In March 2021, a new regulation mandated that all listed companies in the UAE should have at least one female board member. The aim is to boost gender parity and give talented women more visibility in the corporate world.
Yet, well-educated and experienced women often doubt if they should be applying for those board-level positions.
Having witnessed the different qualities that men and women bring to the boardroom, I aim to encourage female leaders, their partners, and colleagues to see the immense value female board members can add to the business, elevating the results to achieve sustainable success.
In my last 10 years of working with boards, two elements stand out. First, a board cannot make direct decisions; it can only advise the CEO and their team. The value any of advice comes from understanding the enterprise as a holistic ecosystem. Second, the vast majority of CEOs are male, with implicit biases formed from their years of experience in the industries they have worked.
The role of the board
The purpose of an advisory or regulatory board is to bring knowledge from other industries, support critical thinking, and provide guidance to increase the confidence of the decision-makers who lead the company. The board’s primary customer is the CEO, who is the ultimate authority for the whole enterprise and answers to the company’s investors, government, external customers, and suppliers.
While the board has the power to hire and fire the CEO, it cannot make direct business decisions. Providing sharp, timely, and bold advice to the CEO and their team relies on a deep understanding of the enterprise as a whole.
Female leadership can add depth, diversity, broader grasp and value to this understanding and advice. Ultimately, the board’s effectiveness is calculated by how much the value of the company increases.
Female leadership can add depth, diversity, broader grasp and value to this understanding and advice.
The gender gap
The fact remains that most board members are successful men with vast business experience and acumen amassed from different industries over many years. When a female leader – though accomplished in her own right – sees all these men in the company profile, she might be apprehensive, thinking, “How will I fit in there?” and “Will they accept me?”
This psyche needs to be dismantled. Over the last 10 years of working with boards and CEOs, I’ve discovered a vicious cycle that originates from the continued male-domination of the boardroom, which can be addressed by bringing more diversity to the table.
The vicious cycle
The vast majority of CEOs globally are males who adopt the silent internal belief of “I know best” in the presence of their board. Meanwhile, male board members often rely on their own experiences and implicit biases when diagnosing problems and advising solutions. The guidance is often too generic, adding little value for the CEO, as valuable advice can only come from understanding the enterprise as an end-to-end holistic ecosystem.
The vast majority of CEOs globally are males.
When male CEOs do have doubts, they are often afraid to verbalise them to male board members in case they are perceived as weak and not capable of leading the organisation. If a CEO can’t share their doubts openly, deep dialogue and mindful reflection cannot take place, and therefore the advice provided by the board will not add value. The organisational management continues to operate on the same old knowledge and paradigm, delivering the same mediocre results each year.
The female influence
I’ve witnessed that bringing in female board members can help break this vicious cycle of mediocrity, an experience backed up by research. The findings of a 2020 study by leadership experts Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found that women were rated more positively on 13 of the 19 competency assessments that encompass overall leadership effectiveness, with particular reference to leadership in a crisis.
Women specifically rated highly on critical boardroom competencies, such as championing change, establishing stretched goals, collaboration and teamwork, and customer focus. This is reflected in my own experience: Male CEOs are more open to sharing their internal doubts with female board members, helping to foster an open and systematic dialogue where new knowledge is created.
The added value of diversity
Some specific ways in which female board members add value:
- They see the bigger picture – the customer, supplier, government needs and interactions, and can make the connections so desperately needed in our ever-increasingly siloed business world.
- They have the natural ability to see the enterprise as a holistic system, with its inter-dependencies and cross-disciplinary context.
- They take the initiative to recognise functional problems and champion changes to solve them.
- They can work collaboratively with the male CEO to take him outside the C suite’s confines and help him see the enterprise outside in, from the broader ecosystems perspective.
- They can drive results by making the male CEO aware of the internal managerial routines, ensuring they are designed for value creation.
It’s no secret that men and women have different innate skill sets. There are clear business benefits to achieving gender balance in the boardroom, from strategic planning to operational outputs.
Laura Gerrits-Gedvile, Chief Executive Officer of The Holistic Enterprise.
The Holistic Enterprise helps CEOs implement management strategies that enable organisations to adapt to a changing world, eliminating functional boundaries and involving customers and suppliers in the end-to-end business ecosystem. Since 2010, The Holistic Enterprise has led and worked with Scandinavian and Northern European CEOs and business owners in more than 27 industries.
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