The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

Women haven't wanted to talk about it... men rarely own up to it. The far too silent barrier to women's advancement is the dynamic of Non-Parental Gender-Based Role Expectations. Read about why in our second of three blogs discussing the role of managers' mindsets:

Happy Australia Day to all of our friends down under! Leading Women and Lighthouse have teamed up once again in conjunction with AMCHAM to run a training program for women leaders on 20 & 21 February in Melbourne. The Purpose, Power, Presence for Middle Managers™ program is based on 40 years of Susan Colantuono and Leading Women's proprietary research into women's career de-railers. Susan is internationally known as an expert in women's leadership development, gender dynamics and hidden gender bias. Susan’s TED talk on Closing the Leadership Gender Gap has been viewed by over 3.5 million, translated into 23 languages and reviewed by Fortune, The Washington Post and The Guardian as one of the five videos that will change the way you work.

It has been a little over 4 years since Leading Women CEO, Susan Colantuono, took the stage at TEDxBeacon Street and we are happy to announce that 'The career advice you probably didn't get' has now surpassed 3,500,000 views! We would like to take this time to thank you for your support of Leading Women and your commitment to closing the leadership gender gap.

January is National Mentoring Month (#NaMeMo) in the United States, and while the month originally focused on mentoring youth, it has now grown to include all forms of mentoring. For us at Leading Women, our research has found that mentoring women is not only good for the women being mentored, but other women in the pipeline and their company's bottom line.

Women haven't wanted to talk about it... men rarely own up to it. The far too silent barrier to women's advancement is the dynamic of Non-Parental Gender-Based Role Expectations. Here's why. About 10 years ago when we systematically started tracking gender dynamics, we didn't specifically ask about outright harassment because most companies' anti-harassment policies and practices seemed to be working fairly well. Instead we asked about overall "gender-based role expectations (non-parental)" and the dynamics of women being seen and treated as: sex objects (through the lens of potential romantic relationships), daughters/sisters needing protection or mothers to be rebelled against (through the lens of familial relationships) or handmaidens (through the lens of roles traditionally held by women).

Last year, Leading Women partnered with the data storage and protection company Veeam to launch their initiative Women in Green (WIG). WIG invests in time, resources, and networking opportunities for their female work population. Mentoring is one of the components of the WIG initiative — and, most importantly, it’s one of the elements of diversity and inclusion initiatives that actually works. Here’s the story: As a company in the technology sector, you might not expect Veeam to be extraordinarily woman-centric. After all, the industry gets a bad rap for being, as the Atlantic put it earlier this year, “awful to women.” But Veeam is striving to be a billion-dollar company — and their executives know that they can’t achieve that goal unless everyone at the company is contributing.

Recently, a podcast host asked me if I’d be interested in doing an interview on gender differences in leadership styles. More specifically, the host wanted me to chat about how women are much more inclusive leaders than men. On the surface, this seems like a positive development for women, and something that’s worth crowing about. It’s also got a lot of traction: viewing women as more inclusive leaders seems like something that will finally get them into the C-suite en masse, no? I declined. No matter how positive it might seem on the surface to point out the “innate” characteristics of female leaders, it never leads to the kind of change we want. Read on to learn about the sinister side of gender essentialism, and how defining women leaders differently doesn’t serve them.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its 2017 Gender Gap Report last week, so we thought we'd take a look at the US and in some of the countries where our clients are working to close the gender gap in their companies. While progress is slow, many nations are making progress - and we are grateful for the improvements they are making in the lives of women.

"Feedback is a gift." You've undoubtedly heard this many times over. Feedback is so valuable that many organizations develop and use 180º and 360º assessments as part of their talent development activities. Often based on their own leadership models and/or performance systems, we have found many of them to be less than helpful to women's advancement. The most worrisome problem is that these assessments often overemphasize the importance of engagement skills. This is also true of many assessments developed by leadership development firms. To counter these problems, Leading Women developed our own assessments that provide women the feedback they need to hear in proportions that are relevant to the level at which they are leading and to which they aspire. We use these proprietary 180° and 360° assessments with the women participating in our programs. One of the most common questions they ask is how to discuss the feedback with their managers.

There are many things that women haven't been told about leadership from career-start to the corporate boardroom. Here are 9 fundamental things about leadership that women haven't been told and need to know. They are these. Leadership is simple, but it's not easy. It's simple if you have a definition of leadership that is useful and prescriptive. This is the first of 9 things that every woman should know about leadership: 1. "Leadership is using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others." This definition is one you can use to make plans at the start of each day or evaluate actions at the end of each day. Acts of leadership involve standing on the foundation of personal greatness, focusing on achieving key outcomes and engaging others in achieving those outcomes.