Charmain Bogue | Why I Think Women Get Promoted for the Wrong Reasons

Charmain Bogue in the office


We are tapping women to fix what men broke, then calling it opportunity.

There is a pattern in how organizations handle succession that I have watched long enough to name directly. When something is going well, the candidates considered for the top role are almost always men. When something is going badly, when the board is frustrated, when a program is underperforming, when the organization needs someone to walk into a mess and clean it up, suddenly the women are being mentioned.

This is not a pipeline problem. It is a risk assignment problem. And it should not be celebrated as progress.

What the research keeps finding

There is a body of organizational research on what is called the glass cliff, the phenomenon where women are more likely to be appointed to leadership positions during organizational crises or in situations of high risk. The theory is that boards and selection committees, consciously or not, are more comfortable placing women in situations where failure is already built into the circumstances. If the thing fails, well, she did not have what it took. If it succeeds, it was a harder job than anyone expected.

I have seen this play out enough times in person that the research feels like description rather than revelation. A woman gets appointed to lead a struggling division, a failing program, a board in turmoil. She works herself to exhaustion, stabilizes the situation, sometimes genuinely turns it around. She then gets passed over for the next senior promotion in favor of a man who had the benefit of inheriting a stable operation and delivering predictable results.

What I tell the women who are handed these opportunities

I do not tell them to decline. The work is real and the skill-building is real and sometimes the role becomes a genuine platform. What I tell them is to go in with their eyes open about what they are inheriting, to negotiate the resources and timeline and support that the job actually requires, and to document the starting conditions so that the turnaround, if there is one, cannot be erased or attributed to the conditions improving on their own.

I also tell them to name, to themselves and to the people making the offer, what they are walking into. A woman who accepts a broken role without acknowledging that it is broken has already let the organization off the hook for the circumstances.

The broader problem

Organizations that only surface women in crisis moments are not building cultures of inclusion. They are outsourcing risk management to the candidates they consider most dispensable. Progress looks like women getting appointed to lead clean, well-resourced, high-visibility opportunities on equal terms with men. Until that is happening routinely, the appointments in the hard moments deserve scrutiny, not just celebration.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Charmain Bogue on the Work That Happens After the Fundraiser Ends Galas raise money. What happens the next morning is what actually matters. There's a version of non-profit work that looks great from the outside. The fundraiser is well-attended. The social media posts get shared. The annual report has professional photography and compelling statistics. Everyone feels good. And then Monday comes, and someone has to figure out how to turn $300,000 in donations into actual programs that actually reach actual people. That's where it gets hard. That's where most of the public stops paying attention. And that's where the real work lives. I've been involved in non-profit and public service work for most of my career, including years of managing large-scale programs with significant budgets and complex logistics. Charmain Bogue knows firsthand that the distance between raising money and spending it well is enormous, and not enough people talk about what fills that gap. Her...
Read more
Image
Charmain Bogue on Advising Boards and Telling Them What They Already Know The value of an outside advisor isn't new information. It's permission to act on old information. Most of the time, when I walk into a boardroom as an advisor, the people sitting around the table already know what's wrong. They know their strategic plan is stale. They know their leadership pipeline has gaps. They know they have a culture problem that no amount of pizza parties is going to fix. They don't need me to tell them. They need me to say it out loud so they can finally do something about it. That's a strange arrangement if you haven't experienced it, the idea that smart, capable people would pay someone to confirm what they already suspect. But it makes sense when you understand how organizations work. Internal voices carry baggage. When the VP of operations says the strategic plan needs an overhaul, people hear a power grab. When an outside advisor says it, people hear an objectiv...
Read more

Charmain Bogue | Why I Narrowed My Practice to Executive Coaching

Image
  Doing fewer things turned out to be the most strategic decision I ever made for my own work. For years, my advisory work was a buffet. Strategic planning engagements. Board facilitation. Training design. Coaching. If an organization had a problem in my general territory, I would build something for it. The variety was interesting, and saying yes to everything felt like growth. It wasn’t. It was diffusion. And the decision to focus my practice on executive coaching came from finally taking my own advice, the advice I had given dozens of organizations: you cannot be excellent at a thing you only do occasionally. The pattern I kept seeing in my own calendar When I looked honestly at my engagements, one pattern was impossible to ignore. The strategic plans, the training sessions, the facilitated retreats, all of them produced their best results when they came with sustained coaching attached. And they produced their most disappointing results when they didn’t. A strategy document wit...
Read more