Women As Game Changers

Some 25 years ago I gained an   insight about women, sports, and business that continues to unfold even today.

At a dinner I was seated next to Phil Purcell, then chairman of Dean Witter, a large financial services firm and a division of Sears. I mentioned that my seven-year-old daughter was the only girl on a co-ed basketball team.

What he said next stuck with me, if in paraphrase:  “Your daughter will have a tremendous advantage as an adult. I’m employing women who are in the first generation of successful women executives at large corporations, and they’re great except for one thing: They don’t know how to lose.”

When the firm would go after a big investment banking deal and come up empty-handed, he said, “The women are crushed. They take it personally. They come in the next day wondering how, with all the work we put in, we didn’t get the deal.  It may take them a month to get over it.”

The guys, on the other hand, thanks to their competitive sports experiences, were used to winning, losing, and battling hard just to end up with a tie.

“We lost that one. Let’s learn from it. Where’s the next deal?”  was their attitude, Purcell told me. They were quickly “shaking it off,” “getting back in the race,” “finding a way to win,” or activating any other positive sports cliché you’d care to name. More to the point, in my opinion, they didn’t think twice about it. They just did it, in part, because they learned from sports that things can change rapidly. The difference between winning and losing can be the difference between acting and not acting, deciding and not deciding.

In short, the guys had learned the lessons sports teaches and routinely applied them to competing in business without hesitation, even if they didn’t always realize it. Now, thanks in part to Title IX legislation opening up organized sports to girls nearly 30 years ago, more and more women today apply those same lessons to competing in business. They do understand very well the leg up sports competition can provide.

“Sport is hugely important for people in business in general, but definitely women,” Sarah Robb O’Hagan told Chicago  Tribune  columnist Phil Rosenthal for his August 7, 2011, column. O’Hagan, 39, is president of Gatorade North America and, as a girl, played field hockey and other sports in New Zealand. “It’s very cliché and basic, but it’s teamwork, learning how to play a position. The best teams on the field have exactly the same dynamics as the best teams in business.”

A connection between sports and business success for women  was recognized at least a decade ago. An Oppenheimer Funds survey of 400 women business executives earning at least $75,000 (in 2002 dollars) at companies with more than 100 employees showed that:

Recently, professional services firms have been hiring us to work exclusively with women at their firms to close the clear gender gap that exists in business development success.  We find that once women have a custom process for business development that relates to their practice area-in law, for example-they are more comfortable, more confident, and just more capable of winning new business.  (That actually goes for men, too. It’s just that women haven’t had as much opportunity to learn the right process.)

In our consultative sales training and custom sales process development practice, we see among the women we work with a trend to compete and to  train to compete  more aggressively. For example, about a year ago we were invited to teach our FOCIS® consultative business development course to women attorneys from three Washington, DC, area offices of a large, global law firm.  We’ve since taught the course in women-only sessions at two of the firm’s Los Angeles-area offices and are scheduled to launch 2012 with a session at its Pittsburgh office.

Now, we know our experience is anecdotal and doesn’t mean that these women attorneys competed in organized sports programs. And we want to be clear that we’re not even implying that to succeed in business or a profession you must have a background in sports. That’s simply not true.

But we are glad to see  that the insight Phil Purcell offered me at dinner 25 years ago is on target. The playing fields on which men and women compete to develop business are, in fact, leveling out, thanks in part to competitive sports.

How can our sales training, lead generation, and marketing services be game-changers for you and your business? Please visit our Web site at www.productivestrategies.com, e-mail one of our senior consultants listed at the site, or do it the old-fashioned way and just give us a call.

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