Berlin If you don’t have any experience yourself, you can give others bad advice – so far, so logical. So how can it be that most communications consultants in Germany are not active on channels such as LinkedIn or Twitter? A question that Tijen Onaran has often asked himself.
The 37-year-old is both: a public person with a wide reach – and a communications consultant. The entrepreneur has been campaigning for more diversity in the German economy for years. 116,000 people follow her on the career network LinkedIn. Onaran has already advised top managers such as Deutsche Bahn board member Sigrid Nikutta. She is surprised that there aren’t more people like her in the consulting scene. Women who are themselves in the public eye.
In order to change this, Onaran now wants to found a communications and positioning consultancy for German board members, supervisory board members and female CEOs – together with Kristina Faßler, marketing and PR expert and former manager at Axel Springer. The focus should be on LinkedIn.
The two not only want to ensure more diversity on the consultant side, but above all encourage their potential customers to be more self-confident when it comes to public positioning.
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“Many top managers still find it difficult to be authentic for fear of making themselves vulnerable,” says Onaran. As women who are in the public eye themselves, she and Kristina Faßler are predestined to take away this fear.
Practical experience helps when advising women in top management
But does practical experience really help that much when you want to advise people? Felix Beilharz, social media expert, is quite sure of that. “As someone who doesn’t use LinkedIn yourself, you won’t be able to successfully teach anyone,” he says, adding: “Behind all brands that are successful on social media are people who are active there themselves.”
Beilharz is convinced: There is a growing market for consultancies like the ones that Tijen Onaran and Kristina Faßler want to establish. A consultancy that focuses exclusively on women from top management can also be marketed better than a company that is aimed equally at both sexes. “The story behind the founding is correct here,” says the expert.
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But what exactly do Onaran and Faßler criticize about the public appearance of German women managers? Onaran criticizes: “As a follower, you often don’t understand: What does this person stand for?”
She often sees good content “on occasion” – such as studies or company figures that are shared. “But that’s usually all prepared by a PR department, finely polished – and therefore interchangeable.”
A view shared by social media expert Felix Beilharz. “It’s a big problem that a lot of CEO accounts are filled by PR departments and not by the person themselves,” he says. In this way, the followers are made to believe that there is no proximity. “I think communications departments should stay away from CEO accounts whenever possible.”
The problem: Female managers in particular still have greater inhibitions than men about presenting themselves authentically in public. At least that’s what Onaran’s business partner Kristina Fassler says. “And that’s also because women leaders are still measured by different standards than men.”
What Faßler says can be backed up by studies, such as a 2020 study by communications consultancy Hering Schuppener (today Finsbury Glover Hering). The authors analyzed 850 articles from the German press. One result: the appearance of female executives took up a third more space than that of male bosses.
Tijen Onaran believes that this shouldn’t lead to top managers hiding from the public eye – but many of them do exactly that, as a look at their LinkedIn accounts shows. “Many profiles are dead files,” says the consultant.
Women in leadership are judged more on appearances
To “check” how active someone is on the network, Onaran likes to look at the woman’s recent activities. “I often see that the person last gave a ‘like’ somewhere three months ago – a bad sign.”
With their founding, Faßler and Onaran are pursuing the common goal of making top managers more visible and self-confident – both have a slightly different focus. “I hope that Tijen and I will succeed in ensuring more visible diversity of opinion in the German economy,” says Kristina Faßler.
Tijen Onaran’s mission sounds more number-driven: “I’m working towards women soon being in the majority in the rankings of top German influencers,” she says. It’s annoying that those lists almost always consist of men.
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