Tacy Byham’s post “#LeadLikeAGirl: Ignite Your Impact as a Leader!†should be required reading on this International Women’s Day. There’s a lot there to think about and lots of data for you to chew over. Here’s an example.
“As we objectively take a close look at women and leadership, it is not really a woman’s issue, it’s a business issue. There’s a lot of undisputed data that shows having diversity in your organizations and female leaders pays off. DDI and the Conference Board collaborated on the Global Leadership Forecast 2014|2015 (GLF), a survey of over 2,000 global organizations in all industries. We compared the top 20 percent high-performing organizations to the bottom 20 percent, and high-performing organizations have twice as many women leaders (37 percent vs. 19 percent)”
Leadership development as part of the solution
If we’re going to increase the number of women in leadership roles, leadership development must be part of the solution. I was inspired to think about what that means by this bit from Dr. Byham’s post.
“I was inspired to think about women, work, and leadership and to consider what it means to Lead #LikeAGirl – hence this blog posting, #LeadLikeAGirl.”
If we’re going to be part of the solution, we need to do what we can with what we can control.
Leadership development as example setting
We can set the example in several ways. We can use more woman leaders to deliver training and more positive examples of women leading in our case examples.
Leadership development as equipping woman leaders
We can make sure that our training and coaching address the particular concerns of woman leaders. We can ask to learn what those are. We can identify resources inside and outside our organizations that can help.
Leadership development, woman leaders, and the long game
Neither our organizations nor our leadership development programs will change overnight. That’s reality and it’s a great reason to get started now.
