Requirement 1: Specify your Diversity Mission (what you seek to achieve thorough diversity) and your Diversity Vision (what will constitute success).

The President has often clarified his Diversity Mission—to deal with complex problems through diversity of thought.  On numerous occasions, he also has stated his Diversity Vision—that this diversity of thought would result in dissent, vigorous debate, tension, and conflict, which would, in turn, produce complex, innovative, creative decisions capable of handling complex problems.

As part of this requirement, care must be taken to speak definitively about motive (the reason thought diversity is important).  In the corporate community, this is the business case.  More broadly, it is the viability case.

Requirement 2: Determine whether your organization/community culture will support your Diversity Mission and your Diversity Vision. In declaring his intent with respect to diversity of thought, President Obama implicitly repudiated the Washington “oppositional”, “perpetual campaign”, partisan political model that has been prevalent in recent decades.  This traditional cultural does not easily support bipartisanship.

Some observers, indeed, did perceive the new president’s bipartisan aspirations for thought diversity as evidence that he was naïve and did not understand the nation’s capitol and its partisan ways.  As if to prove the skeptics correct, one potential cabinet member withdrew his name; apparently, in part, because, he could not support the bipartisanship that would be required.  Also, the struggle to enact the stimulus legislation has proved that partisan politics are alive and kicking.

If your culture does not support your diversity aspirations, one option is to go around it.  President Obama has been seeking to get around Washington’s traditionally partisan culture by repeatedly reminding everyone, “These are not normal times.”  He is hoping that the current situation will be viewed as a crisis, and thus, facilitate at least a temporary departure from a constraining, partisan environment.  This may well be his major diversity challenge.

Requirement 3: Recruit people with the potential to contribute to the thought diversity you are seeking.

Collectively, the recruits must be representative of a broad range of thought, while individually, they must be open-minded, receptive to criticism, and comfortable with the tensions of vigorous debate. As events have shown, not all candidates who meet the representation criterion have the necessary personal characteristics to satisfy the thought diversity requirement.

Most observers give President Obama high marks for assembling a group of people with diverse thought –even to the point of having Republican participation in his cabinet. Not only does the group have diverse perspectives, but also present are strong personalities prepared to advocate for their view. Further, seeded among the appointees are individuals with proven track records of working across party lines. Without a doubt, the potential for diversity of thought appears to be significant.

Requirement 4: Unleash the potential for diversity of thought. Often overlooked, this step is based on the recognition that assembling potential for thought diversity is not the same as actually generating thought diversity.

We cannot yet know whether the potential President Obama is bringing together will be actualized. A few Washington veterans are worried that some of the strong-willed personalities will dominate and stifle thought diversity; specifically, they fear that a rigorous process has not been established for soliciting and hearing ideas.

Requirement 5: Channel the unleashed diversity of thought toward the end of effective, quality decision making. In this regard, the President has insisted that his cabinet member choices share a core vision of the country’s needs. This shared vision will help to channel diverse thoughts. Further, he has stated that after all considerations and deliberations; he will make the final decisions, thus placing himself squarely in the middle of the channeling process.

To this pursuit of thought diversity, the President brings a strong desire for quality decisions in the country’s best interests, and an understanding that without diversity of thought, his administration will not realize its full potential. In this context, the evolution of the Obama Cabinet will provide Chief Diversity Officers with an instructive case study on the do’s and don’ts of achieving diversity of thought.

Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., is the CEO of Roosevelt Thomas Consulting & Training (RTCT) and the founder of the American Institute for Managing Diversity. He has been at the forefront of developing and implementing innovative concepts and strategies for maximizing organizational and individual potential through Diversity Management. He is the author of Building a House for Diversity; Beyond Race and Gender; Redefining Diversity; and Building on the Promise of Diversity.

Here’s the problem.  Women work hard.  Some get top flight educations but feel empty inside.  Some stay in jobs they dislike for security, ignoring their sprit and inner voice.  Some lose track of their natural ways to fit into masculine business scenarios. 

The only way that we can reach true success is when we allow our inner quiet wisdom and knowledge to guide us on a daily basis.  The only way that we can truly receive this guidance is by listening.  The only way we can truly listen is by having a way to connect with this guidance.  For some this connection comes in the form of meditation, for others prayer.  My way is through silence – deep silence in the early morning.  Before my day begins I embark upon a quiet inner journey.  I seek stillness and drop into the quietness.  From this place, a sense of refreshment often arises.  By the end of my quiet moments I often feel renewal and a sense of peace.  At times I will leave my quiet sitting with an idea or thought that I believe never would have visited me had I not stayed still long enough to receive it.

Join us in The Living Room of The Essential Feminine when Camille Maurine and I explore ways that you can enrich your inner life and reach greater levels of success and satisfaction.  We will be there on August 25^th at noon Pacific Time.  Be sure to register at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/987535361 .

My undergraduate degree is in mathematical economics. In my work as an educator and coach, I always believe in measuring positive change in human interaction. I love John and Jim’s idea of increasing the application of measurement in the human dimension. Here are some edited excerpts from a recent e-mail interview with them.

What is Human Sigma, and why do companies need it?

The Human Sigma approach combines a proven method for assessing the health of the employee-customer encounter with a disciplined process for improving it. It is based on five new rules to bring excellence to the way employees engage and interact with customers. Companies that follow these principles are outpacing their competition by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.

How much of your thinking on Human Sigma is owed to Six Sigma?

Well, our answer to that is some. There are some really good conceptual ideas that Six Sigma brought in terms of how to focus an organization on improving itself. But remember that Six Sigma was developed in a manufacturing context, and the role of people was relatively small, 10% or so. Our argument is essentially that business leaders have not focused on people, and our rationale is they haven’t done so because it’s hard. People are the hardest thing to fix. So Human Sigma was developed as a response to the lack of effectiveness of Six Sigma methodology for increasing productivity from people.

It seems it would be difficult to measure human interactions in a scientific way. Can you tell us how that is done?

The act of measuring itself is quite simple: Ask the people involved in an interaction how it made them feel. This simple activity is based on a large body of scientific research about what to ask them, how to ask them, and why asking them works. The right questions are crucial. That is the expertise we have accumulated over a long period of time researching and consulting on the issues and from reviewing data from the millions of employees and customers we have interviewed.

If it is clear from the research that employees hold the key to raising profits and value in a company, why is it that management has been traditionally inept at measuring and managing them?

We have only learned how to measure this accurately in the past 10 to 15 years, so part of the problem has been a simple lack of reliable metrics. This inability to measure engagement also prevented the accumulation of the data needed to build a solid understanding of how to engage employees.

Now that we have a considerable amount of data, it has also become clear that many of the assumptions companies have made about their employees have simply been wrong. For example, there has been a tendency on the part of many executives to value control over quality by scripting employee behaviors when they interact with customers. These executives view employees as mistakes just waiting to happen, as impediments to doing business, and as costs to be minimized. It is difficult to engage an employee who knows that he is viewed as a costly nuisance at best by the organization’s leadership.

Why are people so hard to deal with?

There are a couple of good reasons. If you buy a tractor or a furnace, you know what you’re going to pay for it, how it’ll depreciate, where it goes in the system, what the maintenance costs are likely to be, and roughly when it will quit. If it melts steel or pulls a load at a given rate today, it’ll do the same or very close to that tomorrow.

People, of course, meet none of those conditions. They’re unpredictable, both in ways that you might appreciate and ways that you don’t appreciate. So because people— employees and customers—are much more unpredictable than machines, they can’t be managed or directed in prescribed ways. That makes for a lot of work.

Once you have learned to measure this employee-customer encounter, how can a company work to improve it?

Sustainable improvement in the employee-customer encounter requires disciplined local action coupled with a company-wide commitment to changing how employees are recruited, positioned in roles, rewarded, recognized, and, most important, how they are managed.

In your book, you said the employee/customer encounter is the new factory floor. How did you mean that?

If you contrast manufacturing environments with service economy environments, you need a new definition of value creation for a service economy. The definition that we landed on was that value is created when an employee and a customer come together and they interact. And that’s different from manufacturing, where you create value by making a product that is ready to be sold. Creating value in a manufacturing context is fairly straightforward. If you have a lot of broken products, you have problems. If you have no broken products, no poor-quality products, then your business can flourish. In a service business, so much more is focused on the interaction that your employees have with your customers that you need a new set of tools to evaluate how well you’re doing in that space.

Does Human Sigma apply to noncustomer-facing employees?

Certainly. Think of the guy on the loading dock who may not ever talk to the customer, but if he drops your TV before he loads it on the truck, or if he takes an extra three days to get it to the store, all those things have implications for customers whether that employee ever talks to them.

Can our readers reach you?

Yes, you can contact us at authors_humansigma@gallup.com

Marshall Goldsmith (Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com) is corporate America’s preeminent executive coach and a founder of Marshall Goldsmith Partners. He is the author, most recently, of Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get it Back if You Lost It, as well as What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – the Wall Street Journal #1 best seller, and Succession: Are You Ready – published in February 2008 as part of the Harvard Business ‘Memo to the CEO’ series. Marshall is also on the faculty of the executive education programs at Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan.

This article in a different form originally appeared in Talent Management Magazine.

This project—interviewing people over 60 about the secrets of life—sounds like great fun. I wish that I had done it! What gave you this idea?

When I travel to a new city, I read reviews from people who have been there before—of hotels, restaurants, and things to do. Since I have always been interested in why some people find lasting fulfillment, it seemed to me that same method could apply to life and career. If you want to know the secrets to a happy life, you should ask someone who has lived one.

So I asked several thousand people to identify the one person they knew who had “lived a long life and found lasting happiness.” After reviewing over 1,000 suggestions, we conducted in-depth interviews with an extremely diverse group of 250 people ages 60 to 106. We asked them to reflect on their lives and careers to tell us what they had learned: the things that brought meaning and fulfillment as well as the regrets and things they wished they had learned sooner.

Why did you choose to interview people over the age of 60?

I feel we live in a society that tends to dismiss experience in favor of youth. This is out of step with what human societies have done for thousands of years. When I was done with the interviews, I had tapped into 18,000 years of life experience! It doesn’t get any better than that!

Was there one secret that really stood out for you?

The importance of following your heart and being true to yourself. Many of these people told me about critical times in their lives when they had to follow their own dreams instead of the dreams of other people, what parents, friends, or society was telling them to do.

The first thing is the choice of our careers, which must begin with understanding ourselves and what we love to do. I have met so many people over my years in business who are in jobs or careers that are not a good fit for their deepest self. Maybe they followed what their parents wanted them to do or they just got stuck in a career and keep trying to make it fit who they are.

What about beyond one’s career?

I learned each one of us has a path we are meant to follow. Some of us were meant to spend our lives outdoors or working for ourselves or helping others or living a life of adventure. These people all had different dreams, but the common element is that they followed the voice inside themselves.

A man named Ron, for example, had a family that wanted him to become a medical doctor but he had an experience right before going to study medicine when he realized it was not his path. Others told him the path he was choosing was crazy, but he listened to his own voice and that decision made all the difference in how his life turned out. When I asked him how you know when you are following your heart he told me: “I think most of us know, but we have to have the discipline to listen and the courage to follow.” What I learned is that most people reading this know if they are following their heart right now but we have to have the courage to follow that voice.

What role did taking risks play in finding happiness?

One of the questions we asked people was about key moments when they reached a crossroads and when the paths they chose made a big difference in how their lives turned out. In almost every case, the important crossroads involved risk, stepping out of your comfort zone in some way. Looking back, people often identified those moments of “stepping out” as being the key to their ultimate happiness and success. When I asked people if they had risked enough almost every one of them said “nowhere near enough.” What I concluded is that many of us play it way too safe and it is often when we feel uncomfortable that we know we are making the right decision.

The other fascinating thing is that almost no one regretted a risk they took that didn’t work out—whether in work or their personal life. We can handle the risks we take that don’t work out but what we can’t deal with is the feeling that we didn’t try for what we really wanted. These people told me that the thing we should fear most at the end of life is that our last words would be: “I wish I had…” So the moral to the story is that if there is a dream or hope you have for your life, make sure you at least try for it.

When people looked back on their careers and lives, what gave them the most meaning and sense of purpose?

One of the questions we asked people was what brought them the greatest happiness and the greatest meaning and also what turned out not to matter very much. The most common sources of meaning were relationships and feeling they had made something better while they were here. When people looked back on their careers and lives, happiness came from feeling that they gave something to others, whether it was the people they mentored, the impact they had on some matter that was important to them, or the relationships people had developed during their lives.

It occurred to me that we think what will make us happy is what we get (money, status, power, praise) but what ends up giving us the greatest happiness is what we gave while we were here.

When I asked people what did not matter very much the three most common answers were: money beyond what you need to be comfortable, what other people think of you, and having status. Many of these people said they wished they had learned sooner that life is not a contest and your happiness is not about how you compare with others because there will always be someone who has more of whatever it is you think you want.

Many of these people are well beyond the traditional retirement age. Did you learn anything about staying “young at heart”?

These people ranged from 60 to 106, but they were not “out to pasture” and were still living vital lives both in work and life. Many of them told me how important it is not to pull the curtain down too soon on your life. One of my favorite people was a 93-year-old man named John who had three careers, including that of a painter, a career he began in his sixties. Like so many of the people I interviewed, these people assumed they could contribute until very late in life.

Thank you! How can our readers reach you?

My e-mail address is JohnIzzo@aol.com. My Web site is www.theizzogroup.com.

Marshall Goldsmith (Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com) is corporate America’s preeminent executive coach and a founder of Marshall Goldsmith Partners. He is the author, most recently, of Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get it Back if You Lost It, as well as What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – the Wall Street Journal #1 best seller, and Succession: Are You Ready – published in February 2008 as part of the Harvard Business ‘Memo to the CEO’ series. Marshall is also on the faculty of the executive education programs at Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan.

This article in a different form originally appeared in Business Week.

Allies are different from friends in that your relationship with them always serves a specific purpose. You are trying to accomplish something and your ally has a motive in helping you; there’s a principle of mutual self-interest at work. The relationship is strategic; its purpose is to leverage power. You don’t need to have a lot in common with an ally — you don’t even necessarily need to enjoy one another’s company — but you do need to trust one another.

This post was excerpted from The Female Vision, published by Berrett-Kohler Publishers, June 2010.

Sally Helgesen is the author of five books, including the classic best-seller, The Female Advantage, celebrating its 20th year in print, and The Web of Inclusion, described by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership ever published. She is an international speaker and groundbreaking thinker on leadership and organizations.

Julie Johnson, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, is considered to be one of America’s most experienced and well respected coaches. She has coached hundreds of senior executives in blue chip companies and has worked with many of the most successful women in the Fortune 500. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review as well as in the noted book, Coaching for Leadership.

Sometimes these words or phrases morph as people try to keep up with the latest trends in corporatespeak. A company may begin by striving for “customer satisfaction,” then advance to “total customer satisfaction,” and then finally reach the pinnacle of “customer delight.”

Enron Talked a Good Game

But this obsession with words belies one very large problem: There is almost no correlation between the words on the wall and the behavior of leaders. Every company says it wants “integrity,” “respect for people,” “quality,” “customer satisfaction,” “innovation,” and “return for shareholders.” Sometimes companies get creative and toss in something about “community” or “suppliers.” But since the big messages are all basically the same, the words quickly lose meaning for employees.

Enron is a great example. Before the energy conglomerate’s collapse in 2001, I had the opportunity to review Enron’s values during a meeting with its senior management team. I was shown a wonderful video on Enron’s ethics and integrity. I was greatly impressed by the high-minded beliefs the company espoused and the care that was put into the video. Examples of Enron’s good deeds in the community and the professed character of Enron’s executives were particularly noteworthy.

It was one of the most smoothly professional presentations on ethics and values that I have ever seen. Clearly, Enron spent a fortune “packaging” these wonderful messages. It didn’t really matter. Despite the lofty words, a number of Enron’s top executives either have been indicted or are in jail.

J&J Adheres to its Credo

The situation couldn’t be more different at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), where I had the opportunity to work with that company’s top 2,000 leaders. The pharmaceutical company is famous for its “Credo,” which was written many years ago and reflects the sincere values of the leaders of the company at that time. The J&J Credo could be considered rather quaint by today’s standards. It contains several old-fashioned phrases, such as “must be good citizens—support good works and charities —and bear our fair share of taxes” and “maintain in good order the property that we are privileged to use.” Like most values statements, it conveyed a great message, but it had none of the slick PR packaging that Enron’s did.

Yet, even with its less-powerful language and seemingly dated presentation, the J&J Credo works—primarily because over many years, the company’s management has taken its values seriously. J&J executives have consistently challenged themselves and employees not just to understand the values, but to exhibit them in their day-to-day behavior. Whenever I conducted leadership training for J&J, one of its most senior executives would spend many hours with every class. The executive’s task was not to talk about compensation or other perks of J&J management; it was to discuss living the company’s values.

My partner, Howard Morgan, and I completed a study of more than 11,000 managers in eight major corporations. We looked at the impact of leadership development programs in changing executive behavior. As it turns out, each of the eight companies had different values and different words to describe ideal leadership behavior.

But these differences in words made absolutely no difference in determining the way leaders behaved. One company spent thousands of hours composing just the right words to express its view of how leaders should act—in vain. I am sure that the first draft would have been just as useful. In our study we found that leaders who took training and feedback seriously, made a personal commitment to improvement, and followed up with their co-workers became more effective. Leaders who just listened to the talk but took no action or made no commitment improved no more than those who hadn’t even heard the talk.

Actions Speak Loudest

Companies that do the best job of living up to their values and developing ethical employees, including managers, recognize that the real cause of success—or failure—is always the people, not the words. Rather than wasting time on reinventing words about desired leadership behavior, companies should ensure that leaders get (and act upon) feedback from employees—the people who actually observe this behavior. Rather than wasting time on changing performance appraisal forms, leaders need to learn from employees to ensure that they are providing the right coaching.

Ultimately, our actions will say much more to employees about our values and our leadership skills than our words ever can. If our actions are wise, no one will care if the words on the wall are not perfect. If our actions are foolish, the wonderful words posted on the wall will only make us look more ridiculous.

(This column has been modified from a piece that originally appeared in Strategy+Business, Summer, 2005.)

Marshall Goldsmith (Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com) is corporate America’s preeminent executive coach and a founder of Marshall Goldsmith Partners. He is the author, most recently, of Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get it Back if You Lost It, as well as What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – the Wall Street Journal #1 best seller, and Succession: Are You Ready – published in February 2008 as part of the Harvard Business ‘Memo to the CEO’ series. Marshall is also on the faculty of the executive education programs at Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan.

This article in a different form originally appeared in Talent Management Magazine.

In order for this to change, women must take the initiative. They can’t wait for organizations to start valuing what women see. Women themselves must build a market for what they offer by teaching their companies to recognize the power and value of the female vision. In this way they can create the change they seek.

This post was excerpted from The Female Vision, published by Berrett-Kohler Publishers, June 2010.

Sally Helgesen is the author of five books, including the classic best-seller, The Female Advantage, celebrating its 20th year in print, and The Web of Inclusion, described by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership ever published. She is an international speaker and groundbreaking thinker on leadership and organizations.

Julie Johnson, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, is considered to be one of America’s most experienced and well respected coaches. She has coached hundreds of senior executives in blue chip companies and has worked with many of the most successful women in the Fortune 500. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review as well as in the noted book, Coaching for Leadership.

Our daily actions have real power when they serve the purpose of our larger vision, providing a link between what we are doing now, at this present moment, and what we most profoundly want to achieve in the world. Being clear about this connection — being able to articulate how our actions serve our larger vision — gives us a sense of purpose and inspiration and provides us with a yardstick against which to measure our decisions.

Aligning our actions with our larger vision can be challenging for women working in organizations. As we’ve seen, traditional assumptions about what’s “worth it” in the workplace do not necessarily compel women’s deepest engagement. Nor are women’s strategic perceptions always recognized. Our Satisfaction Survey, along with the other research make clear that women tend to locate meaning in social relationships rather than in competitive rankings. So it’s not surprising that organizational goals and mission statements focused on numerical measures often strike women as hollow.

This post was excerpted from The Female Vision, published by Berrett-Kohler Publishers, June 2010.

Sally Helgesen is the author of five books, including the classic best-seller, The Female Advantage, celebrating its 20th year in print, and The Web of Inclusion, described by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership ever published. She is an international speaker and groundbreaking thinker on leadership and organizations.

Julie Johnson, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, is considered to be one of America’s most experienced and well respected coaches. She has coached hundreds of senior executives in blue chip companies and has worked with many of the most successful women in the Fortune 500. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review as well as in the noted book, Coaching for Leadership.

Members of different referent groups tend to define ethics or morality from the perspective of their group. We all tend to judge others as being right or wrong from the perspective of our referent group. It is critical that global leaders learn to understand others’ perspectives without coming across as judgmental.

Defining Referent Groups

The size of our referent group may range from “the world” to “me,” and almost anything in between. For example, some people see themselves as citizens of the world. They may even be willing to sacrifice what is good for most living humans in order to do what they think is right for the long-term survival of the planet. On the other extreme, some people are focused on “me” and are willing to sacrifice what is good for the world to benefit themselves. In most organizational life, either extreme can often produce a problem.

Some major referent groups include: gender, philosophy, country, geographic area, ethnic group, race, sexual orientation, corporation, work team, extended family, and nuclear family. For each of us, varying parts of our identity are connected with multiple groups. This may vary with age. For example, “family” is a major referent group for children ages 6 to 12, while “peer group” becomes a more important referent group between the ages of 12 and 15. Younger people tend to have less identification with the organization as a referent group, while older, more tenured employees tend to have more corporate identification.

Changing With the Times

Historical events can change our referent groups. In the U.S., World War II caused many young people to strongly identify with America. The Vietnam War caused many young people to have less identification with America. Before World War II, identification with race was much more common. After World War II, primary identification with race has become much more unacceptable. Leaders need to be sensitive to these changes and know how they can have an impact on the perceptions of employees.

There may be major differences between the referent groups with whom we pretend to identify and those with whom we really identify. For example, in the 1950s American corporate world (of Sinclair Lewis) it was “politically correct” to pretend that the corporation was more important than ourselves or even our family. While the essence of capitalism is self-interest, it has often been considered inappropriate to overtly demonstrate self-interest when working for a major capitalist corporation.

Today, many workers with great potential define themselves as “free agents.” While managers in a different referent group may perceive them as selfish, free agents can still be great team players in an organization that recognizes their perspective and builds win-win relationships.

Action Speaks Louder

One of the best ways to understand the power of referent groups is to focus on behavior more than words. By observing behavior and then asking ourselves, “Which referent group is the person really serving?” we can begin to understand the deeper rationale for behavior that may have previously appeared illogical.

Many of the differences that exist among people are easily understood when we know their different referent groups. If you believe that the encroachment of the Western world will lead to the demise of your “pure” culture, and your primary referent group is this culture, it is perfectly acceptable (or even noble) to do almost anything to stop this encroachment.

In a corporate setting, if you believe that your family is your most important referent group, it can be perfectly logical to go home early and not worship the corporate God. It can be noble to turn down promotions (even though this may show a lack of ambition to others).

Sound Philosophy

In discussing referent groups, I am not implying that “cultural relativism” is an inherently good philosophy. In fact, cultural relativists can be just another form of a referent group. They can define themselves as “intellectually superior” to people who have a well-defined set of core values. Many organizations have clearly defined values that relate to key referent groups. It is important for leaders to understand that multiple referent groups (that may not be on the values statement) can also be a key part of an employee’s identity. This is especially true outside the Western world.

My suggestion is that we can all increase our own interpersonal effectiveness by better understanding the powerful concept of referent groups. We can better understand that perfectly logical people have very different views on the world. We don’t have to agree with them (or even respect them), to be able to see their point of view. By understanding our own referent groups and the referent groups of others we can often agree to disagree without wasting our time on trying to convert each other.

Even more important, people in our organizations can more easily disagree with each other without having to judge each other. The Center for Creative Leadership’s research on successful cross-cultural leaders has shown that “understanding without judging” is a key predictor of successful leadership. A deep understanding of how referent groups impact behavior can help leaders achieve this goal.

Marshall Goldsmith (Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com) is corporate America’s preeminent executive coach and a founder of Marshall Goldsmith Partners. He is the author, most recently, of Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get it Back if You Lost It, as well as What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – the Wall Street Journal #1 best seller, and Succession: Are You Ready – published in February 2008 as part of the Harvard Business ‘Memo to the CEO’ series. Marshall is also on the faculty of the executive education programs at Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan.

This article in a different form originally appeared in Business Week.

What does this mean?

It means that the women we spoke with did not perceive the tradeoffs their companies were asking them to make — in terms of time, stress, lifestyle, relationships — to be adequately compensated by the rewards offered in return. It does not mean that the women were unwilling to sacrifice their time or to live with the adrenaline rush we all experience when we’re overextended or thrillingly involved in our work. It does mean that these women did not find their company’s traditional reward system sufficiently compelling.

Over the last two decades, there has been increasing recognition that the structure of work was designed to reflect the realities of an all-male workforce whose constituents had few, if any, domestic responsibilities beyond supporting their families. But there has been little thought given to whether the rewards of work might also reflect male priorities. Our research suggests a fundamental mismatch between what the marketplace assumes people will value in their work and what women (not all women, but enough to make a difference) most deeply value. This occurs because organizations still offer reward, recognize achievement, build incentive, and decide promotion using definitions of worth that reflect an all-male industrial leadership culture.

This post was excerpted from The Female Vision, published by Berrett-Kohler Publishers, June 2010.

Sally Helgesen is the author of five books, including the classic best-seller, The Female Advantage, celebrating its 20th year in print, and The Web of Inclusion, described by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership ever published. She is an international speaker and groundbreaking thinker on leadership and organizations.

Julie Johnson, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, is considered to be one of America’s most experienced and well respected coaches. She has coached hundreds of senior executives in blue chip companies and has worked with many of the most successful women in the Fortune 500. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review as well as in the noted book, Coaching for Leadership.