The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

As you begin to implement your planning for the coming year, it is important to recognize that leaders also need development opportunities.

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.

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.

The theme for International Women's Day 2017 is #BeBoldForChange. In preparation for a week of related events in Australia, I checked to see what Google could tell us about "bold women".

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)?

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.

February is Black History Month in the United States and what's historic this year is that while all around us change is endemic, when it comes to the advancement of Black women in major corporations, little is new. With a few exceptions - most notably: Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox, Rosalind Brewer of Walgreens, and Thasunda Brown Duckett of TIAA - the percentages of African American women at the top of and in director positions at Fortune 500 companies is appallingly small. The reasons are many, and we're grateful to share this insight gleaned from our work with multicultural women. For more African American women to make history in major corporations, women's leadership programs must address the fact that conventional advice to women can create problems for women of color.

Too often mentors coach women on confidence and personality rather than business and financial ability. Diversity Executive magazine recently interviewed Susan L. Colantuono, CEO of Leading Women. Below are excerpts from the interview. (Please share this important info liberally with colleagues in and outside your company and other women in your organization.)

One of 2013's top stories for women in leadership was to see Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors become the first woman CEO of any auto company! Mary's route to the top is similar in many ways to other Fortune 500 women. Like most F500 women CEOs, Mary:

When we asked women to tell us the best career advice they received and applied our definition of leadership to analyze what we heard, we discovered that: Nearly 75% of the advice had to do with the personal greatness component "Use the greatness in you..." Nearly 24% was advice about "...engaging the greatness in others." Only about 2% was advice about how to "...achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes."