Significantly Improve the Gender Diversity of the Leadership Population
What?
The company had assessed that it was critical to the business to significantly increase the ratio of female leaders from middle managers and upwards. They analyzed the reasons why women did not pursue or were not selected for managerial roles.
Some of the Most Striking Reasons Were:
Managers selecting other managers did not have any tools helping them to be objective in their selection processes. The result was that the dominating male population often assessed leadership qualities seen from a male perspective, rather than an objective perspective.
It was unclear for applicants for managerial roles what was really required to be a manager at the company. The result was that many potential female applicants had wrongful expectations for what it required and therefore refrained from pursuing a managerial role.
The general people review process in which performance and potential were assessed on an ongoing basis was flawed as the assessments were generally far from fact-based.
Multiple other reasons were identified, but the above reasons were those tapping into our solutions.
How We Can Make a Difference
The key to success in this situation was to apply a leadership framework that focused on the job that needed to be done, rather than the leader as a person. Also, you need to develop a transition language that can help you better assess leadership potential.
This is where the Leadership Pipeline concept plays a key role as it offers an objective fact-based way of assessing leadership performance and leadership potential.
Our Role in This Project Ended up Being:
Define performance standards for the different leadership roles and describe them
Include diversity perspectives in the leadership programs
Design and implement a strategic approach to the succession planning
Improve the existing people review process to become fact-based both on performance and potential.