I am on-site for the 10th edition of Advancing Women in Leadership Conference, in partnership with Dynamic Global Events and I just wrapped up earlier today a talk around leadership resiliency. But that’s not what I actually want to bring to you, I want to talk about something that came up during yesterday’s session.
There was a conversation during a panel about job searching, right? And how a lot of times, especially women, as they’re looking for new opportunities they jump onto the potential company that they might submit their application, their resume, or be interviewing with. They look at that company’s website, and they’re looking to see if there is diversity on the board and the senior leadership team.
And there was one woman that’s attending and she said, “Look, we actually now have gone through a complete change. We now have transitioned to being primarily a female leadership, female board, senior leader team. However, the organization still has the same challenges it did before.” Isn’t that interesting? We know that changing the board in terms of just different gender or different ethnicity, that’s not necessarily what’s going to create the change in the organization.
Just because we’ve got a change in leadership doesn’t mean that they’re a good leader.
We see too often that amazing individual contributors have risen the ranks into leadership, but they don’t know how to lead people, they don’t know how to lead teams and organizations. Leaders need to learn how to lead people. Now, there are certainly some people who have a natural leadership tendency, absolutely, but for the majority, they need to go through proper training. So, what does that look like?
Because most leaders, they may know how to meet their individual goals, but they need the foundational leadership expertise, especially in two main areas: when it comes to emotional intelligence and communication. So take a look around, does this ring true in your organization, on your teams, maybe across departments, across groups?
Are you seeing that even though there may be more diverse leadership, that it hasn’t actually solved the problem? The challenge is around making sure that not only are we looking for diversity – we want to see diversity – but we’re looking for diversity and then training those leaders to be successful for themselves and for their teams and organizations.