Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:02:26: Barriers to progression

00:04:00: Lack of sponsorship
00:05:11: Fear of failure
00:07:26: Glass cliff
00:12:39: Ability and support
00:16:58: What can we do
00:19:13: What an individual can do for themselves
00:21:00: Lady gang
00:23:29: Collaboration not competition
00:24:26: Sophie's best piece of career advice
00:25:20: Final comments

Helen Tupper: Welcome to the Squiggly Careers Podcast.  This is a weekly podcast to help you with the ups, downs, ins and outs of careers today and to share with you tools and insights to help you invest in your development.  I'm Helen, one of your hosts, and today is the last episode in our current Ask the Expert series.  Instead of me and Sarah, your normal hosts, you've got me and Sophie, Sophie Williams to be precise, and we're going to be talking about progression.  Sophie is the author of two books, Anti-Racist Ally: An Introduction to Action and Activism; and Millennial Black, which looks at how black women's intersection or identity, so that blackness plus womanness, shape their experiences at work.

Her career has included working in leading advertising agencies and running her own agency, Blanket Fort; and we met through our TEDx London talks where Sophie's talk on the glass cliff and how it holds back underrepresented groups at work really made me think about our mission at the business that Sarah and I run together, which is to make careers better for everybody.  Sarah and I knew that we wanted to cover progression in this Ask the Expert series, and we thought that Sophie's insights and perspectives would be hugely valuable.  

So, I hope you enjoy the conversation, and I would absolutely love to know what you take away.  I'll share our email details at the end of the episode, so do get in touch, and don't forget that we've also got the podsheet, which you can download to support your reflections and also PodPlus on Thursday at 9.00am, if you want to join a discussion to dive a bit deeper into the topic of progression.  All the links for these will be in the show notes so hopefully you'll find them there and if you don't, you can just email us and we'll send you them.  Now, let's go onto the conversation.

Hi, Sophie, welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Sophie Williams: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Helen Tupper: Delighted to have you.  Talking about progression as well, which I think is a topic that is top of mind for so many of our listeners and what we often talk about is the importance of progression meaning more than promotion, I guess in the staircase to Squiggle thing.  In staircase like careers, promotion was the way that people progressed, but in Squiggly Careers what we really want to do is open up people's eyes to all the different ways they can progress.

With progression in mind, I'd love to just get your perspective and insights: despite there being lots of different opportunities perhaps for people to progress in a Squiggly Career, what do you think are some of the challenges, some of the barriers that might get in the way of people progressing at work and in their career?

Sophie Williams: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question and I think what we risk doing is presuming that all of the barriers that stop people from progressing are equal and are universal, and that's simply not the case.  We know that the barriers that men and women face in their careers are not the same things, we know that the barriers that a Chinese woman versus a black woman versus a Bangladeshi woman faces in their careers, both in terms of expectations, both in terms of outcomes and availability of seniority and positions and all of those things, they're just not equal.  So, there's not ever going to be a one size fits all sort of answer of, this is the thing that stops people.

Taking black women as an example, we can see that opportunities for pay rises and promotions or roles with more responsibility that can lead to sort of greater satisfaction, they're not communicated in equal ways and so people don't have an equality of information available to them to be able to make those choices.  We also can see really clearly from so much data that internal sponsorship within businesses really makes a tangible change to people's career prospects if they plan to stay within that business, or in fact to leverage their position in the move.

We also see that the availability of sponsors again is not equally provided.  People tend to sponsor people who -- informal sponsoring relationships, we see that people tend to sponsor people who remind them of them.  We are naturally inclined to like people who remind us of us, it's part of the fluency heuristic; so if you are a person who is marginalised in one way or another, if you don't represent or remind senior leaders in a business of themselves, that's a barrier that's going to stop you from being able to progress because those informal sponsorship relationships are just less available to you.  So, there's all kinds of reasons, I think.

Helen Tupper: I'm glad you brought up sponsorship actually.  So, in this Ask the Expert series we've also spoken to Sylvia Ann Hewlett on the topic of sponsorship, so that we've got that whole episode of sponsorship, which would probably be a good thing for people to listen to in partnership with this conversation on progression.  I wonder as well whether you've got any thoughts on, if people are going to progress in different ways, so maybe I'm going to take a sideways move into a different department, that would be a potential progression opportunity for me to take the skills and strengths that I've got and use them in a different way.

Sometimes a fear of failure or a fear of not being good enough can get in their way of seeing progression opportunities that could actually be really interesting for them because the context is different, and the challenge might not be one that they're familiar with.  Sometimes it can shut them off from exploring a progression opportunity that could actually really help them grow and maybe discover potential they didn't know that they'd got yet.

Sophie Williams: Yeah, so I think idea of fear of failure, so just so your listeners know, my work is primarily focused on the intersections of race and gender in the workplace with a particular focus on black women's experiences.  So, a lot of what I say, because of the majority of my research is around that, is based on sort of that context.  When we talk about black women's careers for example, we see this idea of the fear of failure and not necessarily because of a lack of self-belief, but because in so many particularly senior business positions, we are so deeply underrepresented.  So, when you are the only person like you in a space, what tends to happen is people presume that you represent an entire group and look to you to be a monolithic view and voice of that entire group.

In that case, if you are all representing all women, if you're representing all black women or trans women or neurodivergent women, that fear of failure is huge, because you are suddenly representing everyone.  If you fail, that whole group could be seen to have failed and that's a huge pressure to put on people.  I really advocate for not counting yourself out of opportunities.  If you look at a job description, if I look at a job description and I'm like, "I can do most of this but not all of this", if it's a thing I think I could do, I'm still going to put myself forward for it, because I'm not going to count myself out of that.  Someone else who is in that sort of decision-making capacity is very welcome to count me out of that, but I think we need to not discount ourselves from opportunities before giving other people the chance to do that for us; to make their own decisions about whether we are or aren't the right fit for things.

Helen Tupper: I think that is a really important point that I hadn't really considered about the pressure of the fear of failure, I guess a new insight for me.  Another new insight came the term, "The glass cliff", so I've watched your TEDx talk I think four, maybe five times now.  I watched it last night, I watched it on the day that it was live, I've watched it since, both because I loved hearing your talk, I thought it was really compelling in your communications; but also, because I thought the topic of your talk was particularly insightful and interesting for me. 

I wondered if other people aren't familiar with the glass cliff and how that holds people back.  I wondered if you could give us a bit of a precis and I will absolutely link the talk so that people can watch the full talk off the back of the podcast today.

Sophie Williams: Yeah, the glass cliff is a situation for unrepresented leaders and in this case, when I say, "underrepresented leaders", I mean racially marginalised people and women, because they are the two groups that the research sort of shows in this, find themselves in when they finally manage to break through the glass ceiling.  We talk a lot about the glass ceiling being there as this invisible barrier that people can't get through, but we do know that there are some underrepresented people at the most senior levels. 

People love to say, "What about Obama?"  "What about this one person", they like to make singular examples.  What we often find when people who are underrepresented or people who have been marginalised break through the glass ceiling, is that they find themselves in a new dangerous position that no one really talks about and that is being on the edge of a glass cliff.

The glass cliff is essentially the research-backed fact that underrepresented people are more likely to be put into positions of leadership when a business, organisation, government, whatever that is, is already in a consistent period of trouble, a consistent period of decline, and that could be all kinds of decline; it could be a hit to profits; it could be a reputational scandal; it could be any number of things, but these businesses are in a moment of trouble. 

Then we bring in an underrepresented person, a woman or a racially marginalised person or, in the research I do, a woman who is also racially marginalised.  We say to them, we don't even explicitly say, "You are a good leader of people, we value your soft skills.  We think you can make people feel better" and that's why they give them the jobs; but they don't give them the jobs because of their belief in their ability to make transformational change, whether they have that ability or not.  Because they don't have that belief or expectation in that ability, they don't give them the tools or the time that they need to actually make change.

The researchers who looked at this thought that it could be for two reasons: first, in patriarchal societies, women are viewed as care givers, so it could be that they're brought in for their soft skills and if they are able to also make transformational change in the business, then great, the business is being transformed, we're back on track.  But if they're not able to make transformational change, the other element of this is women in business are often seen as being better scape goats.  So, all of the problems that were existing before she took on that role, are able to be put onto her shoulders and she's able to be pushed out of the business.

Then there's the thing called the saviour effect, which is she is more likely to be replaced by a white man, which signals to everyone, investors, employees, team members, a return to business as usual and a return to a safe pair of hands.  Importantly, they are then more likely to be given both the tools and the time to make the change, where the woman or marginalised person is seen to have failed.

The example people are probably most familiar with, even though it's sort of controversial and difficult and nuanced in other ways, is probably Theresa May.  An active outspoken non-Brexit believer, who then took over when the Referendum had happened and David Cameron stepped down, so we had a country in a situation that was in difficulty.  We appointed this female leader to make this change and she wasn't able to make this change, and so she was then pushed out and replaced by Boris Johnson, a white male safe pair of hands, who took essentially a very similar deal but less than what she was pushing for and was lorded for his success in sort of making this deal.  So, yeah, we can see it play out in businesses and in much bigger scales.

Helen Tupper: If we think then about, "Okay, what do managers and leaders need to do?"  I know you've mentioned the time and the tools, and sponsorship might be one of those things, like that could be one of the solutions.  But I would love to know, if we are going to give people progression possibilities that allow them to develop but we are not going to set them up to fail, we're going to set them up to succeed, what is it that managers and leaders should be doing so that we give them the tools, the time and the support from the outset; what would those tools look like, and sponsorship, like I say, might be one of them but are there other things that people should be proactively doing to set people up to succeed in those progression opportunities?

Sophie Williams: Absolutely, so we should hire people for their ability to do the job in hand; and if that job in hand is to turn a business around, we should hire people not because we think they're going to make a team feel happy, but because we believe that they can make that change.  Then we should support them in the same way that we'd support anyone else who's been brought in to make that change.

 We can't just bring people in to use as scapegoats or to use as comfort blankets for people.  We have to go though the same rigour that we would with anyone else, and that also then takes away any perception that these people haven't earned their jobs, because that's the thing that we see so much.  We see so much that when a person who's not a stereotypical leader is put into a position of leadership, their ability to do that role is continually questioned, and so we're making them do the work twice and making them do the work and then justify the work and then justify that again.

No one is going to be able to do their best job if they are constantly being challenged, and that's not to say that people shouldn't be able to justify the choices that they make in work.  They absolutely should be, there has to be a robust and healthy atmosphere and culture of debate and of challenge and all of that, but we have to start with the baseline understanding that these people have been hired because they are the right person for that role; that then shifts the context from them having to justify their right to exist in that space at all.

The second thing that researchers found was, when someone who is appointed to the most senior leadership in a business, so like a CEO position, isn't both white and male, that layer below them, the senior leadership layer who they work most closely with, who are primarily white and male suddenly find themselves doing a worse job.  These stats are slightly old, but in I think 2018 or 2019, the Lean In Foundation found that white men make up about 30% of the entry level cohorts in businesses in those junior roles. 

By the time they get to the C-suite, that's ballooned up to about 68%, so white males are the only group who have essentially the opposite of the glass ceiling; the only group who look above themselves at the beginning of their careers and see themselves more represented rather than less.  But because of that comfort and that expectation of seeing themselves continually represented, when someone is appointed who isn't mirroring that in both whiteness and maleness, we see that white male senior leaders report feeling less able to personally identify with the business and feeling less able to invest in the business, so their work output gets worse.  So that leader's chance of success entirely diminishes, because her team is not there to do the work that is necessary for success.

The other thing that happens when these people disinvest is they disinvest from doing what is any manager's role, which is managing their team, but they don't disinvest from that equally.  What we see and what we have reported and what the data shows is, they disinvest from their junior team members who aren't like them, who aren't male and who aren't white.  Then we're stopping the next generation, the next cohort of potential progression from coming up, because they're not getting that mentorship back to that sponsorship conversation; they're not getting that investment early in their careers and so we're stopping them from fulfilling what could be their progression potential.

Helen Tupper: You raise so many points there and I think that point around white men seeing themselves more represented and that opposite thing of the glass ceiling definitely stuck with me from your talk as well.  What I'm thinking about is, what do we do in organisations, and I know you don't have all the answers, Sophie, I just really want to understand your thoughts on it; but what do we do in organisations to enable that?  Is that education?  Is that data?  Do we need to make this data more visible?  Do we need to have more metrics about manager performance and engagement in those things?  Where do organisations start to go towards solving that challenge, because it's so big.

Sophie Williams: It's huge, so that's why I chose to do my TEDx on it, because I don't think anyone's talking about it and I think if we can make people aware of that, that's probably a pretty good first step.  The really easy thing to do is, if you're building a company from the ground up, don't have a disproportionate number of white men in that senior leadership position, because if they are the only group that's growing, there's something within businesses that is uplifting one group and not another. 

I'm not saying don't have any senior men in your leadership, but your leadership should represent the makeup of your business; and the makeup of your business should represent the context that you're working in.  14% of the UK is black, so 14% of your team should be black, 14% of your senior leadership should be black.  In London that's 40%: 40% of the population of London is non-white or black and global majority, and so that should be more or less represented within your business at all levels.

So, EY, the consultancy firm -- there is a case study of this in my book, Millennial Black, out now.

Helen Tupper: We will also link to that, everyone.

Sophie Williams: They modelled it like this, they were like, "Okay, here's the population sample, here's the representation within our business and so we would expect promotions to be X% of this group and X% of that group"; not as a quota, but as a watch out, so people weren't forced to promote people who weren't ready to fill some kind of quota system, going back to the idea of having that belief that the best person is in the role, but they were asked if that wasn't happening to explain why.

That really led to people being able to examine their own unconscious biases, it led to them being able to find out if training opportunities weren't being communicated equally to all groups, it led them to find out if new role and progression opportunities weren't being communicated equally to all groups, and allowed them to be much more representative of the demographic within their entire business when they formed their leaderships.

Helen Tupper: Brilliant, thank you for that.  I guess the other thing that's in my mind is, we talked there about the managers and the leaders and how we make sure that opportunities are visible.  I liked your point earlier that you don't count yourself out, you always count yourself into an opportunity and I think that's a mindset that other people could take forward for themselves as well, like, "I'm not going to count myself out".  We talked a bit about sponsorship and interestingly, when I spoke to Sylvia Ann Hewlett about sponsorship, she talked about actually it's the role of the individual is to seek sponsorship.  She said it's not really on an organisation to provide sponsors; what the individual should be doing is to think about what's the sponsorship I need, and she talked about something that the individual could do is go and proactively build a relationship with that sponsor. 

She said, "If I think about how could I go and help that person", rather than starting with, "How could that sponsor help me?", is a good way of starting to build a relationship with a sponsor, so I suppose that's two things an individual can do: go, build proactive relationships with the sponsors that you need; and also count yourself in.  Are there any other things that you think in terms of helping people with progression, that people could do or actions that people could take at an individual level?

Sophie Williams: That's really interesting about actively seeking out sponsors, because I think that's really hard to do.

Helen Tupper: Agreed.

Sophie Williams: Sponsors are traditionally the most senior people in business who have that sort of wider purview, have that wider visibility, who are able to advocate and essentially create pathways for people.  It can be really intimidating to go to a senior leader in your business and say, "Please will you help me?"  I don't know how many people would be able to actually action that. 

What I think is really useful is modelling that yourself, so I talk a lot about a "lady gang".  So, lady gang is probably my proudest achievement.  A lady gang is a group of people from all kinds of genders and backgrounds; I know it's called a lady gang, I probably shouldn't have called it that, but I was in my 20s and I didn't know what I was doing.  Your lady gang is the people who you invest in and who invest back in you.

It's really similar to a concept called Shine Theory developed by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow.  It's basically this process of mutual investment.  You practice job interviews together, you practice salary negotiations together, they know what you earn, they know when you last had a pay rise or a promotion, they know what you're good at; they're the people who say good things about you behind your back and who mention your name in rooms of opportunity. 

Essentially, you do the same back; it can't be a one-way system.  And so, I think when formalised sponsorship, mentoring, all of these things, opportunities, aren't readily available to us, we can create our own groups, we can create our own support systems, we can create our own communities and you will be amazed by the things that happen when you start advocating for people and people start advocating back for you; it's really transformational.

Helen Tupper: I love that concept and I think maybe some people might informally have some of those relationships.  Whether it's called Shine Theory or lady gang or if people call it another thing, I think actually, it's almost being conscious of that community and thinking about who's in it; how are they supporting me; how am I supporting them; when was the last time I spoke to them; what help do I need from them; what help can I give them?  I think when you make it more of a concept, then you're a bit more conscious of that community and the role it plays for you in your development.

Sophie Williams: Yeah, I've got my lady gang, none of them have any question of the fact that they are (1) part of my lady gang, and (2) we are called the lady gang; and if they need help with anything, me or someone in that group will be their first port of call.  Am I getting paid correctly?  This HR issue is happening?  How is this being handled?  Do you know of an opportunity?  People come to me -- I'm very lucky people come to me very often for work opportunities, but I'm actually not in a position where I can take on too many of them at the moment; and so I know that I have this really trusted group of people who I can recommend and feel really proud to have my name attached to.  I know that when they get opportunities that they can't take on in that moment, they will do the same.

The crux of it is, we have been told for too long, as marginalised people, whether that is people who identify as female, whether that is the queer community, the trans community, whether that is black and global majority people; we are told too often that we are lucky to be in spaces and that there only needs to be one person like us in that space.  That forces us into a relationship of competition rather than a relationship of collaboration. 

Once we can reset that, once we can see that competing actually doesn't help anyone, except the businesses and institutions that want to pit us against each other and say that one is plenty; once we know that we can collaborate and work together, we can make amazing things happen.

Helen Tupper: Final question for you, Sophie, that we ask all of our guests on the Squiggly Careers podcast, which is for your best piece of career advice or a piece of career advice that has helped you or you think might help other people.  Could you possibly share your words of wisdom with our listeners?

Sophie Williams: Yeah, lady gang would usually be it, but since I've already talked to you about lady gang, I would just say, be brave.  It's about that thing I was talking about earlier of not counting yourself out of opportunities.  If you want to do something, you can put yourself forward for it if you feel like you're ready, or if you feel like you're almost ready; you don't have to be 100% there to make a start.  So, don't count yourself out of things; let the people who are making the decisions make that decision, but put yourself in that consideration space.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Sophie on progression.  As I mentioned at the start, this was the last in our current Ask the Expert series, where we have covered Conversations with Celeste Headlee, Happiness with Mo Gawdat, Feedback with Kim Scott and Trier Bryant, Purpose with Dan Cable, Sponsorship with Sylvia Ann Hewlett and today, progression with Sophie. 

Good news, as well as all those episodes that you can catch up on if you missed any, we've also got a competition running this week, so that's 21 June, to win the books from all the authors in this series.  It's being run over on Instagram at Amazingif, so head over there if you want to enter and be in with a chance to win those books.

Please do let us know what resonated from this episode today, but also from the other conversations that we had with people in this series, and we would love to know what you would like to hear about in our next Ask the Expert series, which will be probably a couple of months' time.  We can't promise that we can get all the people, but we can certainly try and we quite like the challenge, so just email us at Helen&Sarah@squigglycareers.com.  Love to hear your thoughts and we will do whatever we can, but thank you for listening today and I'll be back with Sarah next week.

Bye everyone.