route was unclear. As long as we kept progressing, and learning from what was working and what wasn’t, we could reach the goal. I became a great believer in pilots to test ideas quickly rather than endless theorising. After all, we knew we had to experiment to make progress.
The approach the 30% Club took was to think big, start small but start now.
The fear of what might go wrong
In 2016, Harvard Business School Professor Iris Bohnet, the author of the acclaimed book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, wrote a case study about the rapid rise in the number of women on UK boards, something that has so far eluded the United States. Iris invited me over to help teach the case study to the first group of students. I had never even been to a Harvard MBA class, let alone taught one, and it was a fascinating experience. Professor Bohnet split the 80 students into five groups, each role-playing one of the parties involved (the government, the cross-party task force established under Labour peer Lord Mervyn Davies, the 30% Club, the executive search community and investors). The students’ first task was to list the difficulties they saw ahead. I then explained what had actually happened, whether the anticipated problems arose and how we overcame them. It was an intriguing exercise. The students came up with a cumulative total of no less than 53 potential problems. Many did arise and I started my remarks by noting that it was lucky I had not heard them before we embarked on the campaign, as it would have seemed an impossible task.
It is so easy to come up with reasons not to do something. There is always something that might go wrong. It is often very hard to envisage how to navigate through problems before they arise – but when we encounter them, I’ve found, we can often cope and find a way through. It’s very important not to panic at the lack of visibility or the unexpected twists and turns but to see that as part of the journey. That holds true in our careers as well as our personal lives, and helps us achieve so much more than if we hesitate over each step for fear of not being able to see the next or of how we will cope when we get there.
As it turned out, despite the wobbles and setbacks, the 30% Club’s timing caught the mood of the moment. The financial crisis created real appetite for change, then a few months after the 30% Club launch, Lord Davies concluded his cross-party public review into the scarcity of women on UK company boards. He made ten recommendations: like the 30% Club, he backed voluntary action rather than mandatory quotas. Lord Davies told me at the time that he had a number of reasons not to recommend legislation: one was that his daughter would ‘never speak to him again’, another was that the 30% Club chairmen supporters had promised that if given the chance, they would deliver progress through voluntary action.
Over the next five years the Davies Steering Committee and the 30% Club formed a powerful double act, combining supportive public policy with private sector action. By the time we reached our shared self-imposed deadline of end-2015, the results for the FTSE 100 fell between Lord Davies’ 25% and our 30% goals. Over 26% of FTSE-100 board positions were held by women and there were no longer any all-male FTSE-100 boards. The next biggest 250 companies had achieved even more progress from their weaker starting position: nearly 20% female directors and just 15 all-male boards.
This wasn’t an extrapolation of the past, it was a big leap forward.
It was very exciting to see this jump in the numbers – but even more exciting to see a change in the thinking. The issue was now being seen through a different lens. And success led to more success, increasing the acceptability of what we were aiming for so that eventually it just became expected.
(From Professional Boards Forum BoardWatch, data provided by BoardEx and The Female FTSE Board Report)
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