Women make up almost half the talent in any organization right from the front line to the C-suite levels. Though there is no formula to become an effective leader, it is slightly more complicated for women in leadership roles. Conscious and unconscious bias, intersecting identities, and system inequalities often result in a greater burden for women.
Although huge strides have been made in this direction, the pandemic has undone a significant amount of the progress achieved over the last few decades. A higher number of women are quitting the workforce and their participation is at the lowest level in over 30 years.
This makes it critical for organizations to make efforts for retaining and supporting women leaders. Women leadership programs benefit organizations to retain and advance women in leadership roles. But this is only one part of the overall puzzle and companies must focus on equity and create an inclusive culture for all genders to bring true benefits to women.
Benefits of women leadership programs to Organizations
In its most simplistic form. more women in leadership roles improve organizations. In addition to improving financial performance, women leaders increase job satisfaction and commitment amongst the personnel. Other benefits include:
- Companies with female board members show significantly better financial performance when compared to those with lower female board representation
- Women leaders encourage higher productivity, growth, and development as females are better at building and maintaining interpersonal skills
- Females are good at motivating and inspiring others and are able to unify diversified groups of people, which helps everyone working towards achieving organizational goals and objectives
- Women leaders are better at collaborating with colleagues, employees, and clients across different teams, departments, and functions
- Studies show that women are more optimistic, which allows them to bring in favorable results and increases confidence levels, which helps them to be more successful
Designing a creative women leadership development program
As important as women’s leadership training is, overcoming gender inequality and change within the entire organization is important. An effective training program adopts a human-centric, research-backed solution to enable participants to acquire new skills and hone their capabilities. Companies that have a robust pipeline of talent outperform competitors and thrive in the industry. A creative program is designed to build a strong talent pipeline within the organizations and encourage women to rise and become more successful in their roles.
Curriculum
The curriculum is customized based on the organizational requirements and helps the participants to develop crucial skills to advance in their careers while working towards finding the most effective ways to overcome challenges faced by women leaders. It is designed in a way that promotes the advancement of talented and motivated women into more leadership roles. It focuses on actionable takeaways, which enable leaders to empower their team members, rise in their careers, and grow within their organizations.
Some topics that are often included in an effective women’s leadership program include:
- Creation and promotion of leadership identity, brand, and style
Understanding the difference between leadership and management, creating a personal positioning statement, building a personal value proposition, creating leadership brand image, and image consistency. - Development of career roadmap
An insight into why smart leaders fail, what is impostor syndrome and how to avoid it, self-assessment, and self-promotion - Improvement of communication, negotiation, and presentation skills
Preparing for negotiations, how to deal with irrational people, learning to create value and enlarge the pie, transforming competition into cooperation, increasing bargaining power, and managing bias and cultural differences - Navigating through company politics
Developing impactful relationships by understanding the difference between intention and impact, becoming a trusted advisor, using friction productively, and networking techniques - Enhancement of visibility and self-promotion across the company
Increasing contribution within the organization, how gender impacts communication and how to overcome this hurdle, presentation techniques and tools, and analyzing strengths and style
Other topics
- Creating and identifying opportunities for high-performing personnel
- Developing credibility and inspiring others
- Mentoring and sponsorship
- Identification and management of broader strategic priorities
- Understanding what creates difficult conversations and how to manage these
- Using emotional intelligence to become self-aware and resolve problems
If your organization is looking to bring gender equality into the work culture, Pragati Leadership can provide the best solution. PLI can develop a tailored, top-to-bottom solution for supporting talented women within your company. For more details, contact us today!
