Why the Glass Cliff Persists

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

It's been nearly two decades since the term "glass cliff" was coined; it refers to the tendency for women to break through the glass ceiling to top management roles only when there is a big crisis to overcome, which makes it more difficult for them to succeed. In short, senior female leaders are often set up to fail — and this continues to happen today, as recent examples from business, politics, and academia show. Sophie Williams, a former C-suite advertising executive and global leader at Netflix, has researched why the glass cliff remains a problem and offers advice for women facing them — as well as lessons for the broader corporate world. She's the author of the book "The Glass Cliff: Why Women in Power Are Undermined - and How to Fight Back."

Transcript

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0:56.0	It's been nearly 20 years since the researchers Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam
1:08.2	documented a phenomenon they called the Glass Cliff. This tendency for women, CEOs, and other top leaders to only
1:15.5	break through the glass ceiling and get those most senior roles when the
1:19.5	organization is underperforming or there's some other big crisis to solve, which of course
1:24.7	makes it more difficult for them to succeed. One would think that we could have
1:28.9	corrected for this problem over the past two decades, but from the corporate world to government to academia
1:34.3	it seems we haven't consider Marissa Meyer at Yahoo
1:37.7	Ellen Powell at Reddit Ross Brewer at Walgreens boots Teresa May becoming UK Prime Minister right after Brexit, the
1:44.8	ousting of Liz McGill at the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay at Harvard.
1:49.7	To be sure, there are female CEOs, politicians, and college presidents that haven't found themselves
1:54.9	on glass cliffs, or who figured out how to survive and thrive on them.
	...

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