Dan Morrell: Tosh Barron (MBA 1972) grew up outside of London, studying modern dance and competing on her high school’s sports teams. After college, while teaching physical education at Oxford High School, she took the advice of some Americans in her apartment building and moved to Boston, where she became a dance instructor at Tufts University. Thinking she might want to lead an arts organization, Barron applied to HBS. After cutting her teeth with McKinsey on a rural development project in Tanzania, Barron stayed with the firm for five years before moving over to Xerox in 1978. “I like to learn,” Barron has said. “And I like to do.”

That straightforward philosophy led to a multifaceted, 21-year career at Xerox, where she held senior leadership roles in the company’s largest divisions, in addition to fueling decades of service as a director and lead director on multiple nonprofit and corporate boards.

In this special edition of Skydeck honoring recipients of the Alumni Achievement Award, Associate Editor Julia Hanna talks to Barron about board service, from her experience as one of just a few women, to the importance of finding a cultural fit, and to the team dynamics of effective corporate oversight.

Photo by Susan Young

READ MORE

[MUSIC]

Julia Hanna: When it came out in 1980, the comedy 9 to 5 played up the growing role of women in the workplace, making cheesy fun out of the sexism they encountered. At that moment, Tosh Barron was undertaking something much more serious, leading Xerox’s entry into the Chinese market and fearlessly chastising the company’s chairman for publicizing its activities in the press. Always up for a new challenge, she also began serving on her first corporate board in 1989.

JH: Tell us about your first board experience. Were you the only woman on the board?

Tosh Barron: Yes. On the first couple of boards, I was. And then once you’re on a board and you bring new people in, you try and get some other worthy people to come on that aren’t white males. I didn’t want a board because it was a board. It had to be a company and leaders that I could respect. So, I know many people just want to get on a board. You can’t do that. You’ve got to go where you have a fit.

One of my first boards, you weren’t expected to talk, but all the other boards were just so open. And the senior executives, especially the CEO or the president, wanted it. Again, it’s not something you can force, although you do have to force something if you have to remove a CEO. There are times when that happens, because they're just not doing the job the way it’s needed to be done. So, you have the oversight responsibility, but you have to know enough to know how the strategy has to work.

HR is also important to the upper levels to make sure the talent is there and the right kind of talent for the organizations. Best of all in all my boards, it was mostly complete teamwork between the board and the senior executives. A couple of hiccups on some other ones, which I won’t go into, but…in fact, there was one I stepped off from…because I couldn’t accept how it was being run. So you just have to do what you think is right for where you are going to play a part. And if you can’t play that part with what my values are—I mean I’m not trying to be a goody-goody girl or anything like that—then I step back. And some people I meet just want to be on a board, but there’s a job there and you have to do the job well.

JH: I’m thinking about Quaker Chemical, where you were the lead director, right? For those of us who haven’t served on a big corporate board, what is that like? And what are some things you remember about it?

TB: Well, you take a company like Quaker that was very, very collegial. The role at the top is not you’re the boss, it’s a role to keep the board working. That was my philosophy, that your job is to keep the working, moving forward. All the other board members are senior executives from other companies and they run the committees.

Obviously, the chairman of the board has to have oversight, but it has to be, in my view, a completely collegial way of doing it. And when you’ve got the right people on the board, you don’t have to worry about anything. You just keep moving and you have a lot of debates, but there’s very little friction, if any.

JH: Do you remember any moments from your time on corporate boards that have sort of stayed with you in terms of something that you learned from that time?

TB: Well, I won’t name it, but the very first board that I went on, I think I was there as a token. And it took a while for people to listen to me. But it got there in the end. But I think in this modern day and age, even, and I’m talking in the last 15 years, I think good boards—and you have to vet them if you’re thinking of getting on a board—is how do they work? Now my very first board was an eye opener and it was a very good experience with a good team around it, but it wasn’t in the modern age, shall I say. It got there.

[MUSIC]

JH: Barron is currently the retired vice chair of the board of directors for Business Executives for National Security (BENS), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that uses volunteer talent from the private sector to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the armed forces and intelligence agencies.

TB: It’s an organization that we do pro bono help to all the national security agencies, if they want it. We’re a whole different group of business people. And so we help on things that are not in the hard core of national security, but are in things like finance, like HR.

JH: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved and why you wanted to get involved with BENS?

TB: Well, I knew nothing about it. And then a friend who is a member, said Tosh, you’re coming into BENS. And I think the reason for that was they had almost no women. [Laughs] I mean, I think he knew enough about me to know that I'd be curious and interested in becoming a member.

JH: Drawing on the expertise of business leaders across multiple industries, from finance to technology to manufacturing, BENS acts as a partner, offering concrete strategies for issues ranging from cybersecurity to talent management.

TB: I got very fascinated by the work and I’m still being educated, very educated on the roles and responsibilities of our national security agencies. And what we need to have for the country…and it’s not Republican, it’s not Democrat. It’s the need for national security, at its peak.

JH: You consulted on an HR project for BENS, looking at ways a branch of the military could do a better job of bringing along talent. How did your role leading various divisions of Xerox feed into that work for BENS?

TB: Well, I was very embedded in Xerox obviously at 20 years. And those were the days when it was a very forward-thinking company. And I was one of the lucky people who was able to rise up. Xerox was so open in bringing up talent themselves. And so you pick that up and do it for your own teams, to bring talent in and work with people who need help, etc. etc. etc.

JH: I asked Barron what insights she gained from her board service, and how it compares to her previous executive positions.

TB: Boards are very, very different, because it’s an oversight responsibility, not a doing site. Because it’s looking at the top of an organization, you don’t get into the nits of it, but you do really work on the senior levels that are steering the organizations who are in the companies and helping them, providing advice as a board member.

JH: The share of women sitting on the boards of Fortune 500 companies has been gradually increasing for decades, rising from 9.6 percent in 1995 to 27 percent in 2019. But in 2021 CNBC reported a slowdown in gender parity on corporate boards.

CNBC: That’s according to the new Equilar gender diversity index. It finds that about 24 percent of all Russell 3000 board seats are held by women, but 6 percent of boards on the Russell 3000 have no women on them at all. And only 8 percent of boards are at least 40 percent female. The percentage of new director seats filled by women last year was 39 percent, down from 44 percent the prior year. Equilar warns that, at that rate, boards won’t hit gender parity until 2032—that’s two years later than what the firm projected last year.

JH: Standing in stark contradiction to this trend are studies linking greater board diversity with higher levels of board performance. And last year, in a move that should at least bring greater transparency to corporate governance, the SEC approved Nasdaq’s new listing rules around revealing gender and racial diversity on company boards.

HBS professor Lynn Paine has written widely on leadership and corporate governance and co-chairs the Women on Boards Executive Education program. Listening to the experiences of women who have served on boards, or are trying to find their place on one, she’s struck by what has changed in the time she’s been doing research in this area—and what has remained the same.

Lynn Paine: Probably the most obvious thing that has changed is the attitudes toward women and towards diversity in general. You know, back when Tosh joined her first board, I think there was something like no more than 500 women total on Fortune 500 boards. And diversity wasn’t particularly thought to be an important or desirable thing, even for a company whose business was focused on women.

I mean, a good example would be Avon, which sold beauty products to women and in the eighties, the board was all men. Of course, by the mid-90s, you started to see more interest in diversity on boards, particularly having women and minorities. And partly that was coming from the rise of institutional shareholder power, because then, at that time there were a few institutional investors, actually, mostly religious investors filing proposals for companies to add women and minorities to boards.

Those proposals never got a majority vote, but they did spark the conversation. And that conversation, as you know, picked up as there was more social activism, more women were active. There got to be more research on diversity and its benefits. And so, as time rolled on in the 2000s, we then started to see various kinds of good practice codes of corporate governance, or even legal mandates in some jurisdictions to increase diversity, particularly gender diversity on boards. So that is certainly one thing that’s changed quite a bit.

JH: When I spoke to Tosh, she said that Xerox was a very forward-thinking company and one of her superiors said, you need to go be on a board. And sort of introduced her to the idea and supported her through that effort. What would you say about where we stand with that and how far we’ve come?

LP: Well, you know, first of all, the fact that her boss said she could go serve on a board was really very forward-looking. I would say that today, actually, it’s starting to be discussed that serving on boards should be part of senior executives’ development program in different companies and companies have been ambivalent about this because on the one hand, they want their senior executives to have the experience of being on a board so that they can be better executives, but they also don’t want them to be taking a lot of time away from the job and being on a board can be demanding in terms of time.

But you know, the recruitment and selection process has changed quite a bit. Back in the early 90s, late 80s, it was generally just a question of the chairman and CEO and the other board members looking at their professional networks and identifying the people they thought they’d like to have on the board with them.

And for the most part, women were pretty invisible in those networks. And so there were many women whose names came up, because there weren’t many women in those networks. And the ideal profile at the time was either as a sitting or retired CEO or COO. And once again, by that criterion, there really just, weren’t very many women in the pool of candidates.

The other thing about recruitment back in the 1980s and 90s, is that it was much less systematized, professionalized. Today, personal networks are still the number one way that people get on boards, but at the same time, you’ll have a nominating committee that really tries to look at what skills, experiences do we need on the board and try to kind of oversee and manage the board’s evolution over time by identifying the right kinds of candidates for the needs of the business, and to ensure a certain kind of diversity of all types, gender diversity, experience diversity, thought diversity, and so on.

JH: What do you hear from women who are serving on boards today?

LP: Women today still tell me they have to work harder to gain acceptance. And I'm sure Tosh and all the other pioneering women had to work very hard to gain acceptance. And there is research that shows that even today, competence is often presumed when a man joins the board. For women, it’s often a matter of having to demonstrate or prove your competence. And I still hear that. And the social science research, seems to validate that in a lot of different contexts.

So there’s that element. The other thing I hear is that women say that they have to work harder to build relationships with others on the board. As opposed to having people reach out to them, they are the ones who end up reaching out to the others to try to build personal relationships, build trust, and, you know, build that foundation that you really need to be an effective board member. So, you know, the board has the right numbers, they have diversity, but they’re not inclusive. That can be an issue today, but I think it’s gotten a lot better.

Boards today will typically have a formal onboarding process. So that’s a way for a new board member to get to know other people on the board, to learn more about the business, to get to know senior executives, really, to get a feel for the company and what the issues are in the company.

And then really to hit the ground running as a board member. I think it must’ve been extremely difficult for people like Tosh to get an understanding of the business and to build relationships with all of the people and really to be an effective member of the team, given all the stereotypes and biases. And some of it’s very unconscious, but that was the way it was. And those were the kinds of things they had to contend with.

[MUSIC]

JH: In her understated way, Tosh Barron has worked to improve the experience of women on boards, whether through her own example or as a founding director and advisor to organizations like Trewstar, which helps place more women on public and private company boards. Whatever an individual’s gender identity, she suggests those seeking board service should investigate the group’s dynamic and values to ensure success for all concerned.

What advice would you have for alumni who are interested in serving on a board? What are some of the things they should look for aside from a good fit in the organization?

TB: Well, it's knowing how the board is currently working before you leap into it. Is it a team? And it’s not just the job of the chairman. It’s not just the job of the longest people serving on the boards. So the most important thing is what is the culture of the board? And is that a good fit for you? Will they listen to you? Is it a one-person to four-person thing or is it really a team, as a board, with everybody firing on all efforts together?

How is it helping with the strategy? Is it forthright? Do you have people who dominate and want to talk nonstop? There were a few of those, by the way. But I was so lucky that I found maybe the right boards, just superb teams. It’s tough work by the way, but you learn a lot yourself, too, in a board. But hopefully you’ve got enough knowledge yourself to help the CEO and the senior executives.

This episode of Skydeck was edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX productions. Skydeck is produced by the External Relations Department at Harvard Business School. It is available on iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcast. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Post a Comment