More from these Authors

• Book | 2020

  Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

  Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss

  When leaders and aspiring leaders seek out advice, they're often told to try harder. Dig deeper. Look in the mirror and own your natural-born strengths and fix any real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.
  
  We offer a different worldview. We argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: Build others up. Leadership isn’t about you. It’s about how effective you are at empowering other people—and making sure that this impact endures even in your absence. We show through inspiring stories from ancient Rome to Silicon Valley, the origins of great leadership are found, paradoxically, not in worrying about your own status and advancement, but in the unrelenting focus on other people’s potential.
  
  Unleashed​ provides radical advice for the practice of leadership today. Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, love, and belonging to create spaces where other people can excel, we offer practical, battle-tested tools—based on our work in companies such as Uber, Riot Games, and others—along with interviews and stories from our own personal experience to make these ideas come alive. This book is your indispensable guide for unleashing greatness in other people...and, ultimately, in yourself.

  Keywords: leadership skills; belonging; Leadership; Management Skills; Trust; Organizational Culture;

  Citation:

  Frei, Frances X., and Anne Morriss. Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020.  View Details

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• Article | Administrative Science Quarterly | March 2020

  Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-family Narrative as a Social Defense Against 24/7 Work Culture

  Irene Padavic, Robin J. Ely and Erin M. Reid

  It is widely accepted that the conflict between women’s family obligations and professional jobs’ long hours lies at the heart of their stalled advancement. Yet research suggests that this “work-family narrative” is incomplete: men also experience it and nevertheless advance; moreover, organizations’ effort to mitigate it through flexible work policies has not improved women’s advancement prospects and often hurts them. Hence this presumed remedy has the perverse effect of perpetuating the problem. Drawing on a case study of a professional service firm, we develop a multilevel theory to explain why organizations are caught in this conundrum. We present data suggesting that the work-family explanation has become a “hegemonic narrative”—a pervasive, status-quo-preserving story that prevails despite countervailing evidence. We then advance systems-psychodynamic theory to show how organizations use this narrative and attendant policies and practices as an unconscious “social defense” to help employees fend off anxieties raised by a 24/7 work culture and to protect organizationally powerful groups—in our case, men and the firm’s leaders—and in so doing sustain workplace inequality. Due to the social defense, two orthodoxies remain unchallenged—the necessity of long work hours and the inescapability of women’s stalled advancement. The result is that women’s thin representation at senior levels remains in place. We conclude by highlighting contributions to work-family, workplace inequality, and systems-psychodynamic theory.

  Keywords: 24/7 work culture; hegemonic narrative; social defense; work-family conflict; systems-psychodynamic theory; Work-Life Balance; Personal Development and Career; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Organizational Culture;

  Citation:

  Padavic, Irene, Robin J. Ely, and Erin M. Reid. "Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-family Narrative as a Social Defense Against 24/7 Work Culture." Administrative Science Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2020): 61–111.  View Details

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• Article | Harvard Business Review | March–April 2020

  What's Really Holding Women Back? It's Not What Most People Think

  R. Ely and Irene Padavic

  Ask people to explain why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women's devotion to family makes it impossible to put in those hours, and so their careers inevitably suffer. Not so, say the authors, who spent 18 months working with a global consulting firm that wanted to know why it had so few women in positions of power. Although virtually every employee the authors interviewed related a form of the standard explanation, the firm's data told a different story. Women weren't being held back because of trouble balancing work and family; men, too, suffered from that problem and nevertheless advanced. Women were held back because they were encouraged to take accommodations, such as going part-time and shifting to internally facing roles, which derailed their careers. The real culprit in women's stalled advancement, the authors conclude, is a general culture of overwork that hurts both sexes and locks gender equality in place. To solve this problem, they argue, we must reconsider what we’re willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees.

  Keywords: overwork; Employment; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Work-Life Balance; Organizational Culture;

  Citation:

  Ely, R., and Irene Padavic. "What's Really Holding Women Back? It's Not What Most People Think." Harvard Business Review 98, no. 2 (March–April 2020): 58–67.  View Details

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