For those with a long memory, the two cult 1980s American TV series Dallas and Dynasty neatly bookended the Reagan years. Women with impossibly large shoulder pads were taking corporate men at their own game and heralded a boardroom revolution which was echoed in politics from the world's most famous handbag to the fall of the most infamous wall… At the time, one of us was studying cross-cultural management at McGill University and remembers that there were then broadly two avenues when looking at the role of women in the corporate world:
The American approach was to ignore that people had a gender, treat everybody equally and fairly, by the same rules – i.e., those put in place by men over the past 100 years of corporate life; and
The European one which taught women to recognise and build on their differences, sometimes using unique skills, sometimes exploiting men's stereotypes of working women.
This may today seem like a crude caricature, but we have all fallen into the same trap as far as coaching is concerned: initially we thought that coaching of women in business had to be gender neutral at the risk of diminishing its focus and its effectiveness. However, the more we coached senior women, the more we realised that the same specific themes kept coming back. There was definitely something worth investigating… At the same time, we looked at the proportion of women in senior roles and were appalled at the sheer waste of talent in the workplace. So we embarked on a research programme trying to answer three specific questions:
Are there objective reasons to treat women differently in coaching?
What should women be coached about and at what stage of their career?
Are there any techniques and approaches that work particularly well when coaching women?
We attempted to answer these questions in the specific context of a corporate environment and in coaching women to have a career progression that allowed them to express their full potential – i.e., get to leadership positions comparable to that of equally qualified men. We took three approaches:
We built a robust business case to demonstrate that coaching women to lead is clearly worth the effort;
We did the obvious to find out about needs: we asked women! and
We also trawled the world for examples of gender-specific coaching, looked at our own practice and asked coached women what had been the most useful in their own coaching.
This book is the result of this research. We start from the general (is it worth it?) to the specific (tools & techniques). It is organised as outlined here.
Chapter 2: Why bother with women leaders? – The business case for coaching
The corporate world likes nothing better than a solid business case. Although one could make a moral case for some form of affirmative action to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions, it is not nearly as strong as Pounds and Pence (or your preferred currency…). If coaching is effective at increasing the number of successful women leaders, then is it worth the time and cost? In this chapter you will learn:
Why most economies – East and West – face a ‘leadership cliff’ and how women could help make up this leadership deficit;
The cash benefits of gender diversity; and
How to calculate the value of actively managing the pipeline of women leaders in order to increase talent retention and save recruitment and associated costs.
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to draw up a solid set of arguments for your own business environment and articulate how an investment in coaching can play a role not only in promoting existing women to leadership positions but also in attracting both new and returning women to your organisation.
Chapter 3: What are the critical stages of a woman's career and their coaching requirements?
All managers have important career stages that require specific coaching interventions: the first big promotion into a visible leadership role and mid-career re-launch are quasi-universal experiences. Women have additional specific coaching needs linked to the child-bearing years (a.k.a. off-ramping/on-ramping for our US colleagues) and gaining boardroom access. In this chapter, we look at a typical corporate career and analyse key career stages and associated coaching interventions. Spoiler: it is no longer linked to age…
By the end of this chapter, emerging women leaders should have a good sense of the successive decisions they have to consider when planning their career (managing the so-called glass labyrinth) and how coaching can help in each case. Coaches will find it easier to plan their interventions using this chapter as a roadmap. Business managers will have a deeper understanding of the key stages at which they lose female staff and what they can do about them.
Chapter 4: What do women want? – Reporting the results of our research
This is the chapter that analyses research commissioned specifically for this book. We developed and conducted a questionnaire in association with the London School of Economics and present statistically significant results as well as many quotes and words of advice from respondents. In this chapter you will find:
the perceived key drivers of success for women in a corporate environment;
the biggest challenges at all levels;
advice given to other women in a corporate context in all areas including confidence, gender behaviour, career strategies, emotional advice, etc.; and
coaching implications.
Chapter 5: In search of role models – Conversations with exemplary women
We carried out 25 in-depth interviews of women in senior positions who, by any standard, have ‘made it’. They share their story and dispense advice liberally. Our aim here was to identify and distil the wisdom of genuine role models – not merely women who were successful by playing by the men's rules.
We provide the transcripts of 14 conversations with senior women with minimum interference: the feedback from our previous book using this format was that readers really enjoyed the immediacy of the conversations and could better relate to the situations than if they had been summarised and sanitised.
Anecdotes range from defining moments in their careers to reflecting on lessons for today's young managers. They also describe what type of coaching they received along the way (if any), how it helped them; and they express views on the best timing for coaching.
Chapter 6: 10 years on – What our role models report
We went back to those brilliant role models and asked for their views on what change had been achieved in the 10 years since we had first spoken about this topic.
There have been many advances in terms of regulations, accountability and increased numbers of D & I initiatives, but these women have very clear views of what has actually changed and what we need for the future.
In this chapter, we also added a couple of specialist role models and a selection of successful millennials, all giving us their view on what it takes to be a success. Many of the same issues noted in Chapter 5 crop up but with some other useful insights.
Chapter 7: Coaching women to lead – A systematic approach to coaching women for success
For coaches, this is the key chapter of the book: we draw from the knowledge of all that precedes and add our own experience in cognitive behavioural coaching at a senior level to reveal key interventions. In each section, you will find a summary of the issue, the psychological underpinnings where relevant, several coaching exercises, and an illustrative case study. The themes covered are:
We also look at the change in the coaching profession to a much greater degree of virtual coaching than before.
Chapter 8: What makes a strong leader? – A model for women's leadership development
If women require specific coaching interventions they also require excellent general leadership coaching. In this chapter, we re-examine what makes a good leader. We expand on our BITE model first presented in Essential Business Coaching and enrich it with recent research that looks at eight long-term characteristics for emerging and confirmed leaders. We call our model the Balanced Leader and for each characteristic we point out any gender-specific issue and the coaching approach to deal with it. This can be seen as a long-term road map for all leaders to follow. According to our research, balanced leaders are:
Visible
Resilient
Strategic
Emotional
Decisive
Intellectual
Behavioural
Meaningful
In addition, we report on further research such as the drive to succeed and our study on what creates a desire for followership.
Chapter 9: How to develop a woman-friendly organisation
What should be clear by now is that women-friendly organisations are more likely to attract and retain good quality women managers – as well as enable the...
