The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

Earlier in my career, I was caught off guard when I was asked during a job interview, "How do you innovate?" It was a question I couldn’t answer, and it became a defining moment that has stuck with me throughout my career. Today, as Leading NOW's CEO, it’s a question I often ask our clients when advising them on how to create a culture of inclusion and innovation.

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

It’s a wrap! After delivering 22 of our best-in-class leadership workshops to a sold-out crowd at the #1 ranked women’s leadership conference in Las Vegas, the early reviews by participants of our sessions rated them, in a word, spectacular. We couldn’t be more delighted to share that our amazing team delivered all of the skill-building workshops at WLC 2023, spanning three tracks of learning to over 1000+ attendees, with overwhelmingly positive accolades!

Accountability is at the heart of all high-performing teams and successful organizations. Employees at all levels take full ownership and responsibility for their actions, decisions and performance—and for the achievement of business outcomes—without excuses. Healthy cultures that prioritize accountability see better results in productivity, collaboration and engagement, high morale and a greater capacity to thrive. If that doesn't sound like your organization, then as a leader, you have to find out why. It's time to determine how teams can align their tasks with the organization's big picture.

For over 20 years, Leading Women, a division of Leading NOW, has been advocating for gender parity in leadership by supporting women’s organizations around the globe. But did you know that one of the many ways we do this is through providing our proprietary leadership content to conferences for associations and organizations across all industries? Our skill-building and development workshops focus on business, strategic, and financial acumen; strategic relationships; and mentoring, and provide the kind of training needed for career advancement and success. To reach as many women as possible, we have been bringing our exceptional leadership development content to our partners’ industry conferences, creating customized certification programs, and creating events that have literally changed an entire industry. Here are just a few examples of the different kinds of programming we offer.

Five years ago, I read Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First, a book by corporate governance expert Ram Charam, Dominic Barton of McKinsey & Company and Dennis Carey of Korn Ferry. Immediately, I knew these visionaries were onto something big. They forecasted the need for organizations to deploy talent as a critical function of business, warning CEOs that if they wanted to be successful, they needed to pull the talent initiative into the C-suite. Given where we are today with the war for talent, I'm still amazed at the foresight. CEOs must prioritize people and can no longer leave talent solely in the hands of HR. They need to focus on developing the next generation of leaders if they want their organization to survive, thrive and outperform their competition.

According to a recent article in CEO World, among the top 3 things that are keeping CEO’s up at night is the strength of their people. But it’s not physical strength that keeps them awake. It’s the strength of their current and future leadership talent that has them concerned.

When we asked successful women leaders across all industries what they recommend organizations do to bring more women into senior leadership roles, a common thread from their responses emerged––diversity and inclusion is integral. In part three of our Leadership Lessons from Women Leaders research series, we share their insights and suggestions, along with a few of our own.

Nokia – All Set for Historic Culture-led Turnaround A long-term client, Nokia, a F500 telecoms and technology company famously headquartered in Finland, approached Leading NOW in early 2019 in order to accelerate their journey to being a more inclusive workplace, they asked us to customize a manager curriculum focused on bias recognition and mitigation.

Continuing our blog series and 4 Steps to Making a Real & Lasting DE&I Impact, we covered step #3 and how to build inclusive leadership across your business. We explored how creating a culture of inclusion can start to address our diversity challenges and ensure that all talent is welcomed, valued, and developed. The next part of the prescription addresses the ‘E’ in DE&I, which I feel is the ‘Cinderella’ of the equation. Equity is critical to long-term success, but often the poor relation when it comes to share of company attention, action, and resources.