fbpx

What Black Women Know About Getting To The Top

What Black Women Know About Getting To The Top

Look at the CEOS at the top corporations in America, and you won’t see many Blacks, especially Black women. CEOs at Fortune 500 companies include just three African Americans– and not one is an African-American woman.

It’s not that there aren’t Black women who can handle the role. It’s been 50 years since the founding of African-American Student Union at Harvard Business School, and as part of the commemoration, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) has been studying the careers of the approximately 2,300 alumni of African descent who have graduated from HBS since its founding, in 1908.


Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 35: Isa Watson
Jamarlin talks to Isa Watson, founder and CEO of Squad by Envested, a VC-backed software company that is scaling a next-gen platform to build relationships at work.

“From that group, we identified 532 African-American women who graduated from 1977 to 2015. We analyzed the career paths of the 67 of them who have attained the position of chair, CEO, or other C-level executive in a corporation or senior managing director or partner in a professional services firm, and we conducted in-depth interviews with 30 of those 67,” HBR reported.

So how did the Black women who made it through “beat the odds”? The HBR studied how.

At the top of the list is resilience.

“I think the experience of being Black in America creates resilience — a steady steadiness. And it creates courage and pride. Not pride in a boastful way, but being proud, as you need to be in moments when you feel completely rejected, completely ignored, overlooked, sidelined,” a senior executive of a Fortune 50 financial services firm said.

Because these successful women are African-American, they come with a “go hard, or go home” approach. One explained, “We were all told that you had to be smarter or run faster or jump higher or be better than anybody else around you just to stay in the game. That was a lesson from early, early on—from my parents, teachers, mentors, church. So you come [to your job] with that orientation.”

The study found there are three attributes to resilience that have worked for successful Black women.

Black Women

1.Emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence or EQ has aided many Black women in their rise up the corporate ladder.

Black women “became skilled at picking up on others’ emotions and acting strategically,” the HBR reported. Successful Black women can pick up how others perceive them, yet they don’t change themselves to change perception. They hold onto their sense of self.

One chief financial officer said: “You have to seek out messages and people who affirm your identity.”

Black women have become skilled at EQ. Still, successful Black women often find themselves walking a tightrope — while trying to reach the top that can’t be seen as “too ambitious,” which is often perceived as “intimidating” and that prompts the “angry Black woman” stereotype. “I almost feel you have to over rely on EQ, because people come to the table with natural biases—you have to be hypersensitive and patient,” said a senior executive in a financial services firm. “While some can react immediately to a difficult situation, as a Black person I am conscious about modulating and tempering my response.”

2.Authenticity. Successful Black women are unapologetically themselves. “For these women, authenticity has also involved aligning their racial identity with their leadership positions. Some found roles within their companies that explicitly invited them to draw on that identity, giving them latitude to bring it front and center. They were then able to parlay the visibility afforded by those roles into broader opportunities for leadership,” the HBR reported.

3.Agility. Agility is the skill to maneuver challenges and roadblocks and turn them into opportunities.

One woman explained, “I’m keenly aware of who I am and that I may look and behave in ways that are different from others, but I don’t really focus on that….When I walk into a room and some of the people who don’t know me think I work for the people who work for me, I’m aware of it. But I don’t think about it. I don’t sweat it. I don’t stress about it. I think that’s one of the things that has helped me: I don’t let other people’s insecurities be my own.”