The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

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.

"Feedback is a gift." You've undoubtedly heard this many times over. Feedback is so valuable that many organizations develop and use 180º and 360º assessments as part of their talent development activities. Often based on their own leadership models and/or performance systems, we have found many of them to be less than helpful to women's advancement. The most worrisome problem is that these assessments often overemphasize the importance of engagement skills. This is also true of many assessments developed by leadership development firms. To counter these problems, Leading Women developed our own assessments that provide women the feedback they need to hear in proportions that are relevant to the level at which they are leading and to which they aspire. We use these proprietary 180° and 360° assessments with the women participating in our programs. One of the most common questions they ask is how to discuss the feedback with their managers.

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.

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!

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.

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.”

*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."

Sitting in a talent discussion a manager says, "She wouldn't want that assignment, she has young kids." Sound far fetched in the 21st century? It isn't! Our research finds that barriers created by mindsets like this are reported by women's focus groups in countries including the US, Canada, Brazil and India and focus groups of male managers in countries such as Belgium, China, Italy and Mexico.