A Case Study
It’s well known that only about 9% of top roles are held by women across Fortune 500 organizations.
And many Tech businesses are resolutely determined to move toward greater gender equality and encourage women to go for senior leadership positions.
But what happens when, despite these good intentions, the observed trend is in the opposite direction?
The Problem
One multinational, product-based technology organization was disappointed to see an unexpected trend in their people data. Even though they were actively running multiple initiatives to improve the number of women in Director level roles and above across the business, the number of females in senior leadership roles actually dropped over the period of the pandemic.
The Goal
Through recommendation, the organization commissioned The Career Development Group to build a strategy and implementation plan to reverse this trend and support the increase of women’s presence in the senior leadership teams by 10% over the course of the next year.
The Solution
We carried out a full analysis of the data and interviewed several leaders across the organization to get a better picture of why the rate of female senior leaders had dropped. It became clear that female managers were applying for promotional roles, but the interview success rate had dropped, particularly at the first stage of interviewing.
The Career Development recommended the following course of action:
– Provide a Women’s Career Elevation Program to provide targeted upskilling in areas related to personal brand, personal impact, and executive presence
– Provide an interview skills program for interviewers on unconscious bias and recognizing undervalued talent
– Provide coaching support to senior leaders on understanding the positive return on investment when building a diverse team and recognizing hidden costs when teams lack diversity
The Result
Through their investment in female leaders and their commitment to this strategic course of action, they have seen improved performance across the board.
The organization reported an impressive 12% increase of females promoted to senior leadership positions within 6 months of the Program launch
100% program completion rate for all participants with 95% of participants stating that they would recommend the program to others
Most interestingly, two of the five teams who had new female leaders, had reported winning innovation awards for their most recent work.
The Career Development Group’s value lies in partnering with you to build and deliver leadership programs that promote diversity and difference and use these differences to build better organizational and team performance. We deliver measurable results, every time.