What’s Wrong with Leadership Training for Women?

Susan Colantuono’s TED talk - The Career Advice You Probably Didn’t Get - went online somewhere around 2012, so over 10 years ago. Sadly, not a lot has changed in career advice directed at women since then.

Colantuono’s major insight was that there’s a missing chunk of advice in what we tell women about how to be successful in their careers.

It turns out that much of the advice we give women falls into two categories:

• Advice about Engaging the Greatness in Others: This encompasses things like engaging team members, building collaboration, developing successful relationships with clients and stakeholders, etc. Indeed, managers rank women as outperforming male-peers in this area of leadership (Zenger & Folkman 2019).
• Advice based on gendered stereotypes: This includes things like building confidence, executive presence, and “dress for success”. One good way to identify gendered advice is to ask yourself - would we give this same advice to a senior level male employee?

Let’s look at Colantuono’s 3-part, holistic definition of leadership (for business). Then, audit what we see in leadership programs directed at women.

“Leadership is using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others.“

This definition matters because women are rarely given clear advice and guidance on achieving and sustaining extraordinary outcomes - which refers to using your business, strategic, and financial acumen to move your organization towards its strategic and long-term goals. These skills are also weighted most heavily when it comes to earning positions at higher leadership levels.

Combine all this and you get inequity in how candidates have been prepped and groomed to earn leadership roles.

This is important to see clearly. Below is an audit of training programs aimed at women with the major modules (shown in bullet points) categorised by the 3-part leadership definition.

All of these programs, as audited today, carry no information about the areas of leadership - developing and demonstrating business, strategic, and financial acumen - that are most important when it comes to earning leadership positions at the highest levels of organisations.

Not all programs are this depressingly narrow. Through Northwestern University’s Kellogg’s Executive programs I found the Women's Senior Leadership Program ($24k pp). While it has an over-emphasis on communications, negotiation, and engaging both staff and stakeholders, it does include, “Learn to deal with external constituents, including stakeholders, Wall Street, and the investment community.” Perhaps the latter includes some concrete aspects of financial acumen, but it’s unclear. Similarly, their Women's Director Development Program ($12k pp) includes traditional leadership advice such as communicating your value proposition and cultivating visibility; it also includes analyzing opportunities and detecting financial red flags.

Kellogg’s small nudge into including business outcomes based training is not enough.

How many companies do you know who are regularly sponsoring mid-level female managers to attend $12k or $24k programs?

This is not about putting women on the path to become CEO, but more power to you if that *is your goal.

This is about levelling the playing field so that women stand a chance to earn positions at the top - so that women, whatever their ambition to advance looks like - can do so effectively.

At Lead to Soar, we aim to close the gender leadership gap.

• We offer free resources for both through the Lead to Soar podcast.
• We keep the Lead to Soar network membership fee well below market value.
• And we offer competitive services and training that organisations/leaders can provide to cohorts of women team members - the Lead to Soar Summit, virtual courses, and custom training.

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