The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

I'm inspired by a presentation I saw Brendon Burchard make in which he said that at the end of our lives, each of us wants to be able to say "YES!" to 3 questions: Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?

We get mail...and love to share it in the hopes that it inspires you, as it does us:

We love McKinsey's research. Their recent article, Decoding Leadership: What Really Matters identifies 4 key leadership behaviors that correlate most strongly with leadership effectiveness. Here are the 4 and our commentary about the connection to The Missing 33%® and our definition of leadership (Leadership is using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others):

At Leading Women we use the term gender dynamics to mean the impact of managers' mindsets on their talent development and talent advancement actions. For years, we've been studying 11 of these mindsets and their impacts around the globe.

Chances are your corporate initiatives to advance women have been successful in moving women into middle management. However moving women into senior and executive positions often presents a greater challenge.

Keep your eyes open for our colorful "white" paper on women's advancement. In the meantime, did you see these?

Spotting (and Developing) Leaders! Thanks to Nneka C. who last month pointed us to the HBR article on 21st Century Talent Spotting because of the alignment between the model in one of the sidebars and Leading Women's definition of leadership. For over 14 years, we've been defining leadership as "using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others."

In spite of decades of research identifying organizational barriers to women's advancement and strong business cases for getting more women into leadership positions, we continue to run into organizations (sadly often HR executives) who resist calls to take action to close the gender gap. One organization we know of treated their women's initiative leaders in the same way that our colleagues were treated back in the 1970s (when women's initiatives WERE a "futuristic social experiment").