Your Workplace Legacy - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Establish affinity groups.
• Take risks – speak the unspoken.
• Define new standards of excellence and methods to measure them.

As women increasingly inhabit C-suites, they are presented with a unique opportunity to leave a lasting legacy that will not only be personally rewarding, but also make a significant change to business as usual. Often, they reach the pinnacle of their careers during the final five to seven years of their working lives, a time when their experience, maturity, and longevity with a company gives them a wide berth to take more risks. They can do more than simply make a living. They can also make a difference. One unique way they can leave a lasting legacy is to become an advocate for ensuring equality for all people in the workplace.

Having “arrived” provides women with a unique opportunity to return to the values, causes, and activities they may have had to temporarily abandon as they created financial security for themselves and their families. It is time for them to create the narrative, thoughtfully and intentionally, that will define what people say about them after they have gone, while at the same time shifting the paradigm of their workplace. It will provide the forensic evidence that they existed in the world of work.

Although there are innumerable ways to create a legacy before moving forward to a post-career life, included here are three suggestions for revitalizing and rejuvenating the last few years of work.

1. Establish affinity groups.

In the past decade, progressive companies and professional services firms have instituted affinity groups, or self-supporting networks of people with common interests and challenges. GE, for example, has affinity groups for women, Asian Americans, and African Americans. Supported by the company, these groups plan events, provide mentors, and conduct training programmes to help members navigate the complexities of corporate culture. Not only do affinity groups help current employees, they reduce staff turnover and attract talent by exhibiting the company’s commitment to diversity.

2. Take risks – speak the unspoken.

You’ve reached the stage of your career where your reputation is established and you most likely can “get away with” saying things that people on the way up can’t. It’s the perfect time to raise concerns you’ve had for a while but have never had the courage to express. This includes voicing concerns about the number of women and minorities in senior positions, how developmental assignments are awarded, or discrepancies in pay and promotions. This is not to say that you should let diplomacy and political savvy go by the wayside. The influencing skills you developed throughout your career must still be employed, but you can now use them to say things that can make a significant difference for your colleagues and your company, when others are too fearful to bring them up.

3. Define new standards of excellence and methods to measure them.

A soon-to-retire executive was lamenting the fact that the people in line for succession didn’t share her generation’s work ethic and commitment to excellence. Who’s fault is that? If you collude with younger generations to keep the bar low you’ll only get average performance. As I have so often told clients, “What you measure is what you get.” While you were busy producing or putting out fires you may not have had the time, but now you do – or should. Work with representatives from diverse groups within your organization to establish a culture of excellence. Define what excellent performance looks like and sounds like. Then develop performance measurement systems that assess not only how well someone does their job, but the degree to which they exhibit the performance standards for excellence. You can then be proud of leaving a legacy of excellence.