Over the past year a number of high
profile women chief executives in the services sector have been asked or forced
to resign on the grounds that the organisations which they lead failed to
deliver the necessary standards of service to their customers. Some desk
research did not uncover a similar pattern among male CEO’s, although plenty of
them have been forced to resign for other reasons particularly in the financial
services sector. This raised the question about whether men or women deliver
the best service quality and at what level? The most interesting fact to emerge
so far is that a straw poll among a relatively small sample of academics and
business specialists was mystifyingly inconclusive – “ Why would I ask such a
question?” and a search on the internet produced no published work on the
topic. Given that the comparison between the relative performance of men and
women appears to be debated in most other areas it is curious that this should
be a factual vacuum.
So is it an irrelevant issue and is the
group of high profile female failures a coincidence or are their other reasons?
Could it be that women have had to struggle with all of the other leadership
issues, like vision, culture, finance, process, politics etc.to reach the top
in a largely male dominated environment that they have taken their eyes off the
raison d’etre of their organisations, service quality? Service quality is a
leadership issue so has the poor performance of their organisations been simply
that their lack of focus did not identify it as a priority and is that a
failing that can be solely attributed to being female or not?
And what of other levels of performance?
Do female managers do a better job than
their male counterparts in managing service quality? Are there instinctive
qualities that they exhibit in managing the customer experience which make them
more naturally suited to such roles? In a white paper which I wrote a few years
ago based on interviews with highly successful women they felt that they had
higher natural levels of empathy when dealing with customers and staff and that
factor had been a valuable contributor to their success.
Are female staff better at delivering higher
standards of quality at the operational level? The straw poll I conducted
suggested that the answer to that question was highly dependent on the product
or service in question and hinted that men probably did better in the more
technical product/service areas. From my own experience I have had outstandingly
high levels of service from female staff in both the motor industry and
telecommunications sector and appallingly bad service from their male counterparts
in the same sectors with the converse being the case in financial services.
So is there a gender performance issue
here or not? Circumstantially nobody I
have asked, beyond the instinctive emotional response, has a clear opinion and is quick to identify a
range of qualifying factors before giving an answer?
