Profile
Portrait of a Lady CEO
Kellye Whitney, 09-13-2009
To be taken in by the media frenzy surrounding Ursula Burns’ appointment as CEO of Xerox is to miss a key point. Sure, Burns is black, and she’s a woman, the first of her kind to run a Fortune 500 company. But she’s also the right person for the job.
Burns has worked for Xerox since 1980, when she joined the firm as a summer intern. She led several business teams from 1992 to 2000 before she was named senior vice president of corporate strategic services and led the company’s manufacturing and supply chain operations. Her role expanded, and she led Xerox’s global research, product development, marketing and delivery. In April 2007, she became president of the company and a member of the board of directors.
“We recognize the significance of Ursula’s appointment to the marketplace and to those outside of Xerox from a diversity context,” said Philip Harlow, chief diversity and industrial relations officer at Xerox. “However, from an internal Xerox perspective, we first and foremost embrace her appointment as the logical management succession and our next leader who is best positioned and equipped to move the company forward.”
Certainly, the historic significance of Burns’ appointment is noteworthy. What better business case for the diversity executive to use when soliciting funds for leadership program development, and what better example for diverse talent to look up to and realize that investing their time and talent in an inclusive organization is worthwhile? But it is Burns’ business savvy and knowledge of the company and the industry that are most important.
Margaret Heffernan, author of How She Does It and former CEO of several private companies, said while the appointment seems to signal that we’re approaching a time when the gender of a leadership candidate won’t matter, the intense media scrutiny can be a distraction a female CEO, or any CEO, simply doesn’t have time to entertain.
“As a woman CEO, you have two additional jobs. The first is to make sure the guys aren’t too upset working for a woman. This is improving generationally, but the reality is some men feel comfortable working for a woman and others categorically do not. Your job as a leader is to put everyone sufficiently at their ease so they can do their best job,” Heffernan said. “The second task is to manage extreme media interest. The most alarming precedent was the media frenzy around the appointment of Carly Fiorina when she was named CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The press went wild about her life, her style, her clothes and hair. It’s a subtle decision you have to make about how far to feed that, because part of your job as a CEO is to be in the public eye promoting your company, [but] at the end of the day, your job is not about having the world’s greatest hair.
“It’s great to be visible, but it’s really great to be at your desk getting the work done,” she said. “The novelty of being a female CEO is such that it’s often difficult to know which way to go, but the mantra I constantly repeated in my head is, your job is to build value. Don’t do anything that doesn’t.”
Xerox’s Harlow hit on a key point when he mentioned Burns in the context of the company’s management succession plan. In today’s challenging business environment, with fierce competitive constraints threatening even well-established global leaders like Xerox, survival means leveraging the best talent for bottom-line benefit, no matter what that talent may look like.
Matrice Ellis-Kirk, managing partner of diversity advisory services at Heidrick & Struggles Inc., said workforce demographic trends indicate that soon there won’t be a choice: Organizations will have to expand formerly female-barren leadership ranks.
“Savvier organizations focused on their strategy — expanding their market share and getting a larger piece of the pie, if you will — are looking to also expand their demographic,” she explained. “Those companies are typically looking toward their organization for the answer, and if that answer comes in the form of a female, a male, a black, a white, an Asian, a Latino, I think that’s becoming less and less an issue.”
Katherine Giscombe, vice president of women of color research at Catalyst, agrees.
She said, “Generally when a company puts its bottom line first and makes a decision about who to appoint to senior leadership purely based on competence, that is a really good role model for other organizations. A powerful African-American woman in a senior position as a role model will have an impact on other companies.”
Burns’ work ethic and her extensive knowledge of the technology industry, as well as her willingness to take risks — all of which have been noted in interviews with her peers — helped to put her in her current position, but Xerox’s savvy in capitalizing on these things is also important.
A 2007 article in Fortune magazine described the work relationship she shared with former CEO Anne Mulcahy as two “combat soldiers in the same foxhole” and discussed how Burns knew she was being groomed for the position of president, and, when the time came, the CEO spot as well.
“It reinforces our reputation as a company that strongly believes in a clear and effective strategy to develop talent and provide our people with the tools and resources they need to learn and succeed,” Harlow said. “It also means continuity in Xerox leadership, and [it] should reinforce to the marketplace an ongoing commitment to our strategy, positioning Xerox for future growth and expansion.”
Despite a new, pragmatic business focus, the diversity and inclusion practice retains quite a bit of historical baggage. But it’s difficult to deny that Burns had the experience to pick up the baton of leadership and run with it.
“It’s possible there will be a backlash because they’ll say, ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s a woman grooming a woman,’ but with all due respect, men have been doing this for centuries, and no one has raised an eyebrow,” Heffernan said. “You have to trust the CEO to identify talent and develop it. I wouldn’t put words in the mouth of Anne Mulcahy, but she’s done a sufficiently good job at Xerox. She wouldn’t have groomed someone she thought was not appropriate for the position.”
“It’s always good to have the female gender in a leadership role globally. It brings perspective,” Ellis-Kirk said. “And often women leaders who get to the top have had the benefit of mentorship from different perspectives. None of us get [to the top] by ourselves, men or women. You get there having learned from others, having had experiences that allow you to broaden your perspective and ask questions that oftentimes you’re not allowed to ask.”
“Catalyst has looked at organizations that have formal mentoring programs, and top leadership commitment [to them] is very important,” Giscombe said. “[Being a] powerful mentor [means] reaching out to traditionally underrepresented groups and not just being a mentor in name only, but being willing to let the mentee have some access to his or her network of business contacts, being a mentor who can look at competencies and advocate for them to be in a highly visible position and get access to developmental opportunities that are going to make a difference to her career growth.”
