The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

What challenges are companies seeking to address when they contact Leading Women?

2018's International Women's Day campaign theme is #PressforProgress. "Individually, we're one drop but together we're an ocean. Commit to a "gender parity mindset" via progressive action. Let's all collaborate to accelerate gender parity, so our collective action powers equality worldwide."

Just in time for International Women's Day, Worldwide Business with kathy ireland® announced an exclusive story featuring our CEO and Founder, Susan Colantuono. Susan will be discussing the importance of closing the gender gap that exists within various industries, sectors and companies on Sunday, March 4, 2018 (check your local listings for times). photo credit: Leading Women Appearing on the set of Worldwide Business with kathy ireland®

Happy Australia Day to all of our friends down under! Leading Women and Lighthouse have teamed up once again in conjunction with AMCHAM to run a training program for women leaders on 20 & 21 February in Melbourne. The Purpose, Power, Presence for Middle Managers™ program is based on 40 years of Susan Colantuono and Leading Women's proprietary research into women's career de-railers. Susan is internationally known as an expert in women's leadership development, gender dynamics and hidden gender bias. Susan’s TED talk on Closing the Leadership Gender Gap has been viewed by over 3.5 million, translated into 23 languages and reviewed by Fortune, The Washington Post and The Guardian as one of the five videos that will change the way you work.

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.

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!

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".

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.