Corporate transparency is having a positive impact on corporations from a sales and marketing perspective and has resulted in more involved, loyal employees as well as increasing trust by stakeholders, says the founder of an executive women’s group.
“I really do believe that it all starts at home. It all starts with the individual, because unless an individual begins to change, teams can’t change,” says Carol Gallagher, founder and president of Executive Women’s Alliance (EWA), a U.S.-based organization open to executives within two steps of the CEO position at companies grossing more than $800 million per year.
The EWA held a three-day learning forum recently in Vancouver, the first time the event has been held in Canada. The conference was attended by about 45 high-ranking businesswomen, and while most were from the U.S., senior executives from Canada’s major banks have also attended the event over the years.
“They’re obviously a very intimate group. They’re all at the same level,” said Gallagher, who hails from Oakland, Calif. “The topics we talk about are not female-focused. They’re very business- and leadership- focused.”
“What happens is when you get a group of women together, they open up in a very different way than when it’s a mixed- gender group.”
The group heard from several speakers, including Ed Clark, president and CEO of TD Bank Financial Group, who agreed that corporate transparency must start at the top.
“It’s the only way to instil the kind of leadership model that you want in your organization,” said Clark.
“It’s just too tough to try to run a performance culture without transparency,” he added, and it needs to be evident when dealing with boards of directors and shareholders, as well as with the people who work in an organization.
“The most terrible thing I’ve seen in every organization I’ve joined is this constant of not dealing with the real issues that people have, and then doing a ‘fly-by-night shooting’ and just getting rid of the person,” Clark said. “How disrespectful, how mean-spirited to not have transparency with that person.”
Clark noted a transparent approach can often be a shocking experience for board members, particularly those who haven’t been a CEO or COO of a large corporation. “The reality is that in big organizations, every day, something is going wrong,” said Clark. And it becomes even more complicated when dealing with shareholders.
“In an objective sense, if you want to maximize your share price, don’t be transparent. The market actually doesn’t like transparency,” Clark said, noting that although the market may indicate otherwise, it also wants to see a steady growth in earnings. “If you understand the real world, you understand that in fact, bad things happen all the time, roadblocks happen along the road.”
“There’s a tendency in the marketplace to discount the good news and highlight the bad news,” Clark added. “If you go down the transparency route, you have to recognize that it may in fact hurt you in the short run and maybe even in the longer run.”
Clark, who oversaw the integration of the TD Bank Financial Group with CT Financial Services when TD acquired Canada Trust on February 1, 2000, said his own organization is being driven to achieve a performance culture.
“That is something I would say we’re still struggling through as an organization – how you have a caring and feeling and respectful organization while at the same time having transparency,” he said.
Ruby Anik, vice-president of advertising for U.S.-based Best Buy Company Inc., said she could relate to Clark’s experiences in merging the cultures of two organizations.
She manages a department of 100 people and handles an annual budget of $550 million.
When Best Buy bought Canadian electronics retailer Future Shop two years ago, Anik said the challenge was to recognize that the culture of the new acquisition was different.
“People come into these mergers thinking it’s so similar to the U.S., it must be the same. And it absolutely is not. It’s a very different culture. There’s a pride in being Canadian,” she said, explaining the dual-brand strategy that entails keeping the Future Shop brand while also opening up stores under the Best Buy brand.
Denise Nemchev, president of the U.S.-based Industrial Tools Group for The Stanley Works, sellers of tools to the industrial marketplace, said she attends the EWA forums “to interact with people that are like me, to interact with business leaders who not only seem to get it right in business, but in life and have a balance, and, ‘oh by the way, they happen to be women,’ ” she said. “It’s not really a gender thing.”
(Jan Mansfield can be reached at jan@businessedge.ca)
