Women Leaders: the hard truth about soft skills
Thu 25 March 2010
, Business Week, Business Week
Collaboration, team-building, and inclusiveness are increasingly important as companies break down silos and remove layers of management, reports BusinessWeek.
Mid 2009 women found themselves making up the majority of the American workforce. Yet most organizations still face a huge gap when it comes to putting women in senior leadership roles. Women head up fewer than 3% of the Fortune 1,000 companies. The lower you go down the organizational ranks, the better the situation gets—but not that much.
Best practices
According to BusinessWeek’s Best Companies for Leadership survey, the top 20 organizations are almost twice as likely as the other 1,000-plus companies surveyed to have a high proportion of women in senior leadership positions.
So what should those lagging organizations do to improve the balance? Certainly they should adopt some other best practices of the top companies surveyed, such as creating cultures the foster leadership—cultures that closely manage succession planning and provide growth and development opportunities.
Altering the equation
According to Mary Fontaine, global head of Hay Group's leadership and talent practice, organizations should also be exploring how women change the leadership equation, both in terms of the strengths they bring to an organization and the barriers they still face. Fontaine points to a Hay Group study of 45 outstanding women executives from large multinationals, including IBM, PepsiCo, and Unilever. The women were selected based on such metrics as sales and profitability as well as the climates they created for their teams.
Broader range of style
When compared with a peer group, selected by participating organizations, of effective male executives and less effective women, the Hay Group found that the 45 women used a broader, more effective range of leadership styles to motivate and engage people.
Read the full BusinessWeek article here.
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