Merit’s Amazing Magic: How Competencies Move Us Forward
By Scott Poynton, Skytop Contributor / January 10th, 2022
Scott Poynton is an Australian forester. He founded The Forest Trust (TFT) in 1999 and grew it into a global non-profit working in 48 countries, impacting more than $1 trillion in supply chain transactions.
Scott supported some of the world’s largest companies to be more environmentally and socially responsible. He brokered major transformations across the wood and agri-commodities sectors, pioneering responsible sourcing and launching the world’s first No Deforestation, No Exploitation commitments.
In 2020, Scott founded The Pond Foundation. Its My Carbon Zero program helps individuals and businesses take their own strong, credible climate action. He also leads A Different Way Limited, supporting C-suite executives and their organizations to grow values-based leadership while sharing the lessons of his experience through writing, presenting and lecturing.
Recruiting on Merit
As leaders seek ways to improve gender balance throughout their organizations, most particularly in their leadership teams and Boards, might recruiting on merit be a place to start?
It might only be a sample of two but my own experience with gender balance accords beautifully with a co-founder friend. Notwithstanding the important disclaimer that we’re both men, we’ve both managed organizations where gender balance was/is close to 50:50. In the face of justifiable challenges around gender balance, and acknowledging that much needs to be done to address it, might ignoring gender altogether rather than implementing positive discrimination policies be a good approach?
My Own Experience
My own experience running The Forest Trust, a global non-profit, was that at the end of 2015, when I stepped aside as CEO, my executive team comprised three exceptional males and three exceptional females. Across the organization, 45% of our team were women, many in senior positions, which was an achievement I was proud of because we operated in the forest and agricultural sectors in more than 48 countries, including in the developing world where University graduates in those disciplines were predominantly male. More than 80% of our workforce was dispersed in these countries so we could have expected a far lower proportion of women to men. It was skewed in favor of males in some countries, but across an organization of more than 260 people, 45%:55% seemed like an achievement.
My Friend’s Experience
In my friend’s case, he’s CFO and co-founder (with another male) of Axium MTech, a Swiss-based company with manufacturing facilities in Italy. His team took over the business three years ago and set about growing it. Just recently, when asked about gender balance, he had to ask his HR team for the numbers. It wasn’t something he’d been focusing on. The data were revealing.
In 2018 when his team took over the business, there were 34 employees, 74% of them were males. Last September, when he looked at the numbers for the first time, they’d doubled their payroll to 68 people, but now only 55% were males. OK, not 50:50, but again, like my own case, they operate in a manufacturing industry where many of the employees are male.
“How did you do it?” I asked him.
“We just recruited the best people,” was his simple response and it accorded with my own experience.
The Best People
No special policies, no positive discrimination, just recruit on merit and unsurprisingly, to me at least, good women as well as good men, rise to the top of recruitment lists for a wide variety of positions.
I absolutely do get that in some countries, where women aren’t afforded equal opportunities to receive a quality education, that recruiting on merit could exclude female candidates because they don’t have requisite qualifications. Even then, qualifications are less important than experience and practical knowledge in so many contexts and women, if afforded opportunities to gain such experience, are often the best candidates.
I know many women in the workplace who don’t like the idea of positive discrimination. They just want to be judged for their knowledge and experience regardless of their gender. That said, I’ve been nearly strangled by one female colleague who demanded that such policies were absolutely necessary.
Achieving Gender Balance
My sense is that we can’t be absolute in these things but if we could put on glasses that helped us view humans as gender neutral beings and let us simply assess them on their merit for a particular position, we might find some wrongs being naturally and relatively rapidly put right. The change that emerged over three short years within my friend’s company, even as they doubled their workforce, is testimony to that and my own case likewise. I would like to think that gender just never entered the equation in our recruitment decisions. Subliminally, that’s probably kidding myself, but the gender balance we achieved was something that just unfolded unintentionally.
Gender Neutrality is the Best Way to Drive More Woman Up The Corporate Ladder
Removing our gender glasses in recruitment processes can be a challenge for some people but letting merit work its amazing magic might be a great place to start on a journey toward greater gender inclusion and the promotion of equal opportunities for people other than men. I suggest giving it a go and reviewing where you are every 6 or so months. It would be better if you didn’t have to do that; knowing you’ve got such an approach could lead to bias, but just be intentional about it and see where it takes you. If you feel you must have a policy on gender, perhaps make it a simple one-liner, “We will recruit solely on merit.”
My sense is, you’ll be gender neutral before you know it.