Strategies for Effective Women's Leadership Development in Your Organization

This article first appeared on Acorn Labs in July 2023.

For a more in-depth look at women's leadership development, have a read of the full article.

Women’s leadership development refers to initiatives and development programs that are designed to support women’s leadership skills and opportunities for succession planning. It promotes gender equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace, particularly in leadership, in order to improve decision-making in the business.

The importance of women’s leadership

Women hold less than half of all leadership roles despite being 50% of the working population, and the disparity is even larger for women of color. In 2009, Goldman Sachs & JBWere found that Australian economic activity had increased by 22% since 1974 due to increased female participation in the workforce. And a McKinsey Global Institute Report found that improving women’s equality can increase global growth by almost $12 trillion.

In terms of business, potential candidates—including 61% of job-hunting women, investigate the diversity of potential employers’ leadership teams before accepting an offer. So, the first step to having more diverse talent in your workforce is to offer inclusive leadership programs targeting women.

This leads to:

What are the barriers to women’s leadership?

The “broken rung” hinders women from even reaching the glass ceiling of leadership. This broken rung is the first step to leadership, and it prevents women from advancing to early management positions. This is driven by:

• Gender bias favouring men over equally-qualified women for leadership positions.
• Racial bias disproportionately affecting women of color from advancing.
• Work-life balance challenges due to women being more likely to be caregivers.
• Limited development opportunities, due to biases or a lack of targeted initiatives.
• Unsupportive company cultures discouraging women from pursuing leadership roles.
• A lack of assertiveness in women to promote themselves as potential leaders.
• Lack of representation in leadership to champion women’s leadership development.

How to design a women’s leadership development program

There are additional considerations you need to make when designing a women’s leadership development program that you just don’t have to worry about in general leadership development plans. Leadership development programs specific to omen come in five steps.

Define objectives

This is common to all leadership development plans, but make sure that you keep women in mind when you define objectives here so you can ensure your objectives are relevant and achievable.

Start by identifying the key leadership capabilities for your organization. This means understanding the broader business context that the capability exists in, defining the purpose of it, and defining the outcome you want from it. Once you know this, you can start building goals and objectives for leadership development around them.

Conduct training needs assessments

Use a capability assessment to evaluate the gaps between current and required capabilities, as well as the level of competency individuals have in each capability. Competency is measured in three categories:

1. Needs development
2. Meets expectations
3. Exceeds expectations.

Ideally, you want your leaders to exceed expectations in their leadership capabilities, so even if your emerging leaders meet expectations, you’ll want to continue their development anyway. After all, the needs of individual teams will change over time, and so too will the requirements of the capabilities they involve.

Embed leadership development with DE&I

This is where the leadership development focus concerns itself more with the challenges women face when obtaining leadership roles. Perhaps surprisingly, this doesn’t mean only focusing on developing women’s leadership capabilities. It also means looking at external factors like company culture and bias that may be exacerbating challenges.

Introducing DE&I initiatives like allyship, anti-racism, and bias training allows all employees, current leaders included, to be involved in the conversation, opening doors to women seeking leadership. These initiatives need to be regularly performed to ensure continuous improvement.

Develop leadership skills and behaviors

Leadership capabilities are broken into business capabilities and human capabilities. The former is more about the skills and expertise leaders need for business success, while the latter is more about the mindset of a good leader. You can find the best way to develop these particular leadership capabilities with a training needs analysis. Think along the lines of a knowledge management system like a performance learning management system (PLMS), formal courses, or on-the-job training.

Evaluation and measurement

Monitor, evaluate and measure the effectiveness of your women’s leadership development plan. Leadership development should be an ongoing investment, after all. You can measure the efficacy of your women’s leadership development plan by: