Business Change Management

In the NFL, women are finally breaking through

In February of last year, there was an article in The New York Times entitled, “These Women Were N.F.L. ‘Firsts.’ They’re Eager for Company.” It discusses the many “firsts” in the NFL from team CEO (Amy Trask of the Oakland Raiders) to coaches (Maral Javadifar, an assistant strength and conditioning coach, and Lori Locust, a defensive-line assistant, both for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) to referee (Sarah Thomas who officiated the 2021 Super Bowl) to the front office (Callie Brownson, chief of staff for the Cleveland Browns).

In January of 2021, there was big news concerning the NFL’s Super Bowl. Sarah Thomas — the first woman to officiate a major college football game, the first to officiate a bowl game, the first to officiate in a Big Ten stadium, the first full-time female official in NFL history and the first to officiate an NFL playoff game — was named to the referee crew for the 2021 Super Bowl, having officiated NFL games since 2015.

Talk about a glass ceiling being smashed! This put a woman squarely in the arena of what has traditionally been a men-only sport.

                                                                          
In January of this year, my wife Andi Simon wrote a blog about a pioneering early entry in the women’s rights movement, Christine Grant, who took a leadership position during the early days of Title IX. In 1973, she became the athletic director of women’s sports at the University of Iowa, one of the first women in the country to hold this title. (In those days, there were two athletic directors: one for male athletes and one for female.)

In soccer. In football. In basketball. Now in ski patrols. More and more, women today are breaking barriers and smashing glass ceilings in fields that traditionally have been men-only, not just in sports but across all disciplines: business, politics, medicine, law, tech...the list goes on.

Are men changing as well as women?

Multiple news outlets, including the NY Times, published an announcement on July 7^th, 2022 that the Las Vegas Raiders (sorry, I still think of them as the Oakland Raiders) hired Sandra Douglass Morgan as their President, the first African American woman to hold the role in N.F.L. history.

Why is this important for leadership?

For the past several years, I have written blogs about women in sports and their entry into the mainstream. You can find them here. I wasn’t writing about women who have competed or participated in women's sports but rather, those women who have attained positions in what has traditionally been the men's bastion. These women have become refs, managers, or in some cases, even players in the male arena.

Last week I wrote a blog entitled Nothing Proves The Importance Of Culture Than When Two Of Them Collide. It was all about my experiences in making a big acquisition and then realizing that words have different meanings to different people, especially when applied to a company’s culture.

In this blog I am going to describe another “culture” experience. This also covers corporate cultures and why success in one organization is not what brings success in another.

The gap between what we say and what we do

We know that what we say and what we mean are often far apart. The gap is something that comes from our brains moving far faster thinking than our voices can communicate those thoughts. You might want to take a look at Byron Reese’s new book, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future—and Shape It. My wife recently interviewed Byron on her podcast, On the Brink with Andi Simon.

All the press are celebrating the agreement by The United States Soccer Federation to align the Women's and Men's Soccer teams' pay and distribution of prize monies. It is time, isn't it?

The Federation has reached landmark collective-bargaining agreements with its men's and women's national teams. The terms create pay parity, aligning the men's and women's teams’ pay and creating a unique mechanism to share the prize money coming from their respective World Cup competitions. This deal recognizes that regardless of sex, people are people, and they should be paid for performance, not for gender.

The partners of Simon Associates Management Consultants are committed to helping young entrepreneurs, and particularly women entrepreneurs, take their ideas and turn them into successful business ventures. As part of our effort, in 2018 we started the Simon Initiative for Entrepreneurship through the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Washington University in St Louis.