Take the Lead provide a canvas for women to map out their leadership development priorities.
Why are we still advocating for gender leadership? Surely enough has been done for women? How often do you hear this comment? Probably far more often than you care to count – but gender leadership still needs much attention and commitment. In 2023, the World Economic Forum declared that it would take 131 to achieve gender parity worldwide; in other words, five generations between women have access to the same political, economic, social, health, and educational rights as men. With multinational businesses responsible for deploying substantial amounts of resources on a global scale, it has never been more critical to have women as part of the leadership teams and the right resources to do it. In line with International Women's Day 2024, our new book, Take the Lead: How Women Leaders are Driving Success Through Innovation, was launched along with my co-authors, Anne-Valerie Corboz, Professor of Strategy and Leadership at HEC Paris, and Delphine Mourot-Haxaire, Coach and Director of the UK Office for HEC Paris.
The complexity of business decisions requires diversity.
Business leaders today are working with even greater complexity and have to generate new solutions, requiring new thinking and perspectives. Innovative thinking is a skill that is even more critical for leaders today. Anne-Valerie Corboz emphasizes the importance; "Innovation is the only competitive advantage left to most organizations, as they have streamlined and perfected all other aspects. Innovation and its corollary, creativity, cannot be engineered. They are the product of a culture that allows trial and error, experimentation, and exploration rather than exploitation. In a truly globalized world in which technology is evolving in leaps and bounds, innovation is the only way to respond to emerging needs and trends, and even crafting solutions before the need emerges."
However, practical innovation occurs with diversity and creating trust for colleagues to share radical new ideas and suggestions. Building diverse teams, mainly focusing on gender diversity, has been necessary. Still, diversity's real value emerges with leaders skilled in creating cultures where individuals can share their thinking. When diverse groups come together, and there needs to be more comfort for difference, groupthink is a likely factor, where individuals coalesce around the most powerful person in the team and will not challenge the overarching thinking with their ideas. Leaders often unwittingly encourage groupthink by being the first to suggest their ideas and make assumptions about colleagues, and often, because time pressures are immense, they need to provide more time for everyone to be heard.
The skills required for leaders to nurture innovation through diversity focus more on building relationships and cultures of belonging. As the profile of leadership becomes more diverse, the leadership models also evolve. While we can't argue that there are distinct models of leadership based on gender, we acknowledge that there are skills and characteristics that are more aligned with different genders. Women leaders adopt a more participative approach to leadership. This leadership style creates the foundation to strengthen group dynamics and encourage innovative thinking to become integrated as part of the team culture rather than the preservation of the 'creative types' or senior leaders. In our book, we argue creativity and innovation are at the heart of leadership capabilities for women. Drawing on the experiences of women leaders from across the world who are remarkable in demonstrating innovation in their work and careers.
More is needed to strengthen women's leadership skills; women need to understand how to leverage the diversity they bring with their teams to encourage innovation in business decisions and problem-solving. The skills demonstrated by women promote innovation, build on collaboration, and extend into encouraging a growth mindset, nurturing trust to stimulate curiosity and exploring new ideas. This approach starkly contrasts the strong-man leadership model, dominating global politics where autocracy is the dictating force and there is no space for dissent.
Take the Lead with the voices of women leaders from across the world.
There is no silver bullet for women's leadership.
Despite increasing recognition of the value of gender diversity for leadership, as the World Economic Forum data shows, progress is patchy: three steps forward, one step back, and one step sideways at the best of times. When one considers the gender agenda for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, it is evident there is a lot of well intentioned work in this space, but recruiting, retaining, and promoting women into leadership roles is not simply a matter of setting targets and implementing mentoring programs. We identified seven areas that are important for women's leadership careers.
Mapping these areas onto our leadership canvas, organizations and leaders must create different ways to remove institutional barriers that impede career progression for women. At the same time, however, women cannot simply wait for these barriers to be dismantled; instead, they simultaneously navigate them through their leadership development and tenacity. Delphine Mourot-Haxaire, shares the importance of the canvas; "The rationale behind designing this canvas is to provide a structured framework, enabling women to pause, reflect, and plan their leadership journey. In line with our emphasis on creativity, the canvas took the shape of a boat. It allowed us to play with navigation metaphors. The canvas, designed to facilitate women's navigation through leadership challenges and their career. While all components might not necessarily be relevant simultaneously, it is crucial to keep an eye across all aspects of leadership."
With the leadership canvas, we navigate seven key areas: Creativity, Compass, Connections, Champions, Curating your team, Courage, and Career. Each area is a resource for women to develop their leadership capabilities. These areas further highlight where leaders and HR leads need to pay more attention to strengthening the leadership potential for women, recognizing the complexity of building and maintaining a diverse leadership pipeline.
Purposeful leadership, a source of strength, is often associated with women. Still, it can lead to burnout when there is incongruence. Connections allow women to develop deeper than the usual approach to building networks. Many organizations rely on mentoring support for women, which is helpful for personal development but only leads to career progression. Championing is a proactive approach by leaders to work as allies and advocate for women to access stretch roles. Only some have the opportunity to curate or build their team. Still, leaders create the cultures to attract talent, and we challenge some of the long-standing characteristics associated with female leaders, particularly around control and the need for perfection. Courageous leadership means different things to different people; it can mean becoming more confident in saying no, but it can also mean handling power and hubris when your work and personal lives are threatened and making powerful decisions. The most important theme for women is the understanding they need to drive their careers forward rather than letting their careers 'happen.' Taking a proactive approach in these areas strengthens creativity.
Gender diversity in leadership is crucial for business performance and ensuring decisions are made with the broadest perspective of stakeholders. New ideas can only come when new approaches and perspectives are part of a gender-diverse leadership mindset.
