Women in Business by Santa Maria Times

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

WOMEN IN BUSINESS

In this June 23, 2018, file photo, Lompoc City Councilwoman Jenelle Osborne poses for a picture with police officers during the Lompoc Valley Flower Festival Parade. Osborne was elected Lompoc mayor in the Nov. 6 election. Len Wood, Staff

Jenelle Osborne advocates for women, Lompoc, and

FINDING YOUR PASSION

Businesswoman, civic leader credits women before her for showing the way Jennifer Best CONTRIBUTING WRITER‌

‌Jenelle Osborne fills her life with passion and laughter, whether running her business, volunteering in the community or taking the gavel as Lompoc’s newest mayor. “Being in business is about finding what you’re passionate about, doing your homework, being your own advocate. When there’s setback, learn from it. Grieve, but then pick yourself up, dust yourself off, learn your lesson, apply it and get right back into the breach,” said Osborne, who was sworn into office in December. Raised in a family of boys, the Texan learned early to work just as hard as any man. “When you’re raised in a family of boys you see that, growing up, they’re being told to ask for what you want, to play hard, to play well, to work hard and know what you’re doing. The same thing applies to women as well,” Osborne said. The road to owning and running her own business, and now running the show at the City of Lompoc, has included an array of jobs, volunteer positions and

Willis Jacobson, Staff‌

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New Lompoc Mayor Jenelle Osborne is sworn in alongside re-elected Councilmen Dirk Starbuck, center, and Victor Vega, right, by City Clerk Stacey Haddon, left, during a special meeting of the Lompoc City Council at City Hall.

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Then-Lompoc mayoral candidate Jenelle Osborne talks to a supporter at an election night gathering in November. Frank Cowan, Contributor‌

Len Wood, Staff‌

Former Lompoc City Council member Jenelle Osborne, now mayor, discusses rules for a local cannabis industry during a council meeting in 2018.

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opportunities which all have shared a core component: her penchant for organizing. After studying journalism, Osborne earned her degree in history from Texas Woman’s University. Both majors fed her interest in research, in data, in putting the parts together into a workable, understandable whole. Those organizational skills led her in short order to jobs in program management, marketing and managing thousands of adult volunteers. “My corporate career had been all about taking the larger picture and working through details, implementing and organizing. I just seem to have a knack for that,” Osborne said. Once established on the Central Coast, the opportunity arose for Osborne to explore her own passion as a small business owner. In 2005, she established OriJenelle Organizer, a personal and professional organization business that focuses on helping clients from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara develop systems that make their lives run more smoothly. The company also provides non-profit event planning. “It’s an amalgamation of the tool set I’ve developed from college with the history degree that involved research, analysis and interpretation to being in a military family, moving and packing and moving and packing, and helping friends with their own homes and projects,” Osborne said. Her friends note her home is all about organization: a place for everything, and everything in its place. And she had helped one friend after another organize their personal spaces over the years, just for fun. “It’s important, when you’re starting a business, to look at your own skill set, consider what you love doing, consider if it’s something you want to get paid to do, something that’s satisfying on a daily basis,” Osborne said. Working for herself meant more opportunity to shop locally, explore Lompoc, get to know the community that she’s called home these past two decades. “I discovered what was here, became more immersed in the history of the community. Lompoc has so much potential,” she said. She started volunteering and found herself appointed to the city’s Economic Development Committee on which she ultimately served as chair, then found herself making presentations before Lompoc City Council. Using her marketing and organizational background, she worked with various inputs to help develop programs she believes will provide a brighter future for her community. “I’m transitioning to the point where I fully embrace being mayor, and while it’s a very small stipend, I see it as a full-time job, especially in a city like Lompoc that really needs a full-time advocate to identify its strengths and opportunities and talk strongly about them. We need to change our economy by changing our ability to talk more positively about ourselves,” Osborne said. She credits the women who came before her for expanding opportunities including her grandmother who marched for the right to vote and her mother who took one of few positions open to women in her day and used it to lead her daughter’s generation toward more opportunity. “Do not let being a woman stop you. It absolutely doesn’t matter what sex you are. Running a business, being in business, is about preparation, commitment and willingness to do the work. Be bold. Take risks. Find a mentor. Don’t shy away from a field because it’s maledominated. There’s still a door,” Osborne said.

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SMART BUSINESS Welcoming women into the boardroom is not just a trend or a flavor of the week. It’s an emerging best business practice that can translate into corporate success.

‘Massive business opportunity’

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The Harvard Business Review pointed out in 2014 that women were leading Germany, the IMF and the Federal Reserve — and held up gender diversity in the boardroom as a “massive business opportunity.” Meanwhile, Business Insider notes that only 3 to 4 percent of CEOs around the world are women, and in 2012, the nonprofit Catalyst found that women held just 16.6 percent of board seats in Fortune 500 companies. “The shift is away from wondering what is wrong with women who don’t make it to the top, and towards analyzing what is right with companies and leaders that do build gender balanced leadership teams — and tap into the resulting competitive edge,” according to the Harvard Business Review. “In the US, women under 30 out-earn their male peers and 40 percent of American households have women as the main breadwinner. … Companies with more gender-balanced leadership teams out-perform those with less. While the skeptics will spend another decade resisting this fact with demands to prove causality, the best

leaders prefer leading the charge to following it.” A 2009 Catalyst study concluded that Fortune 500 companies with higher numbers of women board members reported a 42 percent greater return on sales and a 53 percent higher return on equity. And the benefits aren’t limited to a business’ bottom line. “Companies with both women and men in the boardroom are better equipped to oversee corporate actions and ensure corporate citizenship standards are not only met, but exceeded — building stronger, more sustainable companies,” according to Catalyst. “A company that holds its supply chain accountable, values customer loyalty and improves both the community and environment creates a positive cycle of influence.”

Overcoming obstacles

The challenges are undeniable. Decision-makers must be trained on the differences between men and women, such as the varying ways in which they communicate and move through their careers, and entrenchment against gender quotas can be shared by workers of both genders. But the potential rewards are too big to ignore. Says Catalyst: “This approach not only makes the world a better place but also increases the likelihood of sustainable big wins for the company and its stakeholders.”

MAKING PROGRESS We have come a long way from a time when starting a family was a career death sentence for a woman. That doesn’t mean, however, that women in corporate America aren’t still facing unique struggles. Women who took time away from their careers to focus on their families once found themselves falling behind in the race to the top of their industries. But a Pew Research Center survey found that only one in five Americans believed that was the case by early 2015.

An Old Problem

Leaning on Strengths © Fotolia

There’s evidence that corporate America is starting to buy into the idea of women’s

see the value behind their way of doing things,” wrote Glenn Llopis for Forbes Magazine. “While women leaders have their productivity secrets, it’s not secret where they come from: the leadership traits that women leaders naturally possess and — based on my personal and professional experiences — are the most undervalued.” Demonstrating the value of these innate leadership skills may be crucial to womens’ success. According to the Harvard Business Review: “Smart leaders have understood for a while now that gender balance delivers better and more sustainable performance.”

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Even so, Pew reports, “the public is divided about whether, even in the face of the major advances women have made in the workplace, the imbalance in corporate America will change in the foreseeable future.” About 53 percent said men would continue to control boardrooms, while 44 percent expected women to pull even with men in executive positions. (One bright spot: Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said they expected to see a female president in their lifetime.) In fact, respondents to the survey said the top issue keeping women from making gains in leadership positions was not any particular weakness but that old double standard that women just can’t seem to shake. So what’s a girl with her eye on the corner office to do?

particular strengths in business. The same Pew survey found that many people believed women had an advantage over men in some characteristics that could help them get ahead in business and politics. Honesty, ethics and compromise were areas where respondents said women may have the upper hand, as well as providing fair pay and benefits and mentoring young workers. Men, meanwhile, were seen as being more willing to take risks and better at negotiating profitable deals. “I’ve seen women run the show for years both at home and in the workplace, which has enabled me to recognize behavior patterns and

Suited for Leadership © Fotolia

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illary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher. Even if you don’t agree with their politics, there’s no denying these women worked their way into positions of great leadership. While women in business may struggle to notch up the same high-profile success, there are many qualities women bring to work that can create bigtime value for their employers. Bob Zenger of leadership consulting firm Zenger Folkman wrote for Business Insider that his firm’s research leaves little question as to how women perform at the upper echelons of corporate America, demonstrating themselves to be incrementally more effective in middle management, senior management and executive management. “To the degree that senior executives and boards of directors are putting men into senior positions, fearing that women will not perform well at higher levels, we hope that this information adds to the assurance that they need not worry about that.”

Empathy Matters

When Fortune magazine compiled a list of the World’s Greatest Leaders in 2015, it was emphatic about the fact that the 15 women on its roster were experts in a singular type of management. “It’s a model in which leaders must influence a wide range of groups over which they have no direct authority, while those groups typically command much power of their own through their access to information and their ability to communicate with practically anyone,” wrote Geoff Colvin for Fortune. “Am I really saying

that women on average are just better at this kind of leadership? Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” Those 15 women “exemplify a new model of leadership,” said Colvin, and at the root of this skill is a trait that science has attributed more to women than men: empathy. “Even at early ages, the way girls talk is much more cooperative and collaborative than the way boys talk; girls show more concern for fairness than boys do,” wrote Colvin. It’s not hard to see how having an authentic emotional response to other people’s feelings can go a long way in a collaborative environment, giving women an advantage over their male coworkers, he said. Self Improvement Writing for Business Insider, Zenger said his company’s research has found that women in business show a remarkable ability to improve themselves as leaders. He calls it “practicing self development.” “This competency measures the extent to which people ask for feedback and make changes based on that feedback,” wrote Zenger. Over time, men tend to ask for less feedback about their performance, while women continue to evaluate their own performance.

Other Competencies

In fact, women outscored men in most of the areas evaluated by Zenger Folkman, including taking initiative, building relationships, collaboration and teamwork, displaying integrity and honesty. Researchers also shook up some stereotypes, deeming women more effective in areas traditionally dominated by men: sales, technology, legal, engineering and research and development.

WOMEN LEADERS AND PROFITS profitable firm with no women in leadership positions, they found, could experience a 15 percent increase in net revenue after infusing its leadership with 30 percent women. “This pattern underscores the importance of creating a pipeline of female managers and not simply getting women to the very top,” the researchers wrote. Another study showed the correlation between women leadership and a corporation’s success. Human resources consulting firm DDI and nonprofit business research group The Conference Board found that in the top 20 percent of companies in regards to financial, 27 percent of leaders are women. Among the bottom 20 percent of companies, only 19 percent of leaders are women.

Country by country

Quota questions

Quota laws such as those enacted in some European countries may not be effective in producing better outcomes for companies, researchers found. A more effective approach might be to focus on C-suite positions, such as CEO or COO, or mid-level management positions. “If women struggle to reach upper management, a quota would carry heavier short-run costs,” they wrote. “In this case it might be better to pursue policies that help women in the middle of their careers before directly addressing board membership.”

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When Peterson Institute researchers looked at women’s roles in 22,000 publicly traded firms in 91 countries, they found that factors such as girls’ math test scores, healthy attitudes toward women

in leadership positions and liberal paternal leave policies influenced how well women were represented in corporate leadership. Finance, healthcare, utilities and telecommunications sectors showed the highest shares of female executive and board members, while basic materials, technology, energy, and industrials had the smallest shares.

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There are many ways companies benefit from having women in leadership positions. New research suggests that those benefits include a healthier bottom line. Many studies have found positive relationships between women in the boardroom and companies’ success. Two new pieces of research show how that might translate into profit. A working paper titled “Is Gender Diversity Profitable? Evidence from a Global Survey,” was released by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in February 2016. Researchers set out to expand upon a 2015 McKinsey Global Institute report that concluded “a scenario in which women achieved complete gender parity with men could increase global output by more than one-quarter relative to a business-as-usual scenario.” They concluded that the share of corporate executives, followed by the share of women on corporate boards, had a positive effect on their firms’ performance. A

More Work to Do

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lthough much lip service is paid to increasing the numbers of women in board rooms and executive offices, and some countries even mandate quotas of women in leadership

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positions, there still is much room for improvement. Women are still underrepresented in the corporate world. Addressing “the relative absence of women on

corporate executive boards and at the upper levels of management globally,” researchers set out to quantify the problem for the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The Problem

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Nearly 60 percent of the firms they analyzed had no female board members, a little more than 50 percent had no females in “C-suite” roles, and less than 5 percent had a female chief executive officer. About half the firms had no female executives, and about half of the ones that did had only one woman in leadership. The working paper cited a 2012 report by McKinsey & Company, which showed how differently women fare in various industries. In finance, about the same number of men and women are hired, but by the middle-management level, there are half as many women remaining in the field. In the transport, logistics and energy fields, in which fewer women are usually hired, those who are hired reach middle management at higher rates.

The Path Forward

Norway, Denmark, Finland and France have legislated quotas for women’s business roles, though the authors of the study found that those laws couldn’t be proven effective. Instead, voluntary programs might be more effective, researchers wrote. “If at least some of the dearth of women in the upper ranks of corporate leadership reflects pure discrimination, proactive nondiscriminating firms will outperform their discriminating rivals and expand at their expense.” Indeed, companies are already taking on the challenge. Daimler Corporation, pledged in 2006 to fill 20 percent of management positions with women by 2020, and a campaign called 2020 Women on Boards aims to increase women’s share of leadership roles in U.S. companies to at least 20 percent by 2020. Other similar efforts are underway worldwide.