The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

See the Silver Linings?

Over the last few years or so we have noticed a number of CEOs who are being praised in the news for understanding that gender dynamics are real and when they level the playing field for all of their employees they help their company as a whole. In one of Leading Women's blog posts from May 2015, we wrote about Michael Simonds, CEO of UNUM who wrote with deep understanding about women's advancement and closing the leadership gender gap. Our latest nominee for a CEO Who "Gets It" - Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff - was in the news in March 2016 for ensuring pay equity by conducting wage equity audits and making the requisite adjustments, and for naming their first Chief Equality Officer in September 2016.

Not long ago Leading Women CEO, Susan Colantuono, was working with top executive women and men on a discussion of executive presence. She asked everyone to write down the first quality that comes to mind when they think of "executive presence." Then they took their words and stood next to flipcharts labeled Personal Greatness, Engaging Others and Achieving Outcomes. To their surprise, over 50% of the room had words that fell under Personal Greatness, about 30% engaging others and under 20% on achieving outcomes. BUT this wasn't to our surprise. To find out why...

Generic unconscious bias training and its umbrella intervention, diversity training, have been around for decades, but they have still failed to close the leadership gender gap. In their article Why Diversity Programs Fail, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev argue that this is because too much diversity training is mandatory, prompting resentment and defensiveness from managers. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance—and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward,” they write.

While on Facebook the other day, I came across this post from a friend, who works in HR for a well-known US-based health insurance company, and I could not get what she wrote out of my head.

Leading Women is excited to announce our new full-time location in Europe! I am delighted to be establishing Leading Women's permanent office in the the European Union. Having a European base in Luxembourg will give us the opportunity to better serve our European and British clients.

In a recent blog, I mentioned a story about a group of 72 companies who have committed to making gender diversity a business imperative, with accountability for it within the senior executive team. This story has caused quite a bit of commotion in social media and we’ve seen a lot of questions popping up in LinkedIn: “How are they planning on preparing the women for leadership?” “What will they do differently?” “How will they identify what needs to be done (so I can emulate it)?

When presenting proposals for their strategic initiatives, D&I executives often face challenges from colleagues in HR who ask something like this:

In an interview on Worldwide Business with kathy ireland® that will be airing this coming weekend, Leading Women’s CEO Susan Colantuono was asked the question: “If you had one piece of advice to give to a CEO, what would it be? She answered, “As a CEO, or as an executive or director for that matter, if women aren’t proportionately represented throughout your organization, you aren’t facing a women’s issue — you’re facing a talent development issue with business implications. And so it’s important to bring your personal commitment and the same level of organizational accountability to that challenge as you would to any business issue.”

With Father's Day in the US last weekend, it got me thinking about working families and what companies are doing to keep and support both working mothers and working fathers. The US Department of Labor reports that 70% of women with children under 18 years old participate in the labor market in some way, signaling a change from the days where father went off to work and mother stayed home and raised the children.