就像许多其他成功女性一样，拜耳总裁桑德拉•皮特森（Sandra Peterson）将自己定义为一个“更重视激励组织去实现更好目标，而不是实现预期销售利润”的领导者。她非常自豪于自己的协作能力与绩效标准，她激励团队实现一个又一个目标，尽管大多时候团队成员并不确定最后能否达到，而桑德拉（Sandra） 却帮助他们真正完成了这些目标。
“我认为好的领导者背后都有一个比自己更适合各个岗位的团队。令我非常高兴的是，我不用事事作为一个专家，而是将真正的专家置于这些岗位上。我不用知道所有问题的答案，我也无需作为那个永远站在最前面的人。我这样做不是为了我自己，而是为了整个团队的成功，为了我的成员们有更广阔展示自我的平台，有更多的机会来谈论他们为公司做了些什么。”
在桑德拉（Sandra）的激励下，她有着一批非常值得信赖的员工，能够按时完成各项指标与任务。她还提到了自己永远不会妥协的价值观：
“我从不认为有些人就是理应领导或者管理另一些人。我不想让我的员工处在被轻视、被责骂的工作环境中。我不认同威慑管理，我不想牺牲公司的未来去换取一个季度的利润。对于我来说，最重要的是你如何对待你的客户。你是否尊重并赞许你的客户，并且让他们在与你合作的过程中感觉良好？对待你公司内部的员工同样如此，同样需要给予他们尊重。”
针对女性的建议
在男性主导的职场中，女性的发展受到了诸多因素的制约，然而桑德拉（Sandra）却在拜耳这样的企业中获得了成功。桑德拉（Sandra）针对女性职员在拜耳中的发展给出了三方面的建议：
“我有意识地了解了一些企业中层女性管理者的想法，她们并非高级管理人员，我想找出过去那些可以使她们在公司中开辟新道路，然而却被错过的机遇。我并未过度着眼于女性，而损害男性的利益，我只是想给出一些中肯的意见和建议。”
“我做的第二件事就是将拜耳的职位放开，使得雇员更加多元化。我有一个简单的信念，你可以谈论很多关于多元化的话题，你也可以在网上号称企业的多元化，但是除非你真正开展多元化的进程，并建立标准随时追踪、衡量实施过程，否则不可能在组织的表现上真正看到一个多元化的企业。同样，从事这个行业的雇员，可能在刚刚入行时行为方式就被训练得较为功利。所以，我敢说那些男性领导者和经理同样是以此作为他们的行为准则......我花费了很大精力和时间区分辨那些不同寻常的女性雇员们，她们中的有些人具有非常优秀的内在品质，但并非就那么明显得表现在工作之中。”
“我做的第三件事情就是，当我的女性雇员们遇到她们职业发展中的瓶颈，以及面对不同寻常的挑战时，我尽可能多地站在她们的角度，与之讨论解决问题的方法。我同样在指导并鼓励其他女性，并给予相应的意见。从某种意义上来说，我应该可以作为职业女性发展中的一个较为乐观的例子。”
在桑德拉（Sandra）主持的会议中，不仅有各个部门的负责人，同样还有不少来自其他项目组的基层员工。桑德拉（Sandra）说，这样做有两个目的：第一，她会获得来自一线员工的最真实的情况，而不是殷勤讨好的虚假数据。第二，作为一个成长型的企业，她会更加重视女性的意见表达，选取部分女性员工加入到会议的讨论中来（由于高级职位大多是男性）。
“我不会把自己成功的方式作为范例讲给她们，但我会征求她们的意见，让这些声音能够被公司的更多人听到——我并不是在开会时发言的唯一女性。”
桑德拉（Sandra）还给职业女性们一条小建议：避免做办公室里最聪明的那个人。
“这就要说到一个最基本的原则，那就是不要那么与众不同，使得办公室里的其他人感到不舒服。第一点，男人们不知道如何与你交流，他们不知道在休息时间与你讲些什么，因为你和他们如此格格不入。此外，他们在你周围工作，如果你总是自作聪明地展示自己，就会显得其他人的工作做得不如你好，这样就加深了不和谐的因素。在一个高凝聚力的团队中，如果能够相互合作、帮助他人，并且将自己定位为一个“好相处”的成员，那么整个团队必将更有活力和积极性。”
Like many successful women I’ve met, Sandra Peterson, CEO of Bayer CropScience, describes herself as a leader who tries to “inspire an organization to achieve a higher purpose than just making sales and profitability targets.” She also prides herself on being very collaborative, but also has high performance standards. She urges her team to reach for goals – even those that they aren’t sure they’re capable of reaching. And then she helps them to actually get there.
“I believe a great leader has better people working for them [who] can do their jobs better than [the leaders] themselves… I am very comfortable not being the expert and actually putting people who work for me forward. I don’t need to know all the answers and I don’t need to be the one who’s out there up front. It’s not about me. It’s about the organization being successful and promoting those who work for me to give the board presentation or to be the one who talks about the work that’s being done for the company.”
Along with inspiration, Sandra holds people accountable for meeting their commitments and deadlines. She cites certain values that she will not compromise.
“I don’t compromise at all on how people lead and manage other people. I don’t want to work in an environment where people are belittled and berated. I don’t believe in management by fear. I also won’t sacrifice the future of a company for a quarter. To me, the biggies are things about how you treat your customers. Do you respect and appreciate your customers and feel good about what you’re doing? But it’s also how you deal with people in your organization and how you deal with your customers and treat them with respect.”
Three Steps for Helping Women
Sandra also says she actively works to create an environment where women will thrive. This is often not an easy task as many of the industries she’s worked in have typically been very male-dominated. But she has succeeded in this effort by consciously doing three things:
“I consciously make an effort to get to know some of the women who may be in the middle of the organization – they’re not at senior management levels – and try to figure out whether there’s a new opportunity they can take on that enables them to shine and succeed in a way they may not have in the past. I don’t overly focus on the women, to the detriment of others, but give them some advice and counsel in that regard.
“The second thing I do is to be very clear about any job that becomes open in the organization that we must evaluate a diverse slate of candidates. I have this basic belief that you can talk a lot about diversity, and you can do all sorts of networking and mentoring things, but unless you actually measure progress against it and have metrics being tracked and managed against, you don’t actually see the change in performance in the organization. Simply put, people in business are trained from the beginning that what gets measured is what matters. So I ensure that the male leaders and managers also have this as part of their objective as well… I push very hard to take the extra time to identify the unusual candidate, which may be somebody who may have some inherent skills but is not the obvious candidate for that job.
“And then the third one is I try as much as I can to talk to women as they go through different phases of their career about some of the issues and challenges that they may face and how to think about those. I also make an effort to mentor and support other women and give them advice, to the extent I can be a positive role model for these women.”
In addition, Sandra structures meetings so they include more people from lower levels in the various teams – not just the project or department leaders. This, she says, achieves two purposes. First, she gets unfiltered information from people in the trenches who are actually doing the work. And second, by enlarging the group, she automatically gets a couple of other women in the room.
“I don’t go out of my way to showcase [the women], but I may ask them a question so that their voice is also heard – and so I’m not the only female voice in the room.”
One piece of advice Sandra frequently tells women is that they should “avoid being the smartest one in the room.” Why? Isn’t that like a mother telling her daughter to hide her intelligence in school so she has a better chance of catching a husband? Sandra laughed at my analogy, but clarified her point:
“It goes back to a fundamental thing that you make everybody else around the room uncomfortable if you’re different than they are. First and foremost, they [the men] don’t know how you tick; they don’t know what to talk to you about during the breaks, because you’re different than them. And then all of a sudden if you’re the one who always has the answer and is always completely prepared it makes them look like they’re not doing as good a job as you are. That doubles the discomfort level. And so being highly collaborative with other people, and working in a collaborative way and helping them, and putting them at ease along a number of different dimensions all of a sudden changes the dynamics.”
The next post in this series will look at the perceptions and stereotypes of female executives.
