Identifying and Overcoming Barriers
Supporting women in advancing their careers at Maersk
Client
Maersk
Company Size
110,000+ employees
Project Structure
Retainer
Decision Maker
Head of People Solutions
Function
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Challenge
Most women at Maersk do not advance past middle management. What is the root cause of this, and how can women be better supported?​
​
Outcome
A comprehensive product for women to receive more support, and a campaign for their managers to actively practice sponsorship of their female team-members.
Background
Among Maersk's 110,000 employees, most women occupy positions in the lower half of the corporate ladder. Job level (JL) 5 of 9 represents a glass ceiling above which only very few women are found. For this project, the Maersk Leadership Institute and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team formed a joint team with Anglemap and EDIT Development in order to support women at job level 5 to advance.
​
Maersk's initial hypothesis was that the root cause was a lack of leadership skills among JL5 women, and that therefore a learning intervention would be needed.
Approach
From the beginning of the project, we established the design principle that rather than try to "fix" the women, we would instead work to fix their environment and circumstances. Therefore, we challenged the notion that JL5 women needed to develop additional skills and instead worked to understand their contexts and needs.
​
We joined a team comprised of senior members of the Maersk Leadership Institute and DEI team, as well as one consultant from EDIT Development responsible for creating and implementing learning interventions as necessary.
​
In several rounds of interviews, we spoke to 35 JL5 women from around the world, as well as a number of managers of JL5 women and JL6 women who had successfully broken through the glass ceiling. We then led a design process with the entire team to create evidence-based concepts to address the needs and unique situations of JL5 women.
Solution
Through our human-centered research, conducted together with representatives of all teams involved, we found a complex of challenges that led to solutions at three levels: the individual, the interpersonal, and the organizational.
At the individual level, some women struggled to confidently own their achievements, contributing to them not being credited sufficiently. To address this, we developed a program to coach each woman to "own your story" and more effectively represent themselves.
At the interpersonal level, many JL5 women lack accessible role models at higher job levels. To address this, we created a matching program for women at JL6 and above to mentor JL5 women and to build lasting relationships.
At the organizational level, we found that women do not receive sponsorship and support at the same rate that their male colleagues do. Responding to this by digging deeper, we interviewed a number of the managers of JL5 women and confirmed that most of them do not actively sponsor their female colleagues, either because they do not know that they should, or because they are not sure how to do so. In response to this finding, we developed a program to educate senior managers about effective sponsorship. Within this program, the managers already take concrete steps to sponsor one of the women on their team for a new opportunity.
​
Often the solution to a complex human problem is a set of different approaches working in concert on different parts of the ecosystem. In this case, the solutions expanded well beyond the initial scope of JL5 women to include their peers, their managers, and the women who had already advanced to higher job levels.