Women In Leadership: Why It Works So Well

Women In Leadership_ Why It Works So Well

Gender should never determine someone’s leadership abilities. Instead, companies should look at an individual’s personality traits, leadership abilities, and gravitas. This way, they can appoint leaders who can lead by example and inspire their team. 

Unfortunately, women usually aren’t encouraged to assume leadership positions in organizations. While the gap between men and women in leadership roles is decreasing, there’s still a massive disparity between them. In fact, according to a 2019  study conducted by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, women only hold 21% of C-suite positions!

Women are excellent leaders who have the relevant soft skills to help them excel in their positions – sometimes even surpassing their male counterparts. Additionally, women are often more communicative, empathetic, and great listeners  – all these qualities make them exceptional leaders.

Here are a few other reasons why more women should be in leadership positions:

Women Regulate Work-Life Balances Efficiently

Women are effective leaders because they can balance professional and interpersonal skills. This also makes them effective mentors since they can easily form open and communicative relationships with the people they work with. For example, it’s usually less intimidating to approach a woman leader if you have a sensitive question or personal request.

Women leaders are also usually more empathetic and care about their employees’ home and work lives, helping employees have a healthier work-life balance.

Women Are Strong Communicators

Women leaders are effective communicators. Most women leaders can explain clear expectations to their team for a certain project or event. This way, teams can complete the project without any confusion. 

Additionally, women leaders often find a way to strike a balance between requirements and creativity. As a result, they can give instructions to teams and not in a way that hinders their creativity and opinions. This is crucial for creating an inclusive work environment where employees feel valued and engaged. 

Women leaders often use their effective communication skills to build relationships with team members, employees, superiors, and clients. 

Women Have High Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to recognize and understand your emotions and that of others. When you have high emotional intelligence, you’re able to understand, use, and manage your own feelings and effectively communicate and empathize with others. Lakshmi Raj, Co-founder, and Co-CEO of Replicon believes that emotional intelligence comes more naturally to women than men. 

In order to create a productive and inclusive work environment, leaders need to demonstrate emotional intelligence. This way, they can diffuse conflicts and manage stressful situations with ease.

Women Are Team-Orientated

According to Katharine M. Nohr, Principal, Nohr Sports Risk Management, the women she’s worked with typically show more passion, enthusiasm, and willingness to serve their teammates and be served by others. She also mentioned that the work environment feels more collaborative, democratic, and family-like – and with a solid leadership presence. 

While women make fantastic and inspiring leaders, they’re often not given equal opportunities as their male counterparts. As a result, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions and in the political field. According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 40% of the participants believe higher standards for women and lack of readiness by companies to hire women for leadership roles are major reasons why there are so few women in leadership positions. 

At  Corporate Class we strive to  support women leaders and for that  reason we offer a two-day customizable executive presence workshop for women.  This way, women can expand on their leadership skills and take the political and business world by storm!

Women in Fortune 500 companies have participated in this inclusive and interactive program. Women who attend this workshop will learn how to project confidence, surpass barriers, and voice their opinions. This way, they can accelerate their career, lead by example, and inspire their teams!

Who should attend this workshop?

This workshop can be customized for all levels:

  • High-potential and emerging leaders
  • Senior management
  • Established leaders

Note: This program offers a safe and open space for women, transgender, and non-binary people. We work together to create an inclusive experience.

If you want your company to have more women in leadership, contact us today!

The Top 3 Tips for Emerging Female Leaders

The Top 3 Tips for Emerging Female Leaders

Emerging female leaders face challenges that male leaders don’t face. Discover the top three tips for emerging female leaders here.

1. Practice Resilience

Life has a habit of throwing us curveballs. Despite the best laid plans, everyone goes through ups and downs – from everyday struggles to catastrophic incidents that reverberate longer-term. Every shift has a different impact on people, bringing with it a unique set of perceptions, powerful emotions, and uncertainties. While these difficulties are undoubtedly painful and challenging, they do not have to define you.

As defined by psychologists, resilience is the capacity to handle difficulties mentally or emotionally and quickly return to pre-crisis status. By readily overcoming the stress of tragedy and trauma, adversity, threats, or failure, resilient women not only recover, but often emerge stronger on the other side.

While there is a genetic predisposition to resilience, psychologists have noticed various characteristics common to resilient people, including:

  • Optimism and a positive outlook
  • An internal locus of control – belief that you are the author of your destiny.
  • The ability to regulate emotions
  • The capacity to view failure as valuable feedback.

Follow these best practices to develop your resilience:

  1. Beat the negative impact of stress with good nutrition, sufficient sleep, regular exercise, and mindfulness or other spiritual practices. Building your body’s reserves helps you avoid unhealthy outlets such as drugs and alcohol.
  2. Develop and nurture relationships with people who are trustworthy and kind and who acknowledge your feelings.
  3. Practice introspection and emotional intelligence. Be proactive in looking for ways to deal with the issue, learn from your past behavior, and constantly refer to your moral compass and personal values.

2. Have Humility

Not to be confused with being meek, submissive, or lacking self-confidence, humility is “absence of vanity or excessive pride”. As part of a leadership style, humility is an attribute of great leaders.

The positive impact of female leaders redirecting positive attention from themselves to the performance of the team inspires increased employee engagement, greater job satisfaction, and lower staff turnover rates. These successful leaders treat everyone with respect, admit their mistakes, share the credit for successes, and grow by learning from what others have to offer.

If one of your professional goals as part of the next generation of women leaders is to heighten your humility, here is an action plan:

  • Listen. Spend time actively listening to others. Be open-minded and curious rather than protective of your point of view. Not only will others feel heard and valued, but you will also gain a better understanding of organizational needs. Hearing the insights of your team members will help you to make better decisions about performance and new opportunities.
  • Acknowledge. Gratitude lets you channel your drive back into the organization and leads to an optimistic, humble state of being.
  • Ask. Humility includes acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers. Women leaders who are humble ask for help, are open to innovative solutions, and seek feedback regarding their performance. This further serves as inspiration for a culture of personal development in the workplace.
  • Reflect. Review your actions to keep yourself in check. Those in top leadership positions are often mentors and coaches. You may find yourself slipping into those roles in situations when allowing rather than pushing would be more appropriate.
  • Accept. Women’s leadership ambitions focus on constant improvement. As valuable as that is, there is also a need to accept what is without judgement. Move from “seeking approval to seeking enlightenment”. Only once you dispassionately recognize your strengths and weaknesses can you appreciate and dovetail the competence and contributions of peers and employees.

3. Play to Your Strengths (Not Your Weaknesses)

Following on from the last action above, berating yourself for your shortcomings is counterproductive. But that does not mean that you shouldn’t strive to do better.

Globally, business leaders agree that focusing all your energy on fixing your weaknesses is a distracting and frustrating use of your time. Identifying what strengthens you and then cultivating your strengths will empower you. Playing to your strengths helps you to flourish and build a successful career in your leadership role.

If you want to step into your power with confidence, join fellow emerging female leaders for our Women in Leadership Masterclass. Contact Corporate Class Inc. for more information.

8 Trail-Blazing Women Leaders to Inspire Your Career

The current workforce has dealt women setback after setback during the pandemic. A report by McKinsey found that women experienced more exhaustion, burn out, and pressure than men in the workplace, and it’s no wonder that they also found that one in four women are considering leaving the workforce.

Many women who lost their jobs to COVID are now looking to re-enter the workforce as pandemic restrictions loosen. It’s important that women are empowered to return to the workforce and forge their own paths toward success and leadership. If you’re a woman looking for motivation to restart your career or climb the corporate ladder, check out this list of eight women leaders who blazed trails in their respective industries. 

1. Julie Sweet

Taking the number one spot on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet is blazing trails as a prominent business leader. With a bachelor’s degree from Claremont McKenna College and JD from Columbia Law, Sweet is breaking barriers in the C-suite with her unconventional background. Her background as a lawyer gives her an edge in business, helping her put clients first, make sense of vast amounts of information, and act with integrity. 

Sweet is no stranger to breaking gender barriers. After seven years as a senior lawyer, she became the ninth female partner at law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore. She acknowledges that being a woman in corporate America is a difficult road to travel on and has since prioritized diversity and transparency in order to build trust and accountability as a leader. Inspired by Julie Sweet and eager to promote diversity and inclusion as a workplace leader? Check out her quote below to help you get started.

“Treat inclusion and diversity like every other business priority, which means you set goals, you measure, you have data, you have accountable executives, and you have an execution plan.”

— Julie Sweet

2. Helen Hanna Casey

Although women in real estate make up 67% of the industry, leadership across the board has yet to accurately reflect that statistic. One powerful woman in the industry is Helen Hanna Casey, CEO of Howard Hanna Services. Named the most powerful woman in real estate and one of Women’s Business Magazine’s Top 200 Women in Business (among numerous awards), Casey demonstrates that female leadership can take a real estate company to new heights. 

Casey serves as a powerful role model for all women leaders aspiring toward the C-suite and is also a prominent leader at industry events. Check out her quote below for inspiration on how focusing on the success of your employees will bring your company growth. 

“One of your goals has to be that you want your company and employees to expand and grow. […] You have to look at the talents of your people and decide how they can help expand the business.”

— Helen Hanna Casey 

3. Shan-Lyn Ma 

Shan-Lyn Ma is disrupting the wedding industry with her company, Zola, which is on the fast-track to becoming a unicorn (a privately-held startup that’s valued at over $1 billion). Founded in 2013, Ma used her previous experience as a product manager to revitalize the online wedding industry and provide a better experience that customers love. As someone who started her entrepreneurial journey after years of work experience, she’s showing other women that it’s never too late to switch up your career. If you have a great idea that solves a problem, hard work can lead you to success. 

It can be hard being a woman in business, so Ma recommends leaning on a network of other female founders or professionals for advice. If you’re working on building your own network, take some of inspiration from her below on how it’s possible to do it all. 

“I think every founder has to be a motivational leader in order to build a great team and business. I do feel an extra responsibility to show it’s possible to be a woman, be a respected leader, and run a fast-growing startup.”

— Shan-Lyn Ma

4. Cynthia Marshall

Cynthia Marshall is a strong woman leader who is changing the standards for diversity and inclusion in the male-dominated world of the NBA. As the first Black woman to be CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, Marshall has worked hard to develop a company culture where anyone at any level of the business can speak their mind. She accomplished this by having a personal one-on-one meeting with everyone in the Mavericks organization when she started. From there, she’s made sure that everyone has a voice and that all cultures feel welcome in her organization. 

As a woman, we’re often faced with pressure to conform to certain standards of what a leader is, but those standards are so often biased. Remember that being a true leader is leading as yourself and bringing your authentic personality and work to the table everyday. If you are ever told to change who you are, let the following quote remind you that your identity is important. 

“When you fundamentally try to change who I am, when you tell me I can’t say blessed, when you tell me I’m too loud, you’re actually telling me you don’t want me to be a Black woman.”

— Cynthia Marshall

5. Rosalind Brewer

With decades of experience in C-level positions across major companies like Starbucks, and Sam’s Club, Rosalind Brewer became one of the first Black female CEOs of a Fortune 500 company in 2021. Currently, she is #27 on Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business. Despite her vast experience and status as such a prominent figure in business, Brewer still faces the effects of bias and prejudice in the industry. She’s reflected on how her identity as a Black woman has caused others to underestimate her place in the C-suite and mistake her for someone of a lower position. 

If you’ve ever experienced judgement and prejudice in the workplace, emulate Rosalind Brewer’s strength and keep her quote in mind when you need the courage to push back and demand the respect you deserve in the workplace.

“You can and should set your own limits and clearly articulate them. This takes courage, but it is also liberating and empowering, and often earns you new respect.”

— Rosalind Brewer 

6. Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins is the CEO of tech unicorn, Canva, and is serving as inspiration for young female entrepreneurs across the globe. Recently, Canva’s valuation was set at $15 billion, making her and her co-founder husband billionaires off an idea they cooked up at university. Aiming to challenge design and tech giants in the industry, Canva is a graphic design platform that allows you to create things without the steep learning curve of programs like Adobe. 

However, the Australian native had a rough time getting her company started up. Being far from the network of tech connections and funds that is Silicon Valley, Perkins had to take up kite-surfing just to get her foot in the door with investors at a kite-surfing competition in Australia. She was successful at securing funding and the rest is history. Without her vision and drive, Canva wouldn’t be around to make graphic design more accessible to all. For inspiration on being a visionary and a leader in your industry, follow Melanie’s advice below.

“As a leader, I feel my job is to set the vision and the goals for the company, and then to work with everyone to empower them to dream big and crazy.”

— Melanie Perkins

7. Mari Elka Pangestu

As World Bank Managing Director of Development Policy and Partnerships, Mari currently leads the research and data group at the World Bank using her expertise in policy and management. However, she is well-known for previously serving as Minister of Trade for seven years and Minister of Tourism for 3 years in Indonesia. As Minister of Trade, she put a special focus on growing Indonesia’s economy and finding ways for women entrepreneurs to have better access to trade.

With a doctorate in economics, Mari has also led as an expert on global policy regarding food research, geopolitics, sustainable developments, and renewable energy. Although the international trade field is mainly dominated by men, Mari’s life and career show us that with hard work and dedication, your expertise and experience will be rewarded with high levels of leadership. If you’re interested in a job as a woman in trade, check out Pangestu’s quote on how tourism benefits women. 

“Tourism is a very serious industry: it creates one out of 11 jobs, and benefits women and local communities, in particular.”

— Dr. Mari Elka Pangestu

8. Kathrin Jansen 

Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Development at Pfizer, Katherin Jansen has played a major part in Pfizer’s global success. With 28 years of experience leading vaccine development, Jansen recently led a 650-person team to pioneer one of the first COVID-19 vaccines. 

Although the race to a vaccine was one fraught with urgency, Jansen showed true and effective leadership by not sacrificing quality for speed. Jansen believes the science behind her vaccine speaks for itself and that should inspire confidence from the people. With a woman at the helm of such a leading scientific accomplishment, Jansen is a role model for other women in science. See her quote below for how women in STEM can help each other succeed. 

“For me it was important to support female colleagues and make sure they have the opportunities, and you know, just look out for them.” 

— Dr. Katherin Jansen

All women in the workplace should be empowered to advocate for their own career growth, but we can’t do it alone. Take inspiration from these examples of successful women leaders and motivate yourself to achieve just as much or more. Whether you’re interested in tech, business, real estate, sports, science, or trade, there’s a female leader out there who’s blazed a trail for you to succeed after them.

Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Try a leadership workshop or coaching to grow your skills and reach your career goals.