Women In The Boardroom - Developing the future generation of enterprise leaders

Exactly where will tomorrow's leaders come from? For businesses on each and every continent, the solution to that basic issue remains incredibly elusive and starkly sobering. As many companies grapple with a requirement to sign up, cultivate and hold on to tomorrow's leaders, there is much to discover about the current corporate leadership profile.

Managing talent and growing the future generation of industry leaders are being accepted as the keys to attaining human capital advantages over the competition in a world knowledge economy. Yet, today’s inflexible and exclusionary strategies to management succession will cease to deliver the supply of leaders to push innovation and better performance unless employers develop more purposeful leadership and progression prospects for the single greatest section of university graduates all over the entire world – women.

The ascension of an amazingly small number of particularly skilled women to the role of Chief Executive Officer or Board Director for a few of the world's biggest firms may indicate, to some, that the equilibrium of men and women in top management is getting close to parity. Yet true parity for the sole sake of fairness isn't a broadly approved goal. Rather, the long term diversity of management speaks to the potential to optimise organisational capabilities as consumer sectors diversify.

In the most progressive of corporate environments, women may perhaps have some advantages over their male co-workers, as some businesses have resorted to offering a recruitment fee premium for candidate short-lists that incorporate women and/or cultural minorities. However in other parts of the world, and in Europe in particular, the advancement of women business leaders is unclear, and the subject of on-going discussion.

Women's careers are much more likely to consist of periods of full engagement, possible disengagement, and, with increasing frequency, re-engagement with full-time employment than men's. Yet the majority of businesses have failed to identify the potentially non-sequential character of women's career focus. To meet the needs of an increasingly demographic challenge, firms will need to open up even more opportunities to fill up their talent pipelines with more experienced candidates, included in this a greater number of women business leaders.

"Corporations are in business to make money and grow. It is increasingly obvious that qualified women are becoming available and are making a difference in the bottom line, and corporations that have a drive to succeed are responding accordingly. "

The practice experiences and personal observations of TRANSEARCH International professionals from around the world point to the need for substantial organisational change to find and change the institutional dynamics that derail, de-motivate and/or devalue the career advancement of women. They also suggest that women leaders – much like the firms that employ them – will certainly need to alter the way they do business, and that men, too, must play a role in supporting them do just that.

The executive search professionals of TRANSEARCH International have a consensus view that women executives will participate in an ever more crucial role in creating and shaping marketleading institutions in the years to come. The challenge for these firms, therefore, is to fully understand the issues specific to women leaders and the best way to address them in a way that swells the talent pool for a broad range of essential business tasks.

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.