A recent exchange on LinkedIn involved a senior leader at McKinsey questioning whether the glass cliff even exists for female leaders at struggling companies.
Julia Carreon didn’t anticipate that a LinkedIn post promoting her new book would spark an exchange that made a persuasive case for why she wrote the book in the first place.
Carreon, a former executive at Citigroup and Wells Fargo, had drawn on her experience climbing the ranks of Wall Street to write Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling, which was published in September. The book touched on the notion of the “glass cliff,” a term that academics use to capture how women tend to be appointed to leadership positions when a company is going through a rough patch.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Carreon’s friend talked about an example of the glass cliff, using it as an opportunity to highlight her book. Carreon was taken aback when Chris Bradley, a senior partner at McKinsey, commented on the post—and questioned the entire premise of the glass cliff.
As Bloomberg first reported this week, McKinsey has sought to distance itself from Bradley’s comments. “This exchange was inconsistent with our views and the standards we expect,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Fast Company. “The comments were made in a personal capacity and have since been deleted. We stand by our research and leadership on these topics. We are disappointed by these comments and do not endorse them.” (Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.)
To Carreon, it seemed so far-fetched that anyone would make these remarks publicly—no less a leader at McKinsey—that she initially assumed it was a joke. “I wasn’t understanding that he didn’t know that the glass cliff was a thing,” she tells Fast Company. “It finally hit me in real time that he thought we made it up for our book.”
Bradley doubled down as Carreon chimed in, writing that “we once had a problem of female advancement to CEO, but now we have a new problem that the jobs they get are too hard? Is this actually a thing?” He went on to say it seemed like a convenient excuse to “always be a victim in the rain.” When Carreon suggested he do some research on the topic, he retorted that it wasn’t worth his time: “I am not going to start researching glass cliffs as I don’t think it ranks in the top 1000 problems of the world.”
This incident is problematic for McKinsey for a number of reasons. Bradley happens to be a director of the firm’s research arm, the McKinsey Global Institute, which has put out research on gender inequality, including across leadership roles. Through other research, McKinsey has shed light on the barriers that persist for women in corporate America; the firm is known for its annual Women in the Workplace report, published in partnership with Sheryl Sandberg’s organization Lean In. The term glass cliff is even cited in a 2020 report from McKinsey about women in healthcare, in the context of discussing the unique challenges women of color may face. READ MORE
By Pavithra Mohan
Source: fastcompany.com
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