Women In The Boardroom - Growing the next generation of industry leaders

Where will tomorrow's leaders come from? For organizations on every single continent, the response to that straightforward problem remains elusive and starkly sobering. As many firms grapple with a mandate to hire, develop and keep tomorrow's leaders, there is much to understand about today's corporate leadership profile.

Managing talent and growing the up coming generation of company leaders are becoming recognised as the keys to accomplishing human capital advantage over the competition in a world-wide knowledge economy. Yet, today’s inflexible and exclusionary techniques to management succession will cease to produce the supply of leaders to generate innovation and increased performance unless employers create more meaningful leadership and advancement options for the single biggest segment of university graduates all around the world – women.

The ascension of an alarmingly small number of extremely experienced women to the role of Chief Executive Officer or Board Director for some of the world's major firms may suggest, to some, that the balance of men and women in top management is approaching parity. Yet true parity for the sole sake of equity isn't a commonly accepted aim. Rather, the future diversification of management speaks to the potential to optimise organisational effectiveness as consumer segments diversify.

In the most progressive of corporate environments, women may perhaps have some edge over their male colleagues, as some organizations have resorted to offering a recruitment fee premium for candidate short-lists that contain women and/or cultural minorities. Yet in other parts of the world, and in Europe in particular, the advancement of women business leaders is contradictory, and the subject of continuing debate.

Women's careers are considerably more likely to contain periods of full engagement, potential disengagement, and, with increasing frequency, re-engagement with full-time employment than men's. Yet the vast majority of firms have failed to understand the potentially non-sequential nature 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 their talent pipelines with more experienced candidates, including a larger 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 insights of TRANSEARCH International experts from around the world point to the need for considerable organisational change to recognize and alter 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 need to transform the way they do business, and that men, too, must play a role in assisting them do just that.

The executive search experts of TRANSEARCH International share a consensus view that women executives will play a progressively essential role in developing and shaping marketleading institutions in the years to come. The challenge for these firms, therefore, is to understand the challenges unique to women leaders and how to address them in a way that grows the talent pool for a wide selection of fundamental business functions.

Note to Editors: About TRANSEARCH International executive search
TRANSEARCH International executive search firm 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.