Tag Archives: women leaders

Authenticity: How Women Leaders Can Be True To Themselves

First published in The Glass Hammer 22 March 20100 It seems obvious to many of us that a diverse group of men and women leaders are more likely to be creative and make better decisions than a homogenous group of men. If we manage to achieve gender-balanced leadership in our organizations we will, however, only reap the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The “Men Who Get It” Project

First published in The Glass Hammer 11 January 2011 Since publishing Unwritten Rules, I’ve worked with others to try to get more women in positions of senior leadership. Basically all change efforts boil down to the same thing – can we get people to behave differently. In this case, can we get shareholders to appoint more women to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Women Are Not A Diversity Issue

Since I researched and published Unwritten Rules, I have become intrigued that the issue of women and leadership most often falls in the category of “diversity and inclusion.” Why is that women are considered a “diversity” when they constitute 60% of university graduates in Europe and North America? How do women come to be considered a “minority” [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , | 18 Comments

20 Reasons Why We Still Need The “F” Word

In our privileged world “Feminism” has become a dirty word. For most western young women, to be called a Feminist is an insult. My son and his girlfriends associate Feminism with anti-men and women who wear unattractive clothes. To them the “F” word is, at best, dated and no longer relevant. If we could perhaps change the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , | 12 Comments

Men Who Get It

Since Unwritten Rules was published earlier this year I have been speaking at conferences, corporations and on panels. All of these events have had one thing in common – the audience has been almost exclusively women. Given the book provides pragmatic professional development for women leaders, this isn’t surprising. But to achieve gender balanced leadership in [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , | 2 Comments

Rethink Networking

Why you should view networking as an essential leadership competency Many of my coaching clients either say they don’t like networking, or they simply don’t have the time for it. They say things like: “People who network contact me only when they want something.” “Networking events are awful. They are full of people thrusting business cards into [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , | 6 Comments

50-50. Do we need quotas to guarantee balanced leadership?

Are legislated quotas the only way, within our lifetime, to see a balance of women and men leading governments and organizations? There are two sides to this hotly debated issue. First, the naysayers point out that quotas are a form of reverse discrimination – the group now discriminated against (men) are previously the ones that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , | Leave a comment

Worlds Biggest Employers Still Losing Out On Female Talent.

The World Economic Forum has just published its 2010 Corporate Gender Gap Report. It surveys 600 leading companies across 16 industries in 20 countries and explores women’s participation in business and companies’ adherence to gender equality policies. The survey also asked respondents to identify the biggest barriers to women’s leadership and their opinion on the probable [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , | Leave a comment

If Women Ruled The World

There have been several recent articles extolling the virtues of women and fantasizing about how great the world would be if only we replaced male leaders with women. In a scathing piece entitled A Nope for Pope, acid-tongued New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd suggests replacing the Pope with a nun, thus producing a “Nope.” [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , | 7 Comments

The Myth of the Level Playing Field

Why we still don’t have a woman in the White House or Chairing the Board During a recent speaking engagement at a well-known business school I was proudly informed by a university executive that he had recruited mainly women to his team. He clearly expected a pat on the back. I asked him how many women [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , | 1 Comment