*This content is sponsored by RMB, a diversified financial services brand encompassing investment banking, fund management, private wealth management and advisory services.
By Liesl Bebb-McKay*
A year ago, a group of women at Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) realised that we had a shared passion for women in the workplace and wanted to create an RMB where we all can achieve the goals we make for ourselves in our youth, no matter who we are.
It’s no secret that women leaders are rare, not just in South Africa but across the world. Our research showed us that although women start their career journeys equal to men, with equal ambition and opportunity, something happens along the way that prevents them from reaching leadership positions – and its leadership where we have focussed this journey for RMB.
We have the grand ambition to grow the number of women leading financial services in South Africa and to encourage women to choose banking as a career where they can enjoy success whilst still making the choices they wish for their personal lives.
At RMB, we start off well. Women make up at least half of our intake at a junior level, and women perform exceptionally well right up until junior leadership level. And then something goes wrong. Women leave – they either physically leave or they take a great big step back, so when we stop and look around the boardroom table, the number of women in leadership is sadly lacking. There are loads of hypotheses as to why this happens: our programming from childhood; our cultural bias; our genetic blueprint; or is it simply all that guilt?
At RMB, we realise the importance of gender balance in teams and we are working to create a space where all people can thrive equally, no matter how they look, so that we can ensure that our leadership is diverse and well equipped to keep us ahead of the pack.
We have called our initiative Athena, not only because it’s a pretty great name, but because of what Athena stood for. To quote from Adrianna Huffington in her book Thrive: “Athena was the goddess of wisdom – weaving together strength and vulnerability, creativity and nurturing, passion and discipline, pragmatism and intuition, intellect and imagination, claiming them all, the masculine and the feminine. She breathes soul and compassion – exactly what has been missing – into the traditionally masculine world of work and success. Her emergence, fully armed and independent, from Zeus’ head, and her total ease in the practical world of men, whether on the battlefield or in the affairs of the city, her inventive creativity, her passion for law, justice and politics – they all serve as a reminder that creation and action are as inherently natural to women as they are to men.”
RMB’s Project Athena gender equality initiative has won the 2016 Gender Mainstreaming Award #gender pic.twitter.com/pgG08e80iA
— RMB CIB (@RMB_CIB) September 4, 2016
Our investigations and workshops lead us to focus on five key plans to achieve our goal. Though this five key plan was designed to achieve gender equality, much can also be applied to transformation in general.
- Men Matter
Athena stands for men and women for gender equality. It is men who lead our organisation right now and men who will help us drive this initiative forward. It’s men who will be raising the women leaders of the future, men who can encourage young women to lead, and men who can teach men to actively consider what it takes to make this world a place where women want to come and to stay.
- Discretionary time management
We believe that discretionary time management can be an absolute game changer. Work is no longer a nine to five event. Society has moved on, tech has moved on and the difference between work time and home time is becoming less distinct. For women and men, working productively on discretionary terms can be a great enabler for family life and health.
- Teaching women to lean in
We encourage women to trust their skills and abilities, to encourage one another and to embrace their feminine strengths – their diversity. We don’t believe that women need to “man-up to be successful” and would like to create a space where we can encourage women to trust themselves more, to overcome their own internal bias so that they can achieve more in their careers.
- The career life-cycle and networks
Careers today have changed. The career ladder has become more like a jungle gym and, women, especially, need the space to take time out to climb off the ladder for a short time or to take a sideways step as their needs change. Women also need the opportunity to get back onto the ladder when they are ready. Companies need to acknowledge this lifecycle and create a working environment that allows for time out, and allows for onramps back to the organisation.
Athena has given RMB an opportunity to create a tangible network of women, a place to share ideas and thoughts, a place to encourage one another. Surprisingly, women use their networks less in the workplace and do not naturally create strong internal workplace networks. We hope that Athena can create a space to connect women to one another and to men within the work environment.
- Sponsorship
Sponsorship is that special relationship where a person in leadership nurtures another and pushes them to achieve throughout their career. We are encouraging leaders to sponsor someone who looks different to them in the belief that more women will get literally pulled out of the shade and encouraged to push harder in their career journey.
Even outside of RMB, we want to encourage girls and young women to look to banking as a career. Perceptions of banking in mainstream media have damaged some of the pull banking previously had for women and we hope to encourage women to come back to our exciting industry. To get this right we need to tell our stories, we need to change the way we present ourselves as banks, and we need to show that banks are full of real people making a real impact.
Read also: RMB gets Thinking, Pulling, Together – alignment of values becomes breakthrough for SA Rowing
Having women in leadership makes business sense but it is also an imperative if we wish to understand half of our employees and, as importantly, half of our clients.
Athena still has a long way to go but it is now a key part of the overall RMB strategic agenda. We have initiated #jointheconversation to raise the gender discussion within the bank and are making discretionary time management the norm rather than the exception so employees can decide how to manage their time. We have launched a formal programme to help high-achieving women expand their impact and influence within the bank and in outside arenas and have joined the 30% Club.
Huffington perhaps sums up our thoughts: “Women don’t need to leave behind the deeper parts of themselves to thrive in a male-dominated world. In fact women, and men too, need to reclaim their instinctual strengths if they want to tap into their inner wisdom.”
- Liesl Bebb-McKay is head of Innovation & Disruption for RMB Global Markets and a leader at The Foundery, an innovation hub at RMB. RMB won the overall award in the Gender Mainstreaming Awards: Women Empowerment in the Workplace for Athena. RMB also won the award for the best JSE-listed company in the category.
