In Singapore, the number of top female leaders still lags behind their male counterparts. But several companies are taking pro-active steps to groom female employees for a wider succession planning pool. Lisa Cheong finds out how they do it.

As part of her career development plans, Gillian Sim recalls the days when she had just moved to UK and found herself lead a team of seven males.

“I was a country manager from Malaysia, but now I had to go into operations,” says the managing director of UPS Singapore. Relating some of her challenges, Sim laughs as she says, “One thing is, you’re a Chinese. Two is, you’re from where, Singapore? And you have to manage me, a British?”

“So how was I going to gain their respect?”

As Sim soon learned, earning the respect as a leader boiled down to a number of actions such as working closely and with her subordinates, listening to their issues and attending their meetings.

“I know my work, I know the UPS systems. So it was me trying to understand cultural differences and other things like unions. Learning all these was difficult, but they [subordinates] helped me, and it helped that I didn’t act as if I was the boss when I initially came.”

While women employees are indeed present in the Singapore workplace, the numbers for top female leaders in management positions and board of directors still lag their male counterparts. In a study conducted by Watson Wyatt in 2007 among Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and UK, it found that 72 out of the largest 100 companies in Singapore do not have any female non-executive directors. Hong Kong followed closely behind at 68.

Meanwhile, Australia only had 42 companies with no female non-executive directors while UK appeared to be most inclusive at 28 companies.

However, the tide is shifting as women are slowly rising up the management ranks. A Grant Thornton International survey found that as of 2008, Singapore’s average women’s participation rate at senior management level stands at 28% – up seven points from 2007. This is lower than Philippines and Russia which lead the global survey at 47% and 42% respectively. Japan ranks at the bottom of the chart at a mere 7%.

Furthermore, companies such as Motorola, American Express and UPS are taking proactive steps to develop its women leaders, a smart move which will help to strengthen the company’s succession planning pipeline for the future.

In 2006, Motorola launched its Singapore Women’s Business Council (SWBC) with the aim of nurturing the talents of female employees and cultivating a work environment where female employees are given equal opportunities to grow and excel professionally.

With a committee comprising of 16 members from various business and functions, SWBC spearheads activities and initiatives under four aspects:

• Work Life Effectiveness committee – This aims to provide support for employees looking to balance their commitment to the business with their personal, family and community responsibilities.
• Customer and Industry Connections committee – This aims to build awareness of Motorola’s technology and communication offerings among women in the community, as well as establish relationships with customers or industry partners through joint activities.
• Professional & Personal Growth Committee – This aims on assisting female employees increase their leadership skills and personal effectiveness.
• Communications & Publicity Committee – This aims to raise the awareness of SWBC’s activities.

According to Alina Rizzo, chairwoman for SWBC for two consecutive terms, some of the initiatives launched under the committee includes Motorola Bonding Day, where employees brought their children to work to participate in various fun and educational activities.

There was also a Women’s Leadership Forum, which was jointly held with American Express and INSEAD, with Minister Lim Hwee Hwa as the guest of honour.

But why does Motorola sees the need to assist its women employees in increasing their leadership skills and improve their personal effectiveness?

Rizzo says that initiatives such as these encourage women to tap on the Women’s Council’s resources and activities to develop new areas of interests. “This will help them break away from their comfort zone, stretch their threshold further, subsequently, boost their level of confidence, leadership skills, resourcefulness and perhaps creative thinking,” Rizzo adds.

For instance, the Professional and Personal Growth (PPG) Committee organises lunch time talks and workshops for business associations or industry groups. Held around once every quarter, some of the previous workshops organised include topics on personal grooming, networking for success, career essentials for women and financial intelligence training.

The committee also plans a bi-annual Motorola Women’s Award, which recognises and rewards women employees for their “exemplary contributions at work, contribution to the society and in wellness”.

SWBC also aims to coach and mentor its female employees, as Rizzo says it “helps provide employees with an avenue of objectivity for guidance in a career and allow the individual to take charge seeking input from many sources”.

While there is no fixed schedules for coaching and mentoring, Rizzo says the frequency is left to the discretion of the leads and teams to work out.

Rizzo adds, “We do encourage our committee members to engage in dialogue sessions whenever a senior leadership team is in town, as part of mentoring. In all, we have arranged seven dialogue sessions this year with visiting senior leaders of Motorola to talk to the members with real- life experience for success.” Some of the senior leaders in this includes the chief procurement officer, corporate VP of human resources and the chairman of Motorola Electronics China.

In 2007, American Express also started a similar programme called Women’s Interest Network (WIN). Some of WIN’s goals including raising employee engagement through educational sessions and forums to promote internal talent, offering information sharing through networking events as well as working with the diversity team to support the successful careers of women employees.

Through WIN, American Express employees now have an employee shadowing programme which offers employees the opportunity to work in a department that interests them – such as merchant servicing or consumer marketing. WIN also inked an agreement with a child-care centre to take employees’ children at short-notice if their primary child-care arrangements are disrupted.

This year, some of WIN’s programmes included a talk on how to become an effective communicator, as well as a joint sharing discussion among leaders of companies such as American Express, Cisco, Standard Chartered and Shell on the topics of gender and diversity in the workplace.

And that’s not all. In January 2010, UPS will follow the footsteps of Motorola and America Express by rolling out a programme titled Women in Leadership (WIL) for all its women managers in Singapore. While this programme has been in available to UPS employees in Europe and North America, Sim says this programme needed work to be customised to the local context before it could be rolled out.

“What we want to do is support the supervisors that are starting in the company who they face all these problems of working with employees and working with men. So they need that guidance and mentorship.”

And because senior leaders such as Sim have faced the same barriers and hurdles before, she says the senior leaders would now be better equipped to provide that mentorship, guidance and support for younger managers, enabling them to become better leaders.

Under WIL, Sim says some of the programmes include a buddy mentoring programme, networking as well as corporate social responsibility programmes.

“Right now, who do they speak to? They can speak among themselves, but at the end of the day, I think the support is necessary.”

At the end of the day, Sim hopes this WIL programme will help groom women managers who will plug the leadership gaps in the UPS organisation.

“I call Singapore a training ground,” Sim says, explaining that because Singapore has the largest supply chain operations and has built up a base of regional expertise due to its position as the organisation’s regional distribution centre.

“We have a lot of development in India and China that requires logistics leaders in that field. So if we can have more women going through this [WIL], they can venture out to other countries to provide that leadership and growth in those countries.”