Breaking news: finally there seems be an increase in the number of female partners at the large law firms in the Netherlands. The total number of female partners has increased at the top 10 law firms from 57 last years to 61 this year, whereas the total number of partners decreased in that top 10 from 450 to 430. These data are published in De Stand van de Advocatuur 2010. On 26 March the first copy of this document will be handed over to Saskia Stuiveling, president of the general Court of Auditors and member of the Council of recommendation of the Dutch order of lawyers.

There is also less good news for the champions of diversity: at the top 10 last year  a total of 865 female lawyers worked, this year that number has decreased to 808. Also the number of male lawyers decreased, from 1,211 to 1,168. In terms of percentage the proportion male and female lawyers now amounts to at the top 10 of offices 59.4% for 40.6%, in contrast to last year 58.9% and 41.1%.

This text has been translated from: http://www.advocatie.nl

The presentation as well as other useful resources are available here for download for EPWN members:

• Presentation from “Riding the Whirlwind: Culture & Innovation” with Fons Trompenaars

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The presentation is available here for download for EPWN members:

• Presentation from “DSM: Passion for People, Commitment to Diversity”

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Speaker: Fons Trompenaars

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A recent survey of global CEO’s found that leaders in every industry and in every part of the world are emerging from a period of retrenchment and moving towards a vision of sustained growth, and that innovation is the preferred path to achieving that growth. Innovation has regained its central place in corporate life.

Dr. Fons Trompenaars will show how a winning team is made up of individuals who can demonstrate different strengths and, in fact, if a team does not embrace these different strengths, then it will not have the important dynamic to move forward and to innovate. For twenty years Fons Trompenaars has been interviewing leaders around the world, conducting seminars and advising their companies. His conclusions demonstrate how successful leaders have developed cross-cultural competences, the ability to ride what he calls “the waves of culture” and to reconcile the dilemmas involved.

Fons Trompenaars will show how to make culture work for your business. Listed regularly as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers, Trompenaars is recognized internationally for his work as consultant, trainer, motivational speaker and author of bestsellers on culture and business. Captivating and thought-provoking in his presentation style and backed by rigorous research, Trompenaars has contributed many breakthrough ideas on the deeper understanding and reconciliation of inter and intra-cultural diversity, creativity and innovation. Participants will learn how to deal with cross-cultural challenges and dilemmas as well as how to embrace an evolving innovation culture. Leaders must adopt new approaches to make them, their teams and their business more sustainable in these ‘whirlwind’ times.

Fons Trompenaars is author of the seminal book ‘Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business’. His latest bestseller ‘Riding the Whirlwind’, is a blueprint for developing a supportive culture that reinforces creativity and innovation for long term sustainability.

Participants are welcome to network from 19:00 to 20:00. The program begins at 20:00.

Registration and Guest Policy: Registration is required for members (no charge) and guests (guests are welcome at a cost of 45 Euro or ladies can become a member for a little extra). Snacks and drinks included. Guests are allowed to attend two EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam functions per year.

Our distinguised group of panelists will be discussing their views on Leadership, sharing their expertise and offering practical advice on what new business realities require of senior leadership. Featuring moderator Annette Nijs, director of the Europe China Institute at Nyenrode University and Member of the EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam Advisory Board. Panelists Include:

Sybilla Dekker

Former Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, Member of the Supervisory Board Bank Nederlandse Gemeenten and Member of the Supervisory Board of DHV

Dick Harryvan

Member of the Executive Board iNG Group and Member of the EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam Advisory Board

Lidewey van der Sluis

Professor of Strategic Talent Management at Nyenrode Business University and Academic Director of the Powerhouse ‘Competing for Talent’

Robert Swaak

Member of the Management Board of PricewaterhouseCoopers NL

Program:

18:30 – 19:30: Registration, Buffet Dinner and networking

19:30 – 19:40: Welcome and Opening Remarks

19:40 – 21:30: Panel Discussion

21:30 – 22:00: Networking

Registration is required for members and guests at www.europeanpwn-amsterdam.net. The event is offered at no charge to EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam members and a cost of EUR 30 for guests, which includes an excellent buffet dinner. Please note that men are very welcome to attend this event, and members are encouraged to bring their male colleagues and supervisors. For this event there is a special student rate of €15 (students please register on epwnmembership@yahoo.com).

Why women managers shine in a downturn – by Michel Ferrary, professor of management at Ceram Business School, France, expert on gender diversity and stock market performance.

Please join us and our corporate sponsor Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu on October 23rd at 7pm for what promises to be an unforgettable evening!

The Fuel to Power Performance: Leadership, Diversity, and Innovation

Julie Gilbert’s capacity to tap employees’ passions to drive innovation and value has earned her a reputation as one of the fastest-rising leaders in corporate America.

At Best Buy, Inc., she leads retail training, leadership development, and the company’s innovation engine for the more than 140,000 Best Buy employees internationally. She also created and leads the Winning With Women strategy for the company, which is powered by WOLF (Women’s Leadership Forum).

She motivates individuals to find their voices, link to their passions,r e-think their leadership possibilities, and reinvent themselves, their organizations, and their communities. She inspires others to create empowering networks and build new businesses to fuel innovation, change, and winning business results.

Julie is a 2008 honoree of the White House Project’s Circle of 10, a group of exceptional women across sectors that have made women’s leadership possible by virtue of their philanthropic, personal and professional endeavors. She was named one of Minnesota’s Women to Watch by Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal and one of the 100 most successful women in business by Profiles in Diversity Journal Magazine. She has been featured in Business Week, USA Today,and PINK magazine, and profiled on Forbes TV and ABC, among other media outlets.

Biography

Under her leadership, Best Buy has achieved significant business outcomes in employee recruiting,retention, and customer market share. Julie plans to share the strategies she and her team utilize to mine new growth markets, identify unmet customer needs,and create value by leveraging diversity of thought inside and outside of Best Buy.

Before she was promoted to Senior Vice President at the young age of 36; Julie was Vice President of Retail Training, Leadership Development, and WOLF. Through her leadership in WOLF, Best Buy increased female market share by more than $3.6 billion, increased the number of female job applicants by 37 percent, and reduced female employee turnover by 5.7 percent.

Previously, Gilbert served as Vice President of customer centricity for Best Buy,where she led high-end male customer business group. In this role, she spearheaded the creation and partnership for Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theatre store-within-a-store concept, now rolling out across the country. In her time as Director of alliance development, she created and implemented several strategic relationships with key partners, including Virgin Mobile, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Sony.

Prior to her time at Best Buy, she worked for Deloitte and Touche in New York and Minneapolis, where she created several new businesses including one that she scaled nationally to become a top performance driver for the organization.

A firm believer in giving back, Julie incorporates community outreach into the development initiatives at Best Buy. Furthermore, she currently partners with the Girls Scouts (to help inspire girls at all ages to pursue their passions and help each other), the International Museum of Women (which links women globally), and the Grameen Foundation (which helps women in the most poverty stricken areas of the world build new businesses).

A South Dakota native, Julie earned her master’s degree in strategy and marketing and her bachelor’s degree in accounting—both with highest distinction—from the University of Minnesota. She is also a licensed CPA in the state of Minnesota.

Countless surveys and studies have come to the same conclusion: gender diversity in the Netherlands, particularly the streaming of women to top positions in business, government and universities, lags sorely behind other European countries.

Most parties on both sides of the Great Gender Debate would agree on the facts. The story gets murky when you ask why this occurs and what can be done about it.

There are a few popularly-held myths and beliefs around women and leadership in the Netherlands, and it might be useful to look at some of these old chestnuts from a new angle:

Shouldn’t businesses just take more risks in making appointments, in order to give women a chance?

Why are male leaders so sure that appointing women will be a risk? Since so much research points to the fact that rather than being a risky endeavour, appointing women to senior management ensures more ethical decision-making, more creativity and innovation, better business performance and better employee retention and engagement isn’t it much more risky, anno 2008, NOT to appoint women? Further, the phrase ’give women a chance’ is condescending. Gender diversity in leadership is a sound business decision, not charity.

Positive discrimination can lead to resistance in the organisation. A woman who reaches a certain position faster because of her gender will have to earn her authority (over her subordinates) first.

Consider the common occurrence of men holding senior leadership positions who owe their appointments to their gender (and have other unearned and unacknowledged privileges based on having the right last name, having attended the right schools, joined the right hockey clubs and fraternities and are the right ethnicity). Have they suffered any lack of authority issues because people consider they got to the top owing to factors other than skill and merit?

All leadership surveys say that possessing emotional intelligence, having powerful networks and being charismatic/attractive all matter far more than actual business knowledge, intelligence or acumen. How is it that suddenly women are going to have to prove they got to the top simply by being the very best available, and not because of other factors as well? No one else has ever had to.

Corporations have to make the appointments and then back their (female) appointees all the way, making it clear that no insubordination will be tolerated. Furthermore, ’sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’. Who cares what anyone says? Let the performance figures do the talking…

I don’t see any mechanism (process) that holds women back (perhaps only the resistance from middle management. This group is nervously hanging onto their own positions, and won’t easily let women through). Top managers will perhaps have to give women a helping hand by breaking through this resistance.

The concept of ’systemic bias’ is ingrained in every organisation. This occurs when certain behaviours and characteristics ¬ often those of background, ethnicity, personality, gender, age; in short, things over which people have no choice or control ¬ are encouraged and rewarded in an organisation. The preference is very subtle, but extends from recruitment approaches (where is the organisation looking for its new talent, for instance, and what kind of candidate applies?) to promotion (who is placed on the fast track and in management development programmes, and who is asked for key overseas jobs?) and leadership (what kind of diversity exists in the top 200?).

Most organisations unconsciously favour those who look, act and feel like the present leadership, and they in turn are usually clones of the leaders before them. Looking at the pictures of senior management boards of any organisation in the Netherlands there is virtually NO change over time. Down to the ties they are wearing.

It is simplistic, therefore, to assume that the problem lies in a middle-management bottleneck. The problem lies in engrained, hidden and very powerful bias inherent in every process in the organisation. It takes incredible courage to undertake the change management initiatives necessary to enact serious improvements in an organisation. Very few organisations have this courage.

Mary van der Boon is principal of transcultural management firm global tmc international, President of the European Professional Women’s Network-Amsterdam and PhD candidate in Organisational Behaviour on the topic of Systemic Bias in Organisations at Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam.

This article was originally published on Expatica.com.