Men Coaching Women… Properly
‘I’m worried to death about a woman crying.’
Ms. Billie Williamson, a member of Ernst’s Americas executive board, discusses Ernst’s coaching efforts. Not just any ordinary coaching, but coaching men on mentoring and advancing women up the ranks.
What is driving Ernst’s efforts to help men become better mentors to women, as well as minorities? Our clients are focused on the fact that they have diverse work forces and they want our teams to mirror that. In addition, we know you get better solutions when you put a diverse team at the table. People come from different backgrounds, they have different frames of reference and when you put all these together, you get the best solution for the client.
Are there particular concerns a lot of men have? It’s hard for a man to tell a woman, ‘you need to dress more professionally,’ but we’re telling men not to back away from something like that. We’ve also done a lot of coaching on what to say when a woman announces that she is expecting a baby. If a male supervisor says ‘congratulations — but you need to know it’s going to be hard to manage your career and a baby,’ that’s discouraging. But if he says, ‘great, how can I help?’ that’s going to help retain a woman.
Do men fear women will cry if they’re given critical feedback?
What’s most important is not to sugarcoat feedback. If there’s something a woman, or a man, needs to do to improve, it’s important to be candid — and to make clear what actions the person needs to take.
Women tend to be more focused on doing a good job, then on building the relationships they need to get ahead. How can men help? Men need to take young women along to meetings with clients at a very early stage in their careers, to just observe and begin to learn.
Are men in general more likely to do that with a young man than a woman?
A lot of times, a young man will ask a partner, ‘can I go with you to a client meeting?’ while women are less likely to ask. So women need to step up and ask to go to meetings.
What are you doing to help men understand what women feel like at mostly male gatherings? About 15% of our partners today are women and so when we do our women’s leadership conference, we invite a similar ratio of men to attend so they can have the experience of walking into a room filled mostly with women. The idea is to give our men the experience we often have at meetings. Some men are very comfortable, but others say ‘gee, I see what you deal with every day, and I’m not sure whether I should join the discussion or what I should do.’ It’s a great chance for men to walk in our shoes—and it helps men become better coaches to women.
Don’t some women need coaching on mentoring women?
Absolutely. I think there are women who have battled their way up and they have a lot of arrows in their rear end. So once they’ve gotten to senior jobs, they’re fatigued and don’t want to make the extra effort to help other women or they think they figured it out, so younger women should do the same. But I think they’re by far the minority — and we’ve asked all our women to be engaged in mentoring young women and diverse people.
