Women left out of leadership schemes

The list of reasons more women don't hold top jobs is already long and complex. Now, a Harvard Business Review report has identified another culprit: leadership training and development programmes.

According to the report’s authors, three advisers at the executive search and consulting firm Egon Zehnder, too many corporate training programmes value skills and “competencies” without also measuring how employees score on potential. They argue that overlooks many otherwise promising leaders — especially female ones.

“They're not looking for the right thing,” says Andrew Roscoe, who leads the firm's assessment and development practice. When companies talk about “high-potential” programmes, he says, “they pick their favourites in some way, or the ones most like themselves.”

After examining their database of 2800 executive evaluations globally, the Egon Zehnder team found that men tended to outscore women on five of seven competencies that companies more typically use to evaluate managers — criteria such as strategy, change management and understanding the market. Women outperformed men on collaboration and developing other individuals and teams.

But women outscored men on three of the four “potential” traits — curiosity, determination and engagement — that help predict who will excel when it comes to certain skills.

The report argues that because most companies do little to measure employees on these “potential” attributes, they end up devoting their training budget and efforts to the wrong people.

When an aspiring manager shows a deficiency, Roscoe says, “what companies do is the easy thing: They do a skills training course. ‘The research says you're not good at strategy, so we'll send you to business school or bring someone in to teach you strategy’.

“But if the person doesn't already have the right traits that show room to improve in those areas, they can only develop so far, leading to wasted effort and missed chances . . . ”

Roscoe's colleague Miranda Pode says, “what a lot of people default to, when they're looking to hire or promote, is experience,” which can be limiting for women.

“Instead of just taking a narrow look at experience, if you layer on looking at potential, it allows you to have a lens that is much broader in your ability to evaluate talent.”

The Washington Post