A new book for women’s leadership puts innovation at the heart of the career progression.
Why are we still advocating for gender leadership? Surely enough has been done for women? How often do you hear this comment? Probably far more often than you care to count – but gender leadership still needs much attention and commitment. In 2023, the World Economic Forum declared that it would take 131 to achieve gender parity worldwide; in other words, five generations between women have access to the same political, economic, social, health, and educational rights as men. With multinational businesses responsible for deploying substantial amounts of resources on a global scale, it has never been more critical to have women as part of the leadership teams and the right resources to do it. In line with International Women’s Day 2024, our new book, Take the Lead: How Women Leaders are Driving Success Through Innovation, was launched along with my co-authors, Anne-Valerie Corboz, Professor of Strategy and Leadership at HEC Paris, and Delphine Mourot-Haxaire, Coach and Director of the UK Office for HEC Paris.
The complexity of business decisions requires diversity.
Business leaders today are working with even greater complexity and have to generate new solutions, requiring new thinking and perspectives. Innovative thinking is a skill that is even more critical for leaders today. Anne-Valerie Corboz emphasizes the importance; « Innovation is the only competitive advantage left to most organizations, as they have streamlined and perfected all other aspects. Innovation and its corollary, creativity, cannot be engineered. They are the product of a culture that allows trial and error, experimentation, and exploration rather than exploitation. In a truly globalized world in which technology is evolving in leaps and bounds, innovation is the only way to respond to emerging needs and trends, and even crafting solutions before the need emerges. »
However, practical innovation occurs with diversity and creating trust for colleagues to share radical new ideas and suggestions. Building diverse teams, mainly focusing on gender diversity, has been necessary. Still, diversity’s real value emerges with leaders skilled in creating cultures where individuals can share their thinking. When diverse groups come together, and there needs to be more comfort for difference, groupthink is a likely factor, where individuals coalesce around the most powerful person in the team and will not challenge the overarching thinking with their ideas. Leaders often unwittingly encourage groupthink by being the first to suggest their ideas and make assumptions about colleagues, and often, because time pressures are immense, they need to provide more time for everyone to be heard.
