Kim Clijsters and What We Lost With Lehman

Newspaper headlines for the past week have extolled the phoenix–like feats of Kim Clijsters. Few have given more than a passing mention and a commemorative nod to the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ demise. Yet the two, in fact, are connected.

The former Number 1 women’s tennis player who retired two years ago has been storming the battlements at the U.S. Open, cheered on by her husband and 18-month-old daughter—and thousands of men and women riveted by the very public spectacle of someone playing out their private story: A talented woman who dropped out at the top of her game to have a child and is now trying to step back into her career at the highest level. No matter whether Clijsters ends up hoisting the winner’s hardware or smiling gamely from the sidelines — I’m writing this blog on the eve of the finals — she has proven without a doubt that women don’t lose their competitive mojo just because they become mothers.

What Clijsters has done, said Stacey Allaster, the new chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association, in an article in The New York Times, “sends an incredible message to working moms that you can have a career and be successful at your profession.”

Yet it’s a message that many corporations still don’t get, especially those in fast-paced, high-pressure industries like the financial sector. Once you decide to take the off-ramp from your career super-highway, the thinking goes, you can never rev up the pace to get back on the on-ramp. Lehman, however, didn’t believe that.

Lehman led the way in developing the first and best-in-class program for on-ramping women. Launched in November 2005 and rolled out in New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo, Lehman Brothers Encore transformed the career prospects of hundreds of highly talented women in the financial sector.

Encore was not an alumnae reunion nor a job fair wrapped up in touchy-feely language. Explains Anne Erni, the program’s designer (who headed up Lehman’s diversity initiatives between 2003 and 2008 and is now Head of Leadership, Learning and Diversity at Bloomberg LP), the aim was “to legitimize women who have off-ramped and create a new stream of experienced talent for the firm.”

In contrast to new recruits straight from college or business school, off-ramped women — and, as the program picked up steam, men — would bring many more skills and a wider range of contacts to the job. Financial incentives for the company included savings around the costs associated with luring high-level talent from other companies, costs that could include headhunting fees and the spiked salaries often needed to attract talent that’s well-situated elsewhere. Lehman’s investment in a full-time recruiter-manager, a diversity-oriented search firm and customized “reskilling” to bring the new on-ramping recruits up to speed, as well as creating flexible work schedules to accommodate shared priorities, was amply repaid by access to a previously untapped source of professional, available, enthusiastic talent eager to jump back into the game.

Once Lehman broke the mold, other financial firms soon followed, notably Merrill Lynch, whose “Greater Returns: Restarting Your Career” on-ramping program, developed in partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, was launched in October 2008. For a while, it looked as though these initiatives would disappear amid the devastation of the economic meltdown. But Bank of America is committed to continuing the program next spring in combination with its own on-ramping initiative, “Career Connections.”

In short, there’s a growing recognition of what high-performing women already knew and that Kim Clijsters’ reappearance solidly proves: that the beginning of one’s childbearing years needn’t mean the end of a competitive career.

As companies turn to their top talent to lead them out of the recession, let’s hope that they will carry on Lehman’s legacy and look for ways to bring their former stars back into the game.