The Way Modern Firms Will Win The Battle For Women Management

Given the projected talent deficit over the next 20 years, today's rigid and exclusionary strategies to management succession will cease to yield the supply of leaders to drive development and better overall performance unless employers develop more purposeful management and development options for the single largest segment of university graduates all around the world – women.

Women's careers are significantly more likely to include periods of complete engagement, likely disengagement, and, with rising regularity, re-engagement with full-time employment than men's. However the great majority of companies have failed to recognize the sometimes non-sequential characteristics of women's career focus.

One study by the French GEF – Le Groupe Grandes Ecoles au Feminin, a consortium including HEC Paris and INSEAD – has revealed that men aren't even conscious that their women co-workers do not in any equivalent numbers have as many career development opportunities as their male colleagues. That may result from the reality that men in far greater numbers develop a career step-by-step, year-on-year without any break in their service tenure to their employers.

Companies are not yet structured to trust women with leading management-level commitments and to afford them the flexibility to take care of their children. This has boxed many women leaders into picking, at some point in their career, either one role or the other. Women executives can put their career at the centre point of their lives. The only condition is that either they do not have kids or that the husband takes over the customary mom's role.

The rigid nature of many senior executive roles will, then again, be pushed as the predicted shortage of proven performers in several functions and industries worldwide will pressure more employers to distinguish their leadership programs to attract, keep hold of and compensate top management talent. In actual fact, an increasing number of advocacy organizations have established business opportunities for women business leaders – many of whom 'broke the ice' by being the very first women in their organizations to have a specific leadership role – to mentor and interact with a new generation of women managers.

Also, a number of forward-looking employers in industries which range from telecommunications and media to management consulting in countries such as France, the United States and Sweden (to name just a few) have created executive search prospects and women's leadership initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field for career and organizational progression. Employers will need to adopt more adaptive career opportunities as they fight for leaders whose life choices are subject to change but who may possibly search for new and creative options for retaining their careers during any break from the full-time workforce.

Few really have it all when it comes to senior executive roles – but the successful ones have demonstrated great manageability in realizing success and contentment both individually and professionally and can decide what must be dedicated to the corporate and personal family. Executive roles held by both men and women require a mantle of devotion. The corporate 'family' requires attention, time, and physical presence – just like the personal family necessitates.

Corporations are in business to generate money and develop. It is more and more evident that skilled women are becoming available and are making a big difference in the bottom line, and corporations that have a drive to succeed are reacting appropriately. The issue for these organizations is to recognize the problems unique to women leaders and how to address them in a way that grows the talent pool for a wide range of critical business functions.

Note to Editors: About executive search firm TRANSEARCH International
Executive search firm TRANSEARCH International has representation in most of the major economic centres of the world with 59 offices in 37 countries. TRANSEARCH International was founded in 1982 and is a leading international executive search firm.