The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

Recently I read an article about Fortune Magazine’s Pattie Sellers moderating a discussion with execs from Facebook, Coca-Cola and FCB Worldwide on how their companies were attacking the problem of unconscious bias. When referring to unconscious bias, Maxine Williams, global director of diversity at Facebook spoke about “a problem that, as increasing numbers of companies are realizing, prevents them from improving their workforce diversity and typically interferes with the productivity of their employees.” When Seller asked the audience of 200 executives whether they had unconscious bias training programs within their company, only a dozen raised their hands. When asked how many would like to have a program, practically the entire room raised their hands. Huh. If unconscious bias is as big a problem as it seems, why don’t more companies have a plan to deal with it?

When it comes to overcoming mindsets that cause the leadership gender gap, one of the practices that we recommend is to require recruiters (internal and external) to deliver diverse slates of candidates for key positions. While companies often focus on senior positions, we recommend this practice be implemented for positions above the diverging point (the point at which the % of women begins to decline and that of men increases).

We work hard with clients to engage managers and executives in actions to close the leadership gender gap. During one of our multi-month leadership programs, the managers (most often men) who have nominated the women participants join us for 3 major topics: What is Leadership?, The Missing 33%® and Make the Most of Mentoring™. It's an effective way to address several gender dynamics - including the powerful one we call "Men's Culture of Mentorship/Sponsorship."

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.

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