Articles
IMF head Christine Lagarde tells a story about a woman leader she met who took over at a tough moment in her country’s history and resolved to be different. They had to cut the deficit and she wanted to set standards by personal example. When she travelled around the country, she took a small entourage of five cars. But the women she met in the villages asked her why only five cars when the men before her travelled with twenty-five...
Many management thinkers argue that it is no longer enough to do well financially; companies also need to improve the well-being of (or at least not harm) the communities in which they operate, the environment, and their employees.
It’s no accident that chief executives so often focus on short-term financial results at the expense of longer-term performance. They have every incentive to do so. If they don’t make their quarterly or annual numbers, their compensation drops and their jobs are in jeopardy.
The more successful we are, the more vulnerable we become to limiting mindsets in how we define not just our work, but even more importantly ourselves. Success limits potential. And it’s hard to get out of such traps because the alternatives are rarely clear and the stakes are high.
The biggest barriers to women’s access to leadership positions, far ahead of flexible work and work-life balance policies, are general norms and cultural practices, and the patriarchal corporate culture.
Many studies have shown that the representation of women in the senior ranks has been virtually unchanged for years, despite considerable organizational investment in talent management systems. Because leadership development begins early in careers, could inequality in development opportunities explain the gender gap that also emerges so early?
We seem to want evidence that a leader can do without a co-pilot before we are willing to groom him or her for more collaborative roles. Is that one reason why command and control isn’t dead, but alive and well?
In Herminia‘s research, executive women uniformly described the same pattern: get up early, get the kids off to school, go to work, come back for family dinner, get the kids to bed, get online for a few hours, fall into bed. Repeat again the next day. What could get squeezed out of that routine?