On June 14, 2023, the message came from Hamburg: Tanja Dreilich is resigning from her position as CFO of the logistics group HHLA after just six months in order to “devote herself to new professional challenges”, as stated in a press release. The board of directors and the supervisory board agreed on this “by mutual agreement”.
On March 31, 2023, the news from Walldorf was: Sabine Bendiek, head of human resources at SAP, informed the supervisory board that she would not be extending her contract, which ran until the end of 2023, as the software company announced. Bendiek is giving up her position on the board after just three years.
On December 5, 2022, it is said from Bad Homburg: Carla Kriwet is leaving her chief post at Fresenius Medical Care after just 66 days in office – “at her own request”, as the Dax group reports.
New professional challenges. On the best of terms. At his own request. Again, three top managers gave up their posts within a short time. Whether this actually happened for voluntary reasons, as the official announcements are supposed to suggest, is not to be discussed here in individual cases. It is about the fundamental question of whether there is a trend behind the most recent examples: do women at the top of companies actually stay in office for a shorter period of time than their male colleagues? Are female top managers less successful than top managers or to put it another way: do women fail more often than men?
What is certain is that Tanja Dreilich, Sabine Bendiek and Carla Kriwet did not pursue a career in their own company. All three were brought to the top post from the outside. And one thing is also clear: anyone who comes from outside, regardless of whether they are male or female, generally has a higher risk of failing than someone who has risen within the company and has been familiar with the structures and – probably more importantly – with the culture for years. “Anyone who comes from outside doesn’t know the company, they first have to build up a network and gather allies around them, without whom nobody at the top can survive,” says Sabine Hansen, HR consultant and chairwoman of the initiative Women into Leadershipwhich promotes the internal promotion of women to top management.
Carla Kriwet
(Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa)
Sabine Bendiek
(Photo: Marcel Kusch/dpa)
Viewed in this way, women have poorer starting opportunities: while the male board members primarily make it to the top as homegrown in their company, almost two thirds (63 percent) of all female board members in the 160 largest companies in the country come from outside. This is the result of a recently published study by the non-profit Allbright Foundation. It says: “In their own company, talented females only make it to the top in exceptional cases.” For years, companies have failed to develop enough female talent. Therefore, when filling board positions, they could rarely fall back on a woman from their own ranks. And would have to get one from outside.
According to the Allbright study, companies are increasingly relying on the help of personnel consultancies when looking for suitable female candidates. “Companies are frantically ordering women for their board positions,” says Wiebke Ankersen, managing director of the German-Swedish Allbright Foundation. And the headhunters deliver: Almost half (46 percent) of the new board members brought in from outside in the past year were female. Five years ago, there was only one woman out of seven externally recruited board members.
The headhunters from Egon Zehnder, Heidrick & Struggles or Spencer Stuart mostly find what they are looking for abroad, where more women are available at the top level than in Germany: Around half (49 percent) of the externally recruited board members have previously had a career in a foreign company done, for men it was only 36 percent. And almost every fifth member of the board (19 percent) found the headhunters in one of the 40 large DAX companies below the board, “where the pipelines with female executives have been maintained more systematically for several years than in most other German companies”, as it is in of the study is called.
Women sit a little more firmly in their board chairs than men
Because the companies often do not provide supplies themselves, they outsource the search for top women to headhunters. But that’s just “the quick fix at the top,” says Ankersen. In this way, only a few top women would be shuffled from one corporation to the next. According to the right pocket, left pocket principle. “If companies want to have more women on the board, they have to systematically build up a much larger pool of female managers at all levels themselves,” says Ankersen.
So if women are more often lateral entrants and lateral entrants find it increasingly difficult, then the reverse conclusion is that women fail more often must as men? Are they basically the riskier occupation? The opposite is the case, says Allbright Managing Director Ankersen, referring to figures that her foundation has just collected: According to this, five women in Dax, MDax and SDax gave up their board mandates between September and March, and 50 men left at the same time. This corresponds to five percent of all female and eight percent of all male board members. If you look at the departures of the externally recruited board members, the difference is even more blatant: almost every third man who came from outside has already vacated his post in the past five years, but only every sixth woman. So you can say that women sit a little more firmly in their executive chairs than men.
Conversely, can it be concluded that women (despite the more difficult starting position) are more successful at the top than men? That is speculation, says Ankersen. Rather, she interprets the difference as follows: “Perhaps women are screened more closely before they are hired than men.” They might also be more adaptable. In any case, the companies would try harder not to lose the women. After all, today’s corporate leaders are under enormous public pressure to meet their diversity goals. Today, hardly any supervisory board can afford to have a board without women.
Good performance alone is obviously not enough
Around 100 board positions are filled every year in the 160 listed companies. Plenty of opportunity to increase the still low proportion of women from the current 17.1 percent. And indeed, a new dynamic can be observed at the top of companies: According to the Allbright study, almost as many women as men were appointed to the executive boards of the country’s largest companies in the past six months.
Career consultant Sabine Hansen advises women who come from outside to bring along confidants and to look for talent in the new company and then promote them. “Many women think: I’m good, that’s why I’m here,” says Hansen, who worked at Kienbaum until 2019 and now runs her own consultancy. However, good performance alone is not enough. Especially at the top, it’s less about the matter and more about power. “Women shouldn’t be afraid of power and power symbolism,” says Hansen. So feel free to demonstrate who’s boss.
If the recent departures of top managers Dreilich, Bendiek and Kriwet do not show that women are less successful than men at the top, what can be inferred from this? Maybe that even in 2023 the following will still apply: If women in management fail, then not quietly. They do it under the special attention of the public.