If Women Rise, We All Rise: How Companies Can Help Integrate Women’s Leadership Development

We’ve learned many things from SHAMBAUGH’s Gender Equity practice, the most valuable of which have come from the women themselves. In addition to SHAMBAUGH’s Women in Leadership and Learning Institute (WILL), we partner with our clients in providing a targeted leadership program for female talent in-house, which draws talented women leaders from organizations worldwide who come together to not only accelerate the participants’ own growth and advancement, but also bring greater value back to their teams and companies.

A new article in McKinsey Quarterly—“When Women Lead, Workplaces Should Listen”—validates SHAMBAUGH’s findings by mirroring what we have discovered through our years of experience developing and coaching women leaders. That is, as the report correctly states:

“The most valuable lessons of women’s leadership programs are those that show organizations where to improve.”

Of particular importance, McKinsey reported that women, more often than men, display leadership qualities that are “highly applicable to future global challenges.”

These traits include:

• Inspiration
• Participative decision making
• Expectations and rewards
• People development
• Role modeling

 

SHAMBAUGH’s research has revealed similar findings, which is why we have long emphasized the importance of the positive outcomes that can emerge from women’s leadership programs—outcomes that are beneficial for the whole company if the organization is listening and is open to the important points that women bring to the table. Like McKinsey, SHAMBAUGH has found that it is critical to tap into the levels of input and perspectives that are driven by women.

SHAMBAUGH’s leadership programs for women and other women’s leadership programs are doing their job in not only helping women participants develop core leadership skills such as enhancing their executive presence, communicating with greater confidence, and strengthening their power base, but in increasing their value across the organization. But we’ve noticed that where the baton sometimes gets dropped is in incorporating the strengths and insights that women bring back from such programs within the larger company. At the end of the day, the successful implementation of the learnings from a women’s leadership development program is what separates successful change in this arena from business as usual. It’s about how the company—and the women themselves—tap into and leverage what women bring back from the program.

As one of our WILL attendees—a senior manager from KPMG—told SHAMBAUGH at the completion of the program:

“I have learned a tremendous amount of information and feel energized to implement these areas that will support my growth and development as a leader.”

The question is, when female leaders like this attendee return to their respective organizations after completing leader development training, what happens next? For an organization to experience the optimum benefit of the company’s investment into the program, the learning can’t stop when the training is over—and cannot stop with the participants themselves. Companies must then take the next step and listen to the women to absorb the participants’ experiences from the program.

Really, this is something of a no-brainer: Why would we not want to be open to, learn from, and tap into the 50 percent of the workforce who are women? Their experiences are unique from men’s and can be equally (though differently) rich. Women’s insights can help organizations shape a culture and leadership model that drives greater innovation, engagement, and bottom-line success.

One important point that SHAMBAUGH has noticed by working with the women who attend our WILL program is that many companies have systemic and hard-wired practices that come out in our sessions that would otherwise not be called out or noticed within the organization. In many cases, if not empowered by their companies and management teams, women will go along with or adapt to unproductive or limiting norms and practices, assuming they should not call any of them out. These traditional norms may prevent inclusion in a way that not only limits the individual women, but the company as a whole.

The days of questioning, “Why do we keep doing women’s leadership programs as it only preferences women?” is from a limited and distorted lens that does not appreciate the wider range of benefits that can potentially come out of leader development training. These programs, if designed and facilitated constructively—and then effectively leveraged on the backend by the company after the training is over—can lead into beneficial outcomes for all. What we say at SHAMBAUGH is if women rise, then we all rise.

SHAMBAUGH not only has a significant focus on designing in-house leadership development solutions for female leaders, but also examines and provides new practices and disruptive approaches to foster inclusive cultures that drive greater equity and innovation. Participating in programs like these is the necessary precursor to transformation into gender-balanced leadership and inclusive workplaces—and companies that listen to what women bring back from these types of programs help to ensure maximum benefit across the entire organization.

 Contact me at info@shambaughleadership.com to learn about SHAMBAUGH’s programs for women in leadership, including The Shambaugh Institute for Women in Leadership and Learning (WILL) program, which has achieved national recognition for its proven results, research, laser-sharp curriculum, and highly experienced and credentialed faculty and executive coaches.

At SHAMBAUGH Leadership, we’re on a mission to develop high-performing and inclusive leaders who transform workplace cultures so everyone can thrive. As experts on building inclusive and high-performance cultures, we partner with companies and executives to address the whole system of an organization, unlocking and leveraging the full potential of the entire company. Rebecca Shambaugh is an international speaker on driving high-performance organizations through inclusion. Rebecca is Founder of Women in Leadership and Learning, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, and blogger for the Huffington Post. She is author of the best-selling books It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor and Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results. To learn more about SHAMBAUGH Leadership’s trainings and customized programs in leadership development that help create inclusive, high-performance cultures, contact Rebecca at info@shambaughleadership.com.

Find out more about us at: www.shambaughleadership.com

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