Notes from the Corporate Underground by Stan Sewitch

Author:Stan Sewitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781412233774
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Published: 2006-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Babies Are Good Business

In 1989 I started my entrepreneurial path, founding HRG. A year later I started Emlyn systems. A year after that, I and Mike Conrad founded Chromagen. I was a little manic in my drive to build because I had just been “right-sized” from my last corporate job at what was then Mycogen Corporation, and I had a young family to support. If it hadn’t been for that deep motivation to ensure my family’s security and prosperity, I have no doubt that my efforts would have been less.

And in these last fifteen years of business creation, building and management, I have had the good fortune to work with a lot of really talented, hard-working, authentic women. While generalities are dangerous, and there are exceptions to every rule, my experience in the recruitment and management of employees is that women tend to display team behaviors more consistently and deeply than the men. The consulting business is one of those models that cannot succeed unless the constituent staff members are independent in motivation and initiative, and interdependent in achieving results. It’s the epitome of the matrix organizational structure. We have over ninety active projects going on at any one time, with overlapping skill requirements for service delivery and project management, while at the same time maintaining active business development and internal administration. It ain’t easy. Women are generally better at it.

So because my staff members have largely been women, I’ve had the opportunity to repeatedly face the one key challenge in building long-term business viability with team members of that gender.

Women have babies.

Now, you might be nodding to yourself and thinking, “Yeah, that’s why I try to avoid hiring women in that baby-making age range…” Well, I won’t attempt to dissuade your thinking based upon the legal prohibition of gender-based employment decisions. Even though my experience shows a correlation of skills associated to professional consulting and females, I still recruit and interview as many men as I can find, then let the valid selection tools we employ do the work of evaluating them on job-related criteria. But let’s put aside the legalities for the moment. My assertion is that hiring women is good business, even when you know for a fact that they will be absent in the foreseeable future for several weeks or months to give birth to a child…even when you know they might not return to work at all.

“Now he’s really lost it!” you might be thinking. “How could it be good business to go through the expense and time to recruit, train and develop an employee, and then lose their productivity for months, or forever?!”

Let’s start with some data. Over 65% of American households have two working adults in the marriage. The U.S. workforce is nearly equal in gender balance. The unemployment rate has been around 5-6% nationally. You may remember a couple of decades ago when 5% unemployment was considered “elective”, i.e., everybody who wanted a job had a job, at that level of unemployment. Our economists have redefined what a “good” or “bad” unemployment rate is, over time.

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