Cookie cutters are a useful tool for fastidious bakers. But effective leadership development programs don’t fit a mold. Career development must be shaped for specific populations and workforce goals. Leadership development with the objective of promoting women, ideally, should be for and by women. To engage and empower women in the workforce, employee development tools should be shaped to women’s nuanced experiences.
Leadership training lifts employees out of the status quo and encourages new ways of being and seeing. Savvy companies understand the limits of their internal training programs to achieve these ends. When companies take on women’s leadership training within their own ecosystems, there’s an unintended doubling down on and reinforcement of hidden biases, blind spots and assumptions. Bringing together women from different companies, regions and industries to share skills, stories and ambitions in external programs can be uniquely eye-opening.
Many women’s leadership development programs touch on conventional topics like communication, networking and negotiation skills and professional presence, but few grapple with the deep-seated beliefs that motivate employees and the complexities of women’s workplace experiences. To evaluate training options, learning leaders should consider four crucial factors in women’s career growth:
- The several selves of intersectionality
Responsible leadership training programs operate with intersectionality in mind. They acknowledge that the overlapping layers of a woman’s identity — her race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender expression and class — affect how she moves through the world, how she is perceived and the level of discrimination she may face. An intersectional lens isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.
Just as men’s experiences at work diverge from women’s, women aren’t homogeneous, either. Most leadership programs focus primarily on white, cisgender, able-bodied, middle- or upper-middle-class women. In turn, they neglect the wholly different experiences of diverse women, including women of color, those in the LGBTQ+ community, women with disabilities and those from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. These differences influence the sway of their personal and family connections as women negotiate workplace issues.
Leadership courses that ignore intersectionality do a disservice to women because they promote messaging that suggests all women face the same obstacles and benefit from the same strategies. This canned messaging can turn off women who don’t see their experiences reflected back, leading to disengagement and distrust in employee development.
- Facing down systemic barriers
Addressing systemic barriers to women’s advancement — such as biases in hiring, promotions, talent calibration and pay — empowers women to help dismantle those roadblocks. Typically, leadership development programs avoid discussing systemic barriers to women’s career growth like the plague — it’s the third rail of professional discussions. But ignoring structural inequities does not erase their existence.
McKinsey research reaffirms what women see with their own eyes: Just one in four C-suite executives is a woman, and only one in 20 is a woman of color. And there’s a broken rung on that first step of the leadership ladder — for every 100 men promoted from entry-level positions to managerial roles, only 87 women are promoted. For women of color, that number drops to 82.
Black women and Latinas are less likely to feel that their managers support their career development, compared with women of other races and ethnicities. Meanwhile, women with disabilities are more likely to have their judgment questioned and expertise undermined.
When leadership courses avoid conversations about structural inequities at work, they miss an opportunity to treat women as potential agents of change, potential architects of the future they want to inhabit.
- Employer and employee accountability
Leadership development programs must hold employers and leaders accountable for the equitable changes we want to see in the workplace. Programs must also hold women themselves accountable to their professional development goals.
The HR managers who design and administer leadership programs are often privy to both employees’ professional ambitions and employers’ shortcomings. When programs use that information to check in with and, when needed, nudge employees and employers, they prove their worth and offer value long after a training session runs its course.
Without accountability on the back end, leadership training is a flaccid endeavor. The onus is on development programs to gather longitudinal data about outcomes — such as trainees’ professional trajectories and any changes they’ve inspired in their workplaces — to understand how effective programs are and what needs to be amended.
- An expansive vision of success
Career success assumes many shapes: One woman’s ultimate goal may be to ascend to CEO. Another might aspire to have a role that fuses her personal interests and professional responsibilities. Both aims are honorable; both are valid.
While societal messaging often tells us otherwise, there is no single definition of success. Not every woman (or man, for that matter) aspires to rise through the ranks and advance to the C-suite or earn a certain salary to feel accomplished. That narrow characterization of success discourages women from fashioning their own careers in imaginative and authentic ways.
Women’s leadership development boosts all workers, not just women. That’s not just a rosy outlook — it’s rooted in facts. Women leaders supercharge employee engagement. Women managers enhance employee’s well-being, dedicate more time to diversity, equity and inclusion and provide support for those dealing with burnout, which translates to happier employees who are less likely to leave. So it follows that investing in women’s development and elevating more women to leadership positions is a recipe for baked-in success.
