The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

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!

"History must be learned in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past...which give us glimpses of what has been but never the whole reality." Thomas Cahill, author: Sailing the Wine Dark Sea This quote about the fragmentary nature of history reminded me of the photo I took of the goddess Artemis in the museum on the Greek Island of Delos (her birthplace). Artemis, the huntress, was one of the most widely venerated ancient Greek goddesses and seeing her I reveled in the thought that in certain cultures deities could be - and still can be - women.

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...

*From Leading Women's "On the Minds of Millennials: Leading Women's Survey on Gender and Careers" In a 2016 Linkedin post titled, Dear Men: Wake Up and Smell the Inequality, Adam Grant cited several studies as he wrote, "In corporate America, 88% of men think women have at least as many opportunities to advance as men. This is the finding of a major new study—almost 30,000 employees across 118 companies—by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company. Just 12% of men felt that women had fewer opportunities to advance in their organizations. Yet when you look at the actual data, women’s odds of advancement are 15% lower than men’s. It’s not because women are less capable: the evidence is strong that although men tend to be more confident leaders, on average women are more competent leaders."

We recently asked our cracker-jack researcher Lara Feghaly to decode the 10 most substantive articles on confidence that she could find. And to do the same with the book The Confidence Code. What she discovered is startling and crucial for women's career advancement. And we've turned it into an infographic for you.

The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Study is out - and Leading Women's research is in and neither is great news for companies without a leadership development program for their Millennial women: Deloitte research says: “This year’s survey shows that women are equally likely as men to rate 'opportunities for career progression and leadership roles' as a major factor for staying at or leaving a job.” “Millennials want to work for organizations that have a purpose beyond profit, and they want those organizations to provide opportunities to develop leadership skills. These may be the two most important factors in creating job satisfaction and long-term loyalty, especially among Millennial women.” “This year’s survey shows women (67 percent) are slightly more likely than men (64 percent) to leave their employers within the next five years. One reason could be that 48 percent of female respondents say they are 'being overlooked for potential leadership positions.'”

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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.