Organic seeding of career advancement to enable gender balance in leadership roles
Our blog last week looked at the positive movements reported by leading research consultancies on numbers at the board level.
The continuing imbalance in leadership roles is becoming a black box in seeding organic gender-balanced pipelines for the current & the future.
Surprisingly even in organisations which have robust DEI strategies, their efforts have not resulted in a higher representation of women in Leadership roles.
This is our experience in the last year:
We hear DEI/ L&D professionals we partner with share that senior experienced talented women professionals are frustrated/demotivated because of stagnation, with many contemplating moving on.
While engaging in personal coaching with ambitious senior women leaders, they cite ambiguity around career growth as the biggest pain point and a roadblock. Their seniors are reluctant to have meaningful, clear conversations about their future prospects, despite a successful career trajectory.
Tatvã has been approached to partner companies in institutionalise practices like onboarding cross-industry successful experienced women as Role Models to inspire & motivate senior women leaders. The reality is that the leaders in question are “high potential- self-inspired “, so will this address the real issues of stagnation & career growth?
From our experience of working with many organisations & studying leading research documents, we suggest the following actions:
- Move beyond tracking numbers at the recruitment & board levels & focus on retention & career advancement of women.
- The career lifecycle of women employees is different from that of men, recognise this & raise awareness of this with male colleagues.
- Having women’s only sessions are partially effective, opt for an inclusive approach by making all parties partners.
- Move away from awareness sessions on EQUITY- EQUALITY- Unconscious Bias and deep dive into these issues through long-term interventions
- Acknowledge & take proactive steps to address both the FUNCTIONAL (balance, flexibility, compensation) & EMOTIONAL (respected, feeling valued& supported) needs of women leaders. Organisations have worked on addressing the functional needs, without realising that women place a huge premium on emotional needs, which find no place or premium in discussions. Women go through the “parental leave’ phase & returning mothers need to be handled with sensitivity
- Design & roll out leadership development aligned to the career trajectory & life phases of women in organisations.
At Tatvã we have identified these phases as follows:
In addition, we have the life phase of childbirth & parental leave.
- Provide mentoring support with no gender bias
- Role models from across sectors add value only if the conversations are inclusive & male colleagues are also made aware of what the ground reality is
- Shift focus from women professional to male colleagues, include them in the traditional WOMEN ONLY sessions, discuss women’s challenges on strategy tables, and design more specific and actionable training to enable managers to better support women professional
- Relook at the structural barriers that slow down women’s progression
- Seed an organic process of career movement based on MERITOCRACY beyond hardened gender agnostic mindsets.
And finally, this International Women’s Day, forget tokenism and announce growth & career initiatives like personalized development journeys, and leadership opportunities across all levels for women professionals.
BY TATVA
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