Page 14 - Powerlist 2019 - Digital Edition

Belief is the key to

finding senior talent

There’s a real sense of satisfaction when one is able to right a wrong without
breaking any rules. Last year we realised that the Powerlist was not quite
practising what it preached. We had always thought that we treated our
candidates equally when we compiled our shortlists for the judging panel. So we
took it for granted that the number of men on the list outnumbered the number
of women simply because it was a reflection of what was happening in real life.
Then the penny dropped and we realised that we had bought into an idea
that, while it may have had an element of truth to it, shouldn’t have meant that
our list, which showcases only 100 people (not every man or woman in the
country), had to necessarily reflect that. We decided to do something about
it. But what? Smarter people than us have, long ago, given up grappling with
the so-called lack of black women in senior positions conundrum, and failed
to resolve it, particularly in relation to hiring them.
More accurately, they have been fed the ‘paucity of’ line about women (and
men) of African and African Caribbean heritage to the point where, just as it
had with us, it almost becomes rote. Executive search firms are the biggest
culprits, forever offering excuses to their corporate clients for putting forward
yet another all-white shortlist. Far too many of those clients are only too quick
to use what the recruitment firms tell them to justify why they have so little
ethnic diversity in the higher echelons of their organisations. ‘They don’t exist’
is a great excuse. Except that they do.
Anyway, back to us.
After throwing around a number of ideas about what to do to increase the
number of women we put forward, we decided to do the most logical thing
and make sure that the next time we put together a shortlist for our esteemed
judging panel, we would leave no stone unturned in our quest to find more
women befitting of a place on the Powerlist. We’d simply try harder.
So that’s what we did and lo and behold, we started to uncover them.
Before the 2018 Powerlist it was not unusual for the male/female ratio in the
publication to be 70/30 in favour of the men.
After one year of searching for more women we managed to improve the
ratio to 55/45. Still more men, but the gap was narrowing.
We continued to put more emphasis on finding women this year, too. So
after the judges had deliberated and decided on their final 100 for the current
Powerlist, we were keen to discover whether we had improved further.
Incredibly, after we did the count, the result was 50 men and 50 women.
And I should emphasise that we deliberately steered clear of putting women
on the list who we thought weren’t up to the right standard. There was no
positive discrimination.
I bring this up because there is a reason we were successful in our quest
and it is precisely the converse of why so many corporate organisations are
not successful in theirs. Belief. Simple as that. We were able to change our
landscape because we set out with the knowledge or premise that there
were more women out there and all we had to do was find them. It is a totally
different mindset to that which says we are going to look for some people who
we don’t really believe exist, which is where so many search firms start from.
If you believe, you will achieve. If you don’t, quite simply, you won’t.

Michael Eboda
Publisher

10 Powerlist 2019