Since co-authoring Breaking The Glass Ceiling: Can Women Reach The Top Of America’s Largest Corporations? in1987 (paperback in 1994), we’ve seen great progress in the advancement of women in business.

Last week Katrin Bennhold noted in International Herald Tribune that breaking the glass ceiling is now happening, somewhat ironically, with the examples and initiatives of men. She writes of an ambiguous landscape in gender equity:

In the early 21st century, women in the developed world find themselves in a peculiar place. With boys failing in school and working-class men losing their jobs to the economic crisis, pundits predict not just The Death of Macho (Foreign Policy, September 2009) but The End of Men (The Atlantic, July/August 2010).

Reality is more nuanced. Women earn more doctorates, but less money. They are overtaking men in the work force, but still do most housework. They make the consumer decisions but run only 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

“In theory, we now have equal rights,” sighed one senior female executive at a French multinational, who tellingly requested anonymity for fear of riling the men at her company. “In practice, we still have babies.

In the Western world, motherhood remains the barrier to gender equality…MORE”

Bennhold suggest that the more women-focused adjustments of the first wave of workplace gender equity, such as maternity leave, are vital but also reinforce the role of women as primary caregivers…caregivers who don’t get leadership positions, despite their qualifications.

Some organizations are putting the mantle of nurturer on dads by stressing the importance of paternity leave and by putting more men in charge of gender diversity as a matter of building greater awareness of sexism among the sex that still makes the most money and gets the most promotions. While we’ve seen that blatant sexism is less prevalent than it once was, male leadership still hasn’t completely grasped the fact that high-performing women are often high-performing moms who can’t invest the same levels of extra-curricular time on their careers.

In coaching and learning interventions dealing with diversity, it’s time to marshal men to balance the workplace leadership as they get back in touch with their family responsibilities.

Giving the next generation strong father figures would not only help explode the glass ceiling, it might also be the best hope for those failing boys in school who lack male role models. MORE

Since Phil Hodgson and Executive Development Group partner Randy White published Relax, It’s Only Uncertainty in 2001, we have seen not only validation among the executives we work with, but also greater interest in the challenges of ambiguity in business.

At this week’s SIOP Annual Conference in Atlanta, Sandy Shullman and Randy were encouraged and delighted by the collaborative responses to the two half-day presentations. There appear to be some emerging perspectives on the subject as it relates to the practical applications of learning professionals. People in the field see a need to measure tolerance for ambiguity and the uncertainty that it brings in their quests for  potential leaders in their organizations.

It became apparent to us that this “aptitude for ambiguity” is indeed a trait sought by learning organizations like yours and a trait that can be developed.

As with most of our work, our study of ambiguity is a process that is informed and advanced by the questions learning executives bring. Presently, we are further developing our 360 assessment Ambiguity Architect®, so these kinds of mini-focus groups are invaluable. If your firm is interested in learning more about our work on ambiguity, please contact us via e-mail.

Drs. Randall P White and Sandra L Shullman are featured authors in the April issue of CLO Magazine. Writing on Ambiguity Leadership, Randy and Sandy advance the idea that an aptitude for ambiguity and the ability to be comfortable amidst uncertainty are traits that can be measured and developed. Also, they assert that research suggests that they are traits of high-performers. From the article:

Research done by the Executive Development Group suggests that the ability to positively manage uncertainty may be an essential trait of effective leaders, often found in those considered high potentials. Evidence shows it can be measured and learned.

Based on interviews with numerous C-level executives around the world, Elizabeth Mellon, executive director of Duke Corporate Education, said mindset — more than personality and behavior — forms an observable pattern among some of the most successful leaders and that a fearless approach to uncertainty is required.

“C-suite executives reveal a high degree of being comfortable with discomfort,” Mellon said. “They accommodate ambiguity and the uncertainty it brings. They are confident in making decisions that move their organizations into uncharted territory because they know this ensures long-term prosperity. They have ‘solid cores’ that allow them to navigate the unknown and accept not knowing everything. And they tend to have a longer view because they see time as a continuum in which uncertainty will come and go as they progress. Being uncertain doesn’t stifle them.”

Read the whole article here.

In this month’s CLO magazine:

It’s nice to be needed. There’s been an uptick recently in coaching and executive education engagements in South Africa, India, France, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and, ever so gradually, the United States. Organizations are rethinking their business strategies after the financial collapse.

However, ambiguity abounds. There is an obvious tension — as if “nervous” is the new “strategic.” Management wants results quickly, with a heightened financial vigilance and intensified ROI expectations. We’ve watched participants text reviews of our performance during the sessions. One bad day in class and summary dismissal looms. Read full article here.

We’re seeing greater demands on executive education, but the good news is, businesses that are rebounding seem to acknowledge the role of learning.

James Surowiecki writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker about “Status Quo Anxiety” as it relates to the US debate on health-care reform. He points to studies that show humans love what they already “own” juxtaposed to political polls that reveal Americans are simultaneously dissatisfied with their health-care services and reluctant to change in any significant way.

The academics Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely showed the same thing in a real-world experiment: posing as ticket scalpers, they phoned people who had entered a raffle to win tickets to a Duke basketball game. People who hadn’t won tickets were willing to pay, on average, a hundred and seventy dollars to get into the game. But those who had won tickets wanted twenty-four hundred dollars to part with them. In other words, those who had, by pure luck, won the tickets thought the ducats were fourteen times as valuable as those who hadn’t.

—From “Status Quo Anxiety” by James Surowiecki,The New Yorker, August 31, 2009

Surowiecki goes on to suggest that the concept of status quo is, itself, at best tenuous. For most Americans, if you lose your job, you lose your health care insurance. The security we all cling to may not be a complete illusion, but it is definitely ambiguous.

"The Gulf Stream," Winslow Homer

Uncertainty, the natural human response to ambiguity, causes most people to look for certainty and that usually involves clinging to the familiar. But if a familiar approach hasn’t worked in the past or got us into trouble, it’s like staying with a sinking vessel.

In your work, are you willing to abandon a bad idea even though you “own it”?

Dr. Randall P White, yachtsman, in Miami regatta. Randy—evidently with a GOOD idea out front in number 42—is in the middle, sitting.

We have been studying the affects that ambiguity has on leaders for two decades. The uncertainty that we all feel in ambiguous situations appears to be both a challenge and an opportunity. The ability to fearlessly grapple with ambiguity might be a trait that competitive businesses should seek.

The first of the eight “enablers” sought through our 360 assessment “Ambiguity Architect®” is described as “motivated by mysteries.” While the purpose of Ambiguity Architect is to determine a person’s ability to navigate uncertain situations, we find that many of the contributing traits of high rated participants to be those that are desired by scientists, research and development, inventors and entrepreneurs. If the business environment continues to grow in complexity and scale, and we have many reasons to believe that it will, are these roles that grapple with the unknown not increasingly important to leaders across many industries?

Our data suggests high performers can thrive in uncertain situations in which the ambiguity is not a choice nor desirable. We can only speculate much beyond this, but it is compelling to ask: can leaders learn to seek out uncertainty and ambiguity as a business strategy? Does skill at “being uncertain” become a positive motivator for creative solutions by lessening the severity of judgment for “dumb questions.” If we are operating in uncharted waters who is to say we’re on the wrong course? Perhaps there is a new mode or style of leadership that pursues uncertain situations because of these factors.

In this era of uncertainty, we’re watching our greatest leaders emerge. These are folks who ignore the pessimistic attitudes around them, the too many cashed reality checks on the state of the global economy, and the risk and do something completely new. They move toward the unknown as a deliberate leadership strategy. They have to: it’s the only way they know how to behave.

Although we don’t always know what these leaders will do, new research shows that leaders like these share a set of measureable behaviors, including a penchant for risk, a dauntless attitude, relentless curiosity, and great skills—and while some are teachable, many are not.

We recently studied executives around the world using an assessment instrument called Ambiguity Architect. The instrument measures an executive’s tolerance for ambiguity and rapidly changing situations. As we move toward increasingly uncertain times, it’s essential to know an executive’s ability to manage uncertainty.

We find that those who are most adept at leading through uncertainty perform better than their peers, have a greater likelihood of being promoted, and are comfortable leading an organization through the uncharted waters of change.

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As president, Joe Leonard helped AirTran recover from one of the worst airplane crashes in history and shape the company into one of largest low-cost carriers in the nation. READ FULL ARTICLE.