Helena Morrissey, Aiming at Britain’s Glass Ceilings, Gets Results
Helena Morrissey, a money manager, founded the 30% Club, an organization that seeks to increase the representation of women on boards. Credit, Andrew Testa for The New York Times
LONDON — Suggest to Helena Morrissey that she is Britain’s version of Sheryl Sandberg, and she smiles politely.
“I think I am meant to be flattered,” Ms. Morrissey, a 48-year-old money manager, said recently in her office in the City, London’s historic financial district. “But I am doing my own thing.”
Like Ms. Sandberg, the Facebook executive, Ms. Morrissey has become the face of women’s advancement in business in her country. Four years ago, she founded the 30% Club, an organization that seeks to increase the representation of women on boards to that number.
But Ms. Morrissey has taken a rather different approach than Ms. Sandberg and others have.
Ms. Sandberg has implored women to assert themselves and find sponsors who can help advance their careers. And countries like Norway and France have mandated legal quotas for the percentage of women serving on boards.
Instead, Ms. Morrissey has directed her steely focus on Britain’s most powerful men.
Working behind the scenes, she has persuaded 120 of the country’s top chairmen that they want what she wants: more diverse boards that will produce better company returns.
The approach has produced some remarkable results. Since 2010, the percentage of women on Britain’s top boards has nearly doubled, to 23 percent, while in the United States, the figure has crept up a few percentage points to 17 percent.
“There is a spotlight and visibility there that is not present here,” says Brande Stellings, vice president for corporate board services at Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on increasing opportunities for women in the United States.
That Ms. Morrissey is credited with spearheading those results while raising nine children — ages 5 through 23 — could have made her the target of ire in a country that does not always celebrate success. Or it might have fueled the debate about whether a woman can or cannot have it all. It has done neither.
“She’s an anomaly, not a template,” said her husband, Richard, 51, who is a Buddhist and former journalist who cares for the children at home.
Helena Morrissey, center, at Newton Investment Management in 2010, the year she founded the 30% Club. Credit, Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Groups like Catalyst in the United States have worked to get more women in positions of power. But progress in the United States has been glacial, making the 30% Club’s methods, and results, all the more compelling.
“If we could in any way, shape or form replicate the success she has had in such a short period of time, we would be doing a good job for the business community here,” said Peter Grauer, chairman of the news and information company Bloomberg L.P. and the founding chairman of the American chapter of the 30% Club, which was started last year.
The 30% Club’s approach is distinctive, and heavily influenced by Ms. Morrissey, whose English-rose approach masks a relentless determination.
Petite, charismatic and impeccably stylish — she made a point of telling Harper’s Bazaar that she prefers Louboutins and insists on heels — Ms. Morrissey is a charming burst of energy who talks so fast that she can lose track of what she is saying. She openly acknowledges her own shortcomings and believes results matter more than credit.
She works behind the scenes, seeking to persuade others to buy into the group’s philosophy and then own it themselves, an approach that many welcome.
“My style is not to tell people what to do but to show a path that is appealing,” she said.
And she does not go negative. For example, she will not name those who would not join the 30% Club in its early days. Equally, she is supportive of anyone trying to effect change rather than complain about the lack of it.
“I see so much confrontation and negativity and I don’t see that it achieves very much,” she said. Ms. Morrissey is a Sandberg fan and compliments her for starting an important dialogue. “Women do need to lean in but I don’t think it’s fix the women or fix the system. It’s not binary.”
Ms. Morrissey is adamant that the group is not promoting a women’s initiative or a diversity initiative, but a business issue. She cites research from McKinsey, Catalyst and Credit Suisse as evidence that more diverse boards provide better shareholder returns, because homogeneous boards often provide little fresh thinking about customers, risks or outcomes. Not coincidentally, 30 percent representation is the level at which organizational psychologists agree a minority voice can be heard.
To that end, she has encouraged men to lead the charge, and once they are on board employed them to recruit others. When she was trying to build support for the group, she set out to send notes to each chairman of the companies in the FTSE 350 stock index, alphabetically.
When she reached the H’s some unfriendly mail from the A’s started pouring in. She quickly learned there was a better way.
“It’s best to get chairmen to recruit each other than to use me,” she said.
The open tent, no-pressure strategy seems to be effective in Britain, where complex rules around confrontation seem to permeate every level of society.
“Where I think Helena has been uniquely successful is in quiet advocacy, in getting people who have the power to make a change, believing that they want to make a change,” said Robert Gillespie, a member of the Royal Bank of Scotland board and a former banker at Evercore and UBS.
Ms. Morrissey is vehemently against government-imposed quotas, bucking the trend from much of Europe, but she did name the group for the target she means to reach: 30 percent of boards made up of women by 2015. She believes the group will get to 27 percent by the end of the year, and more if it focuses on the 10 percent of nonexecutive directors who have held seats for more than nine years.
The movement has not been without detractors. One chairman told her she was going to destroy business; others wonder why she is not doing more for broader categories of diversity, like race or sexuality. Also, women’s numbers in senior executive roles in Britain remain paltry.
Still, the 30% Club has expanded, with groups in Hong Kong, South Africa and Ireland as well as the United States, and plans for Canada and Australia.
Perhaps the 30% Club’s greatest asset is its ability to try new approaches. Recognizing that boards turned to executive search firms for lists, it lobbied and won the support of some search firms. Hearing that midcareer women wanted mentorship, but not always within their own organizations, it created a cross-mentoring group where a female lawyer might be mentored by a male asset manager, because she might not want to talk to her boss about balancing children and work, or taking time off to care for an elderly parent.
The group has commissioned research debunking common myths, held events and formed an investor group to engage listed company boards constructively.
“What is so often needed in a campaign is lots of levers to be shifting at the same time,” says Emma Howard Boyd, head of the 30% Club’s investor group and a former Jupiter Asset Management executive.
Ms. Morrissey started her career as a bond analyst for Schroders in New York and she was influenced by senior women there. Returning to London, she was passed over for a promotion. When she asked why, she said that her boss told her it was because she had just had a baby (her first).
She left to go to Newton Investment Management, then a 7 billion-pound asset manager. In 2004, she was asked to be the chief executive, an appointment that took her completely by surprise. The company, a subsidiary of Bank of New York Mellon, now has £50.7 billion under management.
She was part of, and in charge of, various women’s mentoring groups. But she described the efforts as “soul-crushing” since so many smart people had invested so much time with so few results.
The financial crisis provided an opportunity. Europe was barreling toward passing a law that required boards to mandate a level of representation of women on boards. She found such efforts patronizing. And at the same time, boards were being questioned for their utter failure to predict or even grapple with the financial crisis.
“The door was ajar,” she said.
In March 2010, she and 14 other women won the support of two influential chairmen, and decided to start the group. The timing was serendipitous: The new coalition government in Britain commissioned Lord Davies of Abersoch to examine the lack of women on boards. In 2011, he set a voluntary target of 25 percent by 2015, coinciding nicely with the group’s goal.
With that, it may not be clear who is responsible for the progress that Britain has seen, though some chairmen point to Ms. Morrissey.
“You could find umpteen government and quasi-government reports that have said sensible things from which nothing has happened,” said one, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Ms. Morrissey is also head of a parliamentary commission on women in sports and the chairwoman of an investment management association whose members oversee £5 trillion in assets.
She has begun the new year by taking the group’s message to schools. Teaming up with another charity, Speakers for Schools, the 30% Club is blanketing a handful of British schools, with the chairmen explaining to students how diversity benefits business.
On Monday, Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC, offered 400 students in a high school audience in east London some advice.
When he goes to promote a man, he said, the reaction is often: “What took you so long? I’ve been ready for ages.” Women, he said, often question if they have the necessary skills.
“Don’t be too self-effacing,” he told the crowd, channeling Ms. Sandberg.
As often happens, Ms. Morrissey’s personal life attracted a bit of attention at the event. The headmaster of the school introduced Ms. Morrissey as the chief executive of Newton, the recipient of honors from Queen Elizabeth, and one of Bloomberg’s 50 most influential people in 2014.
When he said she also had nine children, the room erupted with gasps, followed by chatter and then a steady buzz of whispering.
“She has more children than most women in most jobs,” said Siobhan Lynch, 18, and a student at the school. “It provides hope in a way.”
