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Training Top 125: ADP Takes Action to Close the Gender Divide
April 07, 2009
New program grows ADP's female sales leadership ranks
By Sarah Boehle
In 2007, the small business services sales organization within Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP) identified a gap in its leadership ranks. At the time, women made up only 17 percent of the organization's sales management team—even though women accounted for more than 50 percent of the division's overall sales force.
Determined to find out why, the Roseland, N.J.-based business outsourcing company conducted investigations revealing that women within the organization were actively deciding against management careers for several reasons, including a perceived lack of work-life balance among managers and a desire to see more female role models successfully leading teams while raising families.
In response, ADP launched the "Sales Women in Leadership" program in 2008. The goals of the program, according to Amy Annee, director of ADP's leadership academy program, include eliminating leadership barriers (both real and perceived); fostering cultural change at the managerial level to bolster work-life balance and sales team effectiveness; increasing the percentage of female leaders at each level of the leadership pipeline; and increasing the visibility of successful female leaders across all 50 sales regions throughout the country.
Participants involved in the program received extensive individual and group development and networking opportunities. They also participated in "action learning" projects, during which they worked with senior leaders to brainstorm and develop solutions to drive cultural change. Such projects included creating a "new parent transition" strategy; a systematic re-engineering of the sales management role to eliminate unnecessary tasks and better support work-life balance; and the development of a comprehensive set of resources to help leaders build a team culture that inspires and develops individuals across diverse genders, generations, and cultures.
Since the program's inception, the total percentage of female sales managers has risen from 17 percent to 33 percent, and the number of female sales executives has nearly doubled. In addition, the percentage of women at every stage of the organization's leadership pipeline has increased dramatically, and women now make up more than 46 percent of the pre-management candidates who are certified for promotion through the company's rigorous "Top Gun" leadership development program.
Interested in implementing a similar program? Here are some tips for success, according to Annee:
• Forge connections. To make female sales leaders more visible throughout the organization and encourage them to forge connections with one another, ADP brought together women from geographically dispersed sales regions throughout the U.S. to attend an onsite development workshop. The company keeps these connections alive over time by holding regular webinars and publishing a quarterly newsletter that spotlights program success stories, features best practices from women across the country and announces all female sales division promotions. ADP also created a spreadsheet specifically for women leaders that lists each leader's key leadership strengths as well as her contact information. The spreadsheet was distributed to women organization-wide to encourage informal networking and mentoring.
• Don't be afraid to rewrite the rules. "This program was designed for women, by women," says Annee, "and when we brought women together for the first time to think about how to address the leadership gap we were facing, we asked them to put aside what is possible or realistic and to brainstorm what a dream solution would look like. This approach brought out some of our best ideas."
• Focus on the results that matter. If you want to help people achieve better work-life balance, says Annee, it's important to rethink what's important. "For example, we conducted leader education across the entire sales organization regarding the impact of the old cultural belief that managers should be the first and last people out of the office," she says. "Instead, we emphasized that what managers really should be evaluated on is the results they deliver. One way we did that was to showcase one of our most successful female managers—who just happens to work only four days a week."
Automatic Data Processing Inc. is a business outsourcing company with headquarters in Roseland, N.J. In 2009, it placed 12th on Training magazine's Top 125 list, an annual ranking of organizations that excel at human-capital development.
Source: Training
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