Why Women’s Advancement Is Everyone’s Issue

I recently was a keynote at a major leadership conference in New York. One of the great pleasures of my trip was meeting a male CEO of a Fortune 500 organization, who I call Henry. We were speaking about the progress of women in leadership and what still needs to happen to move the needle. I asked him what he saw as the biggest challenge within organizations to getting more women into senior management.

“Most important is that we ‘all’ need to be in—organizations, men, and women need to play an intentional role,” said Henry. “This means organizations need to have the right culture or it won’t happen. Male leaders and executives need to understand that a balanced leadership team is essential to remain competitive and achieve better business outcomes.” Lastly, Henry said: “What I think is the biggest nutshell to crack is having women leaders truly understand the importance of helping each other.”

An Important Part of the Equation for Your Women’s Leadership Strategy

It’s been a busy whirlwind of speaking engagements these past few weeks, where I’ve discussed what I refer to as “Integrated Leadership” at a number of conferences and executive forums. The reason that Integrated Leadership is so crucial is that it reinforces the already compelling business case for gender-balanced leadership.

I recently met with Henry Maier, President and CEO for FedEx. Henry spoke just before I did at a recent conference in New York, where he stated so well: “When it comes to gender-balanced leadership, we are all in this together—men, women, and the organization.” Henry’s perspective is exactly on point in that it emphasizes the importance of having an integrated strategy focused on advancing talented women in our organizations. To move the needle in that direction, we all need to walk the talk.

Breaking Through the Gender Barrier—You Can’t Do It Alone

Last week, I had the welcome opportunity to participate in a rich dialogue with Cathy Engelbert, who was recently appointed Chief Executive Officer for Deloitte LLP. I congratulated Cathy for becoming the first women in a professional services firm to take the helm as CEO, thus serving as a role model for many future female leaders.

Our conversation, which focused on the perennial topic of how to advance women in leadership, took place at the St. Regis in New York alongside 20 other women executives who have powerful roles in the Capital Markets sector. Several of these women have seats on notable corporate boards. Throughout the discussion, I was reminded about the importance of integrated leadership to women’s career advancement. To break through the gender barrier, women and men both need to play a significant role, as do organizations.

3 Habits of Ineffective Women’s Leadership Development

We’ve spent a lot of time in recent posts focusing on the best ways to approach women’s leadership development. But sometimes, knowing what not to do can be as instructive as guidelines on how to do things right.

In that spirit, I present to you the following three habits to avoid when it comes to developing and retaining your female executives.

The Missing Link: Moving Beyond First-Level Solutions to Women’s Leadership

It has been a hectic but exciting fall packed with travel and speaking engagements at executive forums and conferences nationwide. At these events, I’ve continued to explore with companies this perennial question: “How do we attract, retain, and advance women leaders?”

My most recent talk engaged top executives from Fortune 500 organizations who are responsible for talent development, or play a key role in talent recruitment while running a significant part of their organization. Most if not all of these well-known organizations have invested significantly in their high-potential women and have developed programs to support women leaders.

Take a Deeper Dive – An Examination of Executive Conscience

After presenting at a recent conference, I found myself at lunch sitting next to a CEO who seemed anxious to talk to me. He shared that although his company had made significant investments over the past few years in diversity training, Lean Six Sigma initiatives, and team development, he still wasn’t satisfied with the speed of transformation within the company. Women leaders were advancing too slowly, silo mentality was rampant, and employees were disengaged. In short, though the CEO had dove into these important initiatives with both feet, the results were underwhelming, and he asked me what to do.

I recommended a “deeper dive”—which I call an examination of executive conscience—to break below the surface of the issues. Here’s how it works. Say that you’re trying to understand why only around 14% of women in the Fortune 500 hold executive officer positions, as confirmed by the 2013 Catalyst Census. You could look at the behaviors of those who are doing succession planning and talent development—but this won’t tell you the whole story. You could examine company policies, practices, procedures, and controls—but you probably won’t find much wrong there, since these were put in place to drive equity and fairness in hiring.

Engaging Men Matters – Let’s Start Having the Smart Conversation!

Recently I was asked to conduct a Fireside Chat with two male senior executives of a Fortune 500 company. These Fireside Chats are designed to bring men into the Integrated Leadership conversation and explore how men and women can work in partnership to break down barriers, address gender-related stereotypes and help each other realize their roles in closing the gender gap.

The forum drew the organization’s 200 top women leaders, as well as a critical mass of male executives. With the purpose of engaging these two men in a dialogue about inclusion and diversity and why both are important, I took a deep breath and began to ask them questions. The conversation was amazing! These two men shared their perspectives about why it’s important for women to be in the leadership ranks at all levels of the organization and how having them there actually impacts bottom-line growth.

Executive Insights on Integrated Leadership

At a recent event in Washington, D.C. for my latest book, Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results (McGraw-Hill), I was honored to have in attendance senior executives from such highly successful companies as Marriott, Merck, IBM and PPD. Several of these executives shared their insights and perspectives on leadership and what it’s going to take to lead effectively in the 21st century.

I opened the event by highlighting the dramatic shifts taking place in our work environments and across the world, as well as the business case for Integrated Leadership, which calls for embracing and leveraging the broader spectrum of human intelligence in our organizations and teams. Dottie Brienza, Chief Diversity Officer and Head of Talent Development for Merck, then shared some terrific thoughts on Integrated Leadership and the importance of having balanced leadership teams: “Numerous research studies show that organizations with a greater number of women in senior executive positions are more profitable, have greater market share and are better able to compete and grow. Businesses that have fewer women, frankly, are leaving money on the table. It simply doesn’t make good business sense to leave women out. This is not because women are better than men. It’s because women bring something fundamentally different to the table that allows businesses to operate more holistically.”

Integrated Leadership is a Three-Legged Stool

When I decided to write my latest book, Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results (McGraw-Hill, December 2012), my goal was to start a dialogue about the lack of women at the top levels of leadership. According to a recent New York Times article, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and former top State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter have the same goal. The need for this dialogue is clear: after decades of talking about gender diversity, women are still grossly under-represented in the senior leadership ranks. Even though women make 80% of purchasing decisions, comprise 51% of the workforce and hold close to 50% of all managerial positions in the Fortune 500, they represent as little as 15% of the executive suite and corporate boards.

In her forthcoming book Lean In (Knopf, March 2013), Sheryl Sandberg argues that the primary reason women are not advancing to the senior ranks is because they often inadvertently sabotage themselves. On the other side of the debate is Anne-Marie Slaughter, who places the blame for the lack of women in senior leadership with the organizations who employ them and with policymakers who fail to enact legislation to support them.

Could You Function With Only Half a Brain? What Organizations and Leaders Need to Do

Companies that ignore the broad spectrum of leadership thinking are destined to fail. The new leadership model for the 21st century is called Integrated Leadership, and it’s based on the full spectrum of human intelligence – balanced teams of men and women working together synergistically to create an overwhelming, undeniable competitive advantage. In my newest book, MAKE ROOM FOR HER: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results (McGraw-Hill), I share how organizations can harness the collective strengths of both men and women to soar to new heights.