subject: 3 Best Practice Methods for Leveraging the Talents of Women Business Leaders [print this page] 3 Best Practice Methods for Leveraging the Talents of Women Business Leaders
Women leaders may invariably be seen by an increasing number of employers as an untapped source of talent, experience and senior-management leadership.
The following data puts the reality and the challenge into perspective:
* Women held only 17 percent of seats on the boards of Fortune 100 companies and just 11 percent of FTSE 100 directorships, according to The Alliance for Board Diversity and The Equality and Human Rights Commission, respectively.
* One of the Alliance's member institutions, Catalyst, has reportedly found no increase in women on Fortune 500 boards in three years, yet is has also documented a strikingly positive correlation between the number of women on the boards of companies and the number of women who ultimately become corporate officers of the same company.
* Companies with a higher proportion of women in top management may perform better, according to a McKinsey study.
* Although women earn less than their male counterparts, they make more than 80% of the purchasing decisions in American homes, BusinessWeek reports.
* A new law that took effect earlier this year mandates that 40% of board seats for 487 public companies must be held by women, according to Bloomberg.
* Only 43% of women professionals feel well-equipped to compete in the business economy of the future, according to a report issued by Accenture.
* In 2007, women comprised just 6% of the best-compensated executives, according to research by The Forum of Executive Women (Philadelphia).
Managing talent and growing the next generation of business leaders are becoming recognised as the keys to achieving human capital advantage over the competition in a global knowledge economy. Yet, today's inflexible and exclusionary approaches to management succession will cease to yield the supply of leaders to drive innovation and higher performance unless employers create more meaningful leadership and development opportunities for the single largest segment of university graduates around the world women.
Best Practice #1: Measure the career development of high performing women
In order to gauge the availability of talent for key management roles in the future, employers must measure the advancement and career development of high performing women and recognise the unique obstacles women face as they build careers and families and potentially search for opportunities and options to re-engage at the management level.
Best Practice #2: Create networking opportunities and specific career pathing for women leaders
Companies want options for management succession. To keep as many high performing women business leaders engaged with their organization and "on radar" for future promotion, employers must create networking opportunities and specific career pathing for women leaders. These should provide them their own options for engaging flexible work assignments that don't force them into a decidedly unfavorable choice (for the employer and the individual alike) between work and family, which has had the effective of significantly reducing the pool of talented candidates to satisfy succession plan requirements.
Best Practice #3: Learn from the example set by today's women business leaders
Learn from the example set by today's women business leaders. Understand the career track they followed to gain the requisite skills and experience to do the job. Ask today's women business executives about the obstacles they faced and apply these lessons (with their help) as they relate to recruitment, retention, development and promotion of a new generation of women leaders.
Looking ahead, it's hard to imagine that the companies on the leading edge of the knowledge economy will get there or stay there without leveraging the experience and talents of women business leaders as their consumer segments continue to globalize and diversify. It is increasingly obvious that qualified women are becoming available and are making a difference in the bottom line, and corporations that have a drive to succeed are responding accordingly.
The executive search consultants of TRANSEARCH International share a consensus view that women executives will play an increasingly critical role in building and shaping marketleading institutions in the years to come. The challenge for these organizations, therefore, is to understand the challenges unique to women leaders and how to address them in a way that expands the talent pool for a wide range of critical business functions.
