Last year, I created a virtual “women in leadership training” trash bin. The dismal statistics across all business sectors were irrefutable. The women in leadership dialogues I had embraced (or been subjected to) for my entire professional career were clearly not working.
Statistics on women in leadership across all business sectors continue to lag at unjustifiable rates, and not just at the C-Suite and Board level, but also at the Senior Manager and Director levels as well. Given the facts, I could not in good faith be a true advocate for professional women if I was doing nothing but recycling strategies that had repeatedly proven themselves to be ineffective.
Bin the baggage
So, I created my trash bin. Dumping my own training baggage seemed like a reasonable (and maybe necessary) place to start. I began with the easy targets. Topics like Confidence, Balance and Guilt were the first to go. Be More Assertive and Be Less Aggressive were two topics that quickly followed.
Feeling energized, I began to talk to other professional women, inviting them to join in my soul-freeing exercise. As a result of these discussions, my trash bin not only filled-up, but virtually overflowed with tired topics. Delegation. Networking. Dressing for Success. Learning to Golf. And even with a few misgivings, in went Mentoring, Sponsorship and Bias. No matter how much I liked those topics, they were not yielding results either. And, my absolute favorite topic to toss in the bin? Learning How to Overcome the Obstacles. Really? If we can identify the obstacles, shouldn’t we just be removingthem?
Lift the barriers
And this is when the epiphany struck. Literally years of effort has been wasted on training that was designed to support women’s success in a traditional business environment that is riddled with obstacles. Unburdened by all the prior training noise in my head, the path forward was suddenly very clear to me. It was time to seek (and maybe even demand) changes to the traditional working environment, which honestly is not particularly friendly to anyone. Moreover, I believe the timing to seek these changes is ripe for three primary reasons, all of which have shifted the business motivations for this change.
By Rosalie Harrison
The vast majority of business leaders responding to a recent survey said they’re concerned they can’t train employees quickly enough to keep up with AI and tech developments in the next three years. A similar amount said AI and other tech disruptions will require companies to rethink skills, resources and new ways of doing work.
If you were to ask a random person on the street what an HR professional does, their answer would probably be conflict resolution, or that HR folks deal with employee salaries and benefits. And while that is part of an HR professional’s responsibilities — to ensure employee safety, respect and accountability — that doesn’t even scratch the surface.
With remote work destined for good to be a fixture of the modern workplace, almost half of companies are monitoring remote employees’ online activities. Monitored activity can include active work hours, websites visited, chats, and messaging logs. Almost a third (31%) of respondents said their employers are monitoring their computer screens in real-time.
