WOMEN ON BOARDS, THE KEY ISSUES
Women are good at ethical behavior, creativity/innovation, and mediation.
They should improve negotiation skills for themselves and develop their own personal leadership style. Warning: you have to be able to take decisions.
Develop self confidence
Learn to ask for things that are important for your development (challenging assignments, training, promotion, etc)
Women should care more about
- Competence – this is taken for granted.
- Visibility
- inside the company - be visible in projects which are also seen by the CEO and top management/making the management aware
- outside the company - be present in internet, on the press/media; be well known and appreciated by HR, by clients/choose right people as ‘sponsors’ (clients are particularly important, as they experience directly how good you are as a professional – frequently best sponsors)
- Networking/lobbying – networking but with content! Women should work on lobbying, reinforcing relations as men do.
Ideas and projects to be developed
- Build awareness and women networks within companies: actions must come from the top but requested, promoted, developed starting from bottom (learn to ask);
- organize training for high potential women;
- analyze pipeline/measure performance: why and how do women get lost from studies/MBA to top positions at work and what can companies do in order not to loose precious talent;
- make women visible now: even if women are not as numerous as men, we already have women with profiles and CVs that are in line with board positions requirements;
- Build a ‘pressure group’ to make the cultural changes happen. Probably a slow but true cultural change would be better than a forced quota system;
- education in schools on leadership/bring role models in schools;
- education for men/courses for men to build awareness on women skills
- Importance of choosing the right company – ‘great places to work for women’ is under study
Contact the author
Viviana Cavalli
vivianacavalli@yahoo.it