An article by Claudia Nemat, Member of the Board of Management responsible for Europe and Technology.
This coming Sunday is International Women's Day and we will once again find the issue of equal opportunities for women in management being highlighted in the media. Perhaps we should make us of Sunday to take a different view of this issue.
In Germany, the debate often takes a somewhat patronizing tone, as if a favor is being done to women. That is the wrong approach. We need to conduct the debate in a different way - the issue is competitiveness, not giving ourselves a "good feeling." Companies today face brutal, global competition for good ideas and the best products on the market. The digitalization of the economy has resulted in a rapid rate of innovation that throws the markets into ever faster cycles - as, for example, in the case of the current trend surrounding uber and airbnb, which are taking the passenger transport market and the hotel industry by storm and transforming them. In this competition for ideas, it is about taking new perspectives on old markets. Any kind of management that supports monocultures will fail in this competition. Modern management must manage diversity. Especially in Germany, we analyze the same markets with the same managers, who have often enjoyed the same education and employ the same methods, and then wonder why our products are interchangeable. As managers, we shouldn't wonder, we should ask ourselves the question: how can we change this?
Hand on heart - and I am by no means excluding myself - which of us would promote a product developer who comes to work in t-shirt and flip-flops like Mark Zuckerberg, to a management position? There's no difference for the female manager who says she would like to work from home two days a week. A management monoculture, in which everyone who climbs the ladder sits at their desk for ten hours or more a day and makes the best slides won't keep us competitive. But this has nothing to do with the issue of women in management. Companies need to create conditions that promote diversity and in that way enable new perspectives on products and markets. The reconcilability of family and work, managers from unusual backgrounds, international rotation, these are not expressions of do-gooding. In the modern world, they are a necessity for companies wanting to attract creative minds that bring different experiences and fresh ideas to the conference table. I believe that in Germany, we are still far too straight, too adapted, too little international, and also too masculine, the higher up the management ladder you go. As top management, we need to create more open corporate cultures.
I don't want to hold this discussion as a woman, but rather as a manager, whose main task is to offer the best conditions to the best minds for my company, so that they can turn the best ideas into products with which we will win on the market and earn money. In 2010, we at Deutsche Telekom decided to promote women using quotas. Today, 25 percent of our managers worldwide are women, which is good. But we also need to think about how we manage diversity in the interests of the company. Otherwise, we won't stand a chance in the global competition - ideas like uber or airbnb don't come from the well-tempered middle of society, they come from people who see markets differently. This is the discussion we as managers should be having on Sunday.