The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

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.

Recently, I was asked to present information on “How to Make a Business Case for Gender Diversity” at the 100% Talent Wage Gap Summit in Seattle. Citing research on how increasing the percentage of women in leadership delivers significantly better business results from well-known organization’s like Credit Suisse, McKinsey & Co., Peterson Institute for International Economics, EY, Catalyst, and the Centre for Talent Innovation, I had all the data back-up I needed to make the case for investing in diversity initiatives.

Today's blog post comes from our friend Bridget Frey CTO at Redfin. Redfin and PayScale analyzed the executive teams at 31 of the largest U.S. tech companies and 6,562 salary profiles of people who reported working for these companies. What did they discover? The gender pay gap is half the size at tech companies with more women executives. Read ON!

Learn what women haven't been told about leadership from career-start to the corporate boardroom. Conventional wisdom about leadership will take you only so far! With the right leadership skills, the highest levels of career success are well within a your reach. But much that you've been told about leadership is outdated, incomplete and ineffective. If you rely on conventional wisdom about the career success equation it will fail you because of The Missing 33%® No Ceiling, No Walls takes a fresh, unblinking look at leadership. It identifies the vital missing piece of the leadership equation, and offers specific, actionable information not found anywhere else, including:

To prepare our presentation for the National Association of Women Lawyers General Counsel Institute, we interviewed GCs, CEOs and directors on corporate boards asking the question: "What are the most important selection and success criteria for General Counsels?" In all but one case the very first words out of their mouths emphasized the importance of being seen as a "partner in the business;" 50 percent answered with comments such as:

"Acquaintances... represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have, the more powerful you are." Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point "Leaders who are good networkers... are the connectors... They master what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls the 'weak tie', a friendly yet casual social connection." Robin Gerber in Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way

Women are often told that building a strong Network is a key to moving up in their career. But what they are being told is incomplete. In our brand new infographic we examine what's wrong with what women are taught about networking and the Leading Women difference!

Women don't want to talk about it... men don't want to 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.

Mother's Day was this past weekend in the United States (and in many other countries as well) and my husband took our kids to the playground in the afternoon so I had few minutes by myself to read the paper - a luxury most parents will understand - when I stumbled upon an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled "The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood." This piece, while attempting to highlight the gender pay gap, completely missed the mark. It isn't necessarily a problem with women prioritizing family, but rather with managers' expectations that they will and companies allowing managers to create unequal pay situations. Manager's mindsets strike again!

At the tail end of 2016, the CEOs of 27 large companies made an unprecedented announcement: they pledged to have 50% of their top leadership roles filled by women by the year 2030. To achieve the goal, they identified key actions for senior managers including: "...address unconscious bias; base advancement on performance rather than time in the office; promote women into operating roles with responsibility for profit and loss; set targets and communicate them; and actively sponsor promising female leaders." Executives in the EU and Australia have similar coalitions in place. Time to break out the champagne, right? Not so fast. Surprisingly—or perhaps unsurprisingly, depending on how cynical you are—not everyone agrees that we need more gender equality initiatives. In fact, there are many men and some women who think actions like calls to promote women into operating roles, setting targets and sponsoring promising women are frankly unnecessary and unfair.