Daniella Alpher blogs and tweets about career women globally from her home in Tel Aviv. In her day job, she is a VP of marketing at CoolaData, an open data infrastructure enabling deep behavioral analytics to visualize, predict, and act on data. Daniella spent eight years as a television news producer at ABC News in New York and was awarded an Emmy for millennium coverage and a Peabody for news of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Dr. Silvija Seres is an independent board member based in Oslo, Norway. She serves as a nonexecutive director of Norwegian Lottery, Aschehoug, and Enoro AS. She has also been a member of the Corporate Assembly at Telenor ASA since 2011 and a member of Telenor’s Election Committee since 2012. Previously, Silvija worked as director of business management at Microsoft and as vice president of product marketing at Fast Search & Transfer ASA. Dr. Seres holds a PhD in mathematical sciences from Oxford University and an MBA from INSEAD.
Originally from Serbia and Hungary, Silvija Seres lives in Norway and serves on a dozen company boards ranging from large multinational corporations to small nonprofits. Before her career in technology and business, she worked as an academic, researcher, and programmer in the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Silicon Valley. In 2004, after getting her MBA, Silvija moved back to Oslo with her husband and joined FAST, an enterprise search software company which was acquired by Microsoft four years later.
Silvija has clearly benefitted from being in one of the most gender-equal countries in the world. Parental leave in Norway is almost a full year, and its terms are the most progressive in the world: the first nine weeks can only be taken by mothers, but beyond that, partners can share the leave and fathers are obliged to take at least twelve weeks of leave. Silvija has four small children. “My husband takes almost as long a parental leave as I do,” she explained. “Of course it has an effect on his career, but children are not just a woman’s issue.”
In 2003, Norway was the first country to legislate a 40 percent quota for women on executive boards. At the time, only 7 percent of board directors were women and now the numbers speak for themselves: in 2006, women made up 21 percent of boards, and today they hold nearly half of Norway’s corporate board positions.
Typically Norwegian board members used to be recruited from CEO positions in the same or similar industries. Since there were not enough female candidates in those positions, today’s Norwegian female board members have less top-level management experience, but more education and deeper industry expertise. Many of these women are also younger than their male colleagues. “This diversity in background leads to more creativity, I think,” said Silvija. “The new dynamics in many board rooms have been surprisingly positive.”
Silvija had a boss who once asked her why she feels like she has to deliver 150 percent all the time. “I was so focused on proving results and playing by the rules,” she admitted. “I over delivered, and some of it was wasted. What I’ve learned is you should spend only 80 percent of your working time doing real work because if you’re efficient, you’ll still deliver more than what’s expected. Then spend the remaining 20 percent of your time on relationships and talking to people. Women should relax a little bit. It doesn’t mean you’re not a top boss or anything; it just means that you’re a little bit more aware of interpersonal dynamics. Leave some energy for that.”
A few years ago, Silvija’s boss invited her team to the United States for a conference, and he dedicated one day to team-building on a golf course. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t play golf,’” she recalls, “but everybody else was so keen that we went playing golf, and basically what happened is that, you know, they dumped me on this beautiful course and just left. And I said, ‘Maybe I should at least be sitting in a cart following you guys or something,’ but there wasn’t space, or whatever, I don’t remember. And so I was kind of left there, six or seven months pregnant, while they were off playing golf for hours.”
Silvija had a talk with her boss about it later, and he acknowledged that it wasn’t the most sensitive thing to do. She then moved on without missing a beat. There is no chip on her shoulder; it isn’t worth her time to stop and dwell because there’s just too much going on out there. She clearly had the right skills at the right time when quotas were legislated in Norway. She sits on the boards of the Norwegian Lottery and Statkraft, one of the largest global companies dealing with renewable energy. But while we’re likely to see more and more opportunities for women on company boards across the globe, Silvija said it remains a highly competitive environment.
“When quotas were introduced in Norway,” she explained, “a lot of women expected these board positions would rain on them. They don’t if you’re not good at presenting your value. There is no easy, quick way to get on a board. You can’t be sure you’ll get it even if you do everything right. I’ve been extremely lucky to get these, even in Norway. We have quotas, but I grounded myself as a technology specialist who knows how to be commercial. It’s a matter of being specifically relevant while actively collaborating with the right people. It’s a time-consuming exercise—my calendar for the next year is already fully set.”
Women hold only 4 percent of the top management positions of public companies in Norway, which means that management suites of Norwegian companies are still heavily dominated by men. Norwegian corporate boards are gender-balanced, but women’s pipeline to the top still has a long way to go.