Power Sheet - October 1, 2015

I was at a Marriott hotel in Orlando earlier this year, attending a conference, and when it came time to go out for dinner I called an Uber car. The driver was a woman I’d guess was in her 50s, and she mentioned that she used to work for Marriott. She’d been in a staff job at one of its offices. A few years ago she took a leave of absence, and when she eventually called the office to arrange her return, she was told her old job no longer existed, and they didn’t have a place for her. I braced for a tirade against Marriott. But what I heard was just the opposite.

“That is a great company,” she said. “It’s a great place to work. I have the highest respect for them.”

And that, I thought, is a well-led business. You can’t always make everyone happy, but you can do a lot to earn people’s respect. You’ll be glad you did.

I mention this because Marriott is No. 81 on Fortune’s first annual ranking of the 100 Best Workplaces for Women, released yesterday. It’s also on our ranking of the 100 Best Companies to Work For (No. 53), its 18^th appearance on that list. The larger point is that, beyond a company’s rank, its mere appearance on these lists tells us something important about its leadership, more than many readers may realize.

That’s because these two rankings are not like the Fortune 500 or Global 500. For those lists we scour the world to find every company that might be eligible, and if a company isn’t publicly traded, we take pains to obtain its audited financial results. But we can’t do that with rankings of great workplaces because we need each company’s cooperation in order to get the information we need. For this new list our partners at Great Place to Work surveyed 135,689 employees at 637 companies. That is, companies must want to be on these lists, or at least want to know where they stand, even to be considered.

It turns out that many of the companies on our new ranking of Best Workplaces for Women are also on our long-running list of Best Companies to Work For – besides Marriott, I note Acuity, SAS Institute, Edward Jones, Wegmans Food Market, and Camden Property Trust just among the top ten in the 100 Best. All the employers on these lists are focused on being great places to work for everybody. They understand that human capital is their only source of sustainable competitive advantage, and that means they’ve gone beyond having a good leader at the top; they understand leadership organizationally.

Sometimes that was built into the culture many decades ago, as at Marriott. The company was led for 85 years by just two CEOs, founder J. Willard Marriott and his son, Bill Marriott. Bill became executive chairman in 2012, when Arne Sorenson became CEO. But the Best Workplaces for Women also include small, young companies like No. 2 Squaremouth, a financial services firm in St. Petersburg, Florida, that’s only nine years old.

Any company can grasp the value of good leadership if it wants to. Our newest ranking is a list of 100 companies that actually do so.

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