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It's Lonely At The Top
Samson, the visionary co-founder, today holds the title of senor vice president. Why not chief executive officer? Part of the answer is Samson's own preference for what she calls "a balanced life" that the CEO job wouldn't permit. Another part dates back nine years, when Samson's company had begun to grow rapidly and she needed capital to fuel the expansion.
She turned to Wall Street, where the money men told her she had an exciting idea but advised her to recruit a "high profile" CEO with telecommunications experience. She knew, and they knew, that meant she had to hire a man and take a demotion. At least four other women entrepreneurs in Florida tell similar stories of having to defer to a male CEO in order to raise capital. These and other examples along with statistical evidence make it clear that within traditional corporate and financial hierarchies women have yet to crack the old boys' network in significant numbers. Indeed, after decades of talk about affirmative action and reports of women winning important roles in corporate and professional life, the few reliable statistics that are available on the subject clearly suggest the reality is quite different. To be sure, there are many more women in the corporate ranks today than a decade ago, but there are not many more at the top.
Nationally, tracking the progress of women reaching the upper echelons of business is pretty much limited to an analysis of Fortune 500 companies by Catalyst, a business women's advocacy group in New York City. In its 1996 report, Catalyst found that only 10% of the officers in Fortune 500 companies are women and that only 10.2% of the board seats of those companies are occupied by women.
In Florida, as in most other states, statistics on women in business range from unreliable to downright inaccurate. For example, last fall, with much fanfare, Florida's Commission on the Status of Women, which is charged with informing the governor and the Cabinet on women's issues, announced its "top 10 list of women-friendly companies." Upon further inquiry, however, the commission admitted that the awards were based on a sampling of a mere 49 companies which had answered the survey. The other 951 companies surveyed simply ignored the questionnaire.
An embarrassment
The reason for this is suggested by the results of a poll by Florida Trend. At the 200 largest publicly traded companies, we found just 42 women (5.3%) among 800 corporate officers and 52 (4%) among 1,296 members of boards of directors.
At the top 50 private corporations, there are 17 females (9%) among 200 officers and only 14 (5%) among 300 directors. At the 10 largest banks, seven of 50 top officers (14%) are women and 24 directors among 393 (6%). [See chart on pg. 54].
Many female directors of both private and public companies have family connections. The only two female CEOs at the top companies in the Trend survey are both daughters of the founders: Pat Moran of JM Family Enterprises in Deerfield Beach, the second largest private company in Florida, and Ann Spector Lieff of Spec's Music, the 123rd largest public company in the state.
While many companies boast of women in the executive ranks, it's usually on the level of manager or vice president and the jobs typically are staff, not line, positions, such as human resources and public relations.
And while women are scarce at or near the top, it's almost impossible to find non-white women in key corporate or banking positions in Florida.
Florida Trend's reporting shows that Florida business and finance is still a bastion of white males. Asked for names of minority women in top business or financial jobs in Florida, Wendy Abberger, who is executive director of Leadership Florida, the Florida Chamber of Commerce's program to train the state's future leaders, responded with a meager list and the comment: "This is an embarrassment - for us and for Florida."
Abberger isn't telling anything new to Yvonne R. Jackson, senior vice president worldwide of human resources at Burger King Corp. in Miami. "When the whole women's movement took place, it was primarily for caucasians," she says. "Minority women were tag-alongs."
Most companies don't reach out to minority women, says Jackson, a 47-year-old African American. "It takes mentoring and developing, and it's easier for white males to do that with white females."
With their prospects limited, many ambitious women have jumped off the corporate track to start their own companies [See pg. 56]. Those who remain behind have come up with tactics for getting ahead. In interviews with more than two dozen of these women who have reached or are pushing toward the executive ranks, virtually all of them gladly - almost eagerly - shared their strategies in the hope of helping other women seeking to move up the ranks:
Daring to succeed
Take Risks. One strategy shared by almost all of these women is the need to take risks. No risk, no reward, they say, and a hazardous assignment pulled off successfully can catapult a career. Problem is, women don't often get such assignments.
"People are hesitant to give women the breaks, to throw them into the deep end to see if they can swim," says Adelaide A. (Alex) Sink, president of NationsBank Florida. "But that's how careers are made."
In the late 1980s, when she was in middle management at the Tampa office of North Carolina National Bank (now NationsBank), Sink spotted such an assignment and pounced on it. She volunteered to open up the Miami market when the bank got its first charter there. "Not many people from North Carolina understood Miami," she says. "There weren't a lot of people raising their hands to go."
She did, commuting between Tampa and Miami each week, cradling an infant in her arms. She set up a second household in Miami because her husband, Bill McBride, managing partner at Holland & Knight, couldn't uproot. Sink's operation is "among the top-producing by several measures" at the country's third largest banking institution, according to Scott Scredon, a company spokesman. Acknowledging her accomplishments, NationsBank feisty CEO Hugh McColl presented Sink with a crystal hand grenade last year, a traditional NationsBank macho trophy of success.
"You have to take jobs that others walk away from," advises Monica Mehan, who started as a billing clerk for Illinois Bell and now is president of Jacksonville-based AT&T American Transtech, the first female to head an AT&T business unit. Her unit handles customer service operations and huge database projects for AT&T and other companies.
In 1992, then a vice president in charge of programmers at AT&T headquarters in New Jersey, Mehan accepted the unpopular assignment of creating software to separate the long-distance and local call billing of 82 million customers. "There was potential for a lot of failure," she reminisces.
Indeed, when the software was put to use, a line of bad codes crashed the billing system and shut it down for two days. Mehan had the unpleasant task of facing AT&T's chairman to explain the fiasco. But soon the software was humming and so was Mehan's career: She was made president and CEO at American Transtech.
Mehan says many women seem fearful of tackling the technical and business side of companies. Such reluctance can be career suicide because line jobs with direct impact on profit and loss typically are the path to the top. "Women sometimes want to stay in more comfortable zones," she says. "They have to get out there and deal with difficult business sides."
Judith Roales, executive vice president and general manager at the St. Petersburg Times, which owns Florida Trend, explains that her career success has been based on setting difficult goals then charging at them. In the 1960s, while in the midst of a divorce with two children to raise, she convinced a small Delaware newspaper to create a Washington bureau and put her in charge. This was at a time when few women were offered serious news positions. Her advice to women: "Make big aggressive steps when you're at low points in your career. That's when you have the most to gain and the least to lose."
Responding to Wall Street
Find a Mentor. For all their grit, these women haven't done it alone; Most have latched onto supportive mentors.
"A lot of people know a great deal more than you do about what you're hoping to learn," says Barbara Samson. "When I find people I want to surround myself with, I'm direct. I say, "Will you coach me?'"
Responding to the urgings of Wall Street bankers to put someone with experience at the top, Samson hired a male chief executive officer. Part of his role, as she saw it, was to educate her in the ways of the corporate world. "He saw in me skills he wanted to help me broaden," she says.
Samson rotated through every department in the company so she could learn the whole business. Now she is senior vice president of public relations and the public face of the company. She is credited with helping the company raise $500 million since 1994 from investors to whom she is introduced as the co-founder of the company. She retains only a minority interest in her company's stock. "I've devoted the last 11 years to the company," she says. "I want my life to be about more than the company."
Like Samson, Pamela Jordan installed a male above her, as president, when she took over her father's business, Arab Pest Control, in 1978. "I would not be where I am today if not for him. He coached me, believed in me," she says.
After five years, Jordan assumed the mantel of president. In 11 years, she built the company from a struggling $3 million operation into a $15 million enterprise through acquisitions and internal growth, then she sold it to Waste Management in 1989. Jordan went on to run a $35 million division for Waste Management and now is vice president in charge of mergers and acquisitions, with offices in Tampa, for Atlanta-based Arrow Exterminating, one of the largest firms in the industry. l Avoid Gender Games. While these women have been served up plenty of offenses and challenges because of their gender, most of them say they just brush them aside and plunge ahead.
Jordan offers an illustration. In 1979 at her first trade conference, she entered a room of 12 men, where the chairman of the insurance committee sat puffing on a cigar at the head of the table. "We're glad you're here; we needed a secretary," he told her. Rather than challenge him, Jordan says she quietly sat down and proceeded to take notes. "I made the best of it."
She proved herself on the committee and two years later when the committee chairman resigned, he appointed her to take his place. "Even if it didn't feel good at the moment, I tried to stay out of that gender stuff," recalls Jordan. "An attitude can hurt you."
Pauline Winick, executive vice president of business operations for the National Basketball Association's Miami Heat, recalls her first NBA board of governors meeting in 1989. Winick was treated in openly hostile fashion by a few men. "Some of the men would not shake my hand," she reports. "They couldn't stand the fact that a woman was in this boys' club." It took some time, but she says: "I learned to shake it off."
Winick reports that attitudes are changing. The younger men in NBA management are more accepting of women in power. "Their mothers all worked," she says. Jennifer Beber, president of Miami-based advertising firm Beber Silverstein & Partners with $60 million in billing, says she's tiring of the male bantering about sports that seems to dominate strategy meetings at corporations where she's making pitches. "They use sports analogies to get people motivated," says Beber, 37, who five years ago took over the firm co-founded by her mother. "If that's the language they understand, I can't speak it."
Instead of playing that game, she advises women simply to be themselves. For her that means using non-aggressive, less demanding tactics to get her point across. "I say, "Look, I may not be pounding the table, but my idea is right.'" Indeed, a recent report on management styles by Cornell University says that compassion will become a more important attribute for executives, instead of competitiveness and aggressiveness.
Pat Moran, president and CEO of JM Family Enterprises in Deerfield Beach, the world's largest Toyota distributor, faced a daunting gender challenge: ingratiating herself with the Japanese, a society with fiercely held traditions that dictate women stay at home or don't rise above lowly jobs. She became accustomed to being the only female on Toyota factory tours in Japan.
"It took a lot of years to gain the respect of the Japanese," recalls Moran, who entered the family business 13 years ago and has been president for the past eight. On her watch, JM Family Enterprises revenues have gone from $2.4 billion to $5 billion in 1996.
Taboo for a female
Delores Kesler, founder of AccuStaff Inc., also faced gender resistance in 1994 when she took her Jacksonville temporary staffing firm public. Kesler, chairman and CEO, was strongly discouraged from leading the pitches to investors. "It was almost taboo for a female to go in and work with Wall Street," she recalls. "The investment bankers said, "You can't do this, Wall Street isn't going to buy a female.'" She did anyway, but not before appointing a new CEO, Derek Dewan, then managing partner at Coopers & Lybrand in Jacksonville, to help orchestrate the public offering. Last summer, when she left the company which she started as a tiny staffing firm in 1978, it had revenues surpassing $1.3 billion. Kesler, 56, who remains on the AccuStaff board, has created a scholarship foundation and an investment fund. She says one of the reasons she left the company was to devote more time to her ailing mother.
Such traditional concerns for family cannot be underestimated in analyzing women's roles in the corporate and financial worlds. Many women faced with the choice of nurturing a family or a career opt for the former.
On the other hand, some women work out creative solutions to balance kids with work. When Dianna Morgan, 45, left Disney World 11 years ago to be with her young children, she was a public relations manager. She returned after only four years as a senior vice president of government relations, one of four female senior vice presidents at Disney's Florida operations.
"There's no magic formula," she says of her success, "you just have to recognize that sacrifices come with these titles." In the Catalyst report on Fortune 500 corporations, the only company in Florida to be acknowledged for its progressive policies on female promotions was Miami's Knight-Ridder Inc. Interestingly, Knight-Ridder applies the very same strategies internally that are cited by successful women in this story: assigning mentors, putting women and minorities into broadening and challenging assignments, and systematic reviews of performances. "We measure year to year how women and minorities are advancing in the company," says Mary Jean Connors, senior vice president of human resources, who adds that since this policy was instituted, female readership of its newspapers has risen from 47% to 52%.
If the corporate picture generally looks grim right now, experts predict that across the country, women who have gained education and experience are poised for a major breakthrough. Whether that national view applies to Florida remains to be seen. "I'm not sure promotion of women is on the radar screen of every sizable business in Florida," says Alex Sink.
