Want More Women CEOs? Invest Earlier in Women’s EI and Personal Leadership

As you may know, myself personally and my company VORNICA are on a mission to triple the number of women CEOs in Europe by 2030. This is why I go to bed and I wake up thinking: what’s going on? When more than 60% of university graduates in Europe are women, why is this so hard? Why aren’t we there yet?

This is why I pay special attention when women in the C- level or even in the C-Suite come to me for individual executive coaching and mentoring to advance their careers.?

With the risk of generalizing, my observations about why we have so few women CEOs today are two-fold:

1. There truly aren’t enough driven, ambitious women in the C-1 level.
2. When they are, many of them are tragically emotionally and strategically immature. This is what makes their journey into top leadership more difficult than it should be.

Now, before throwing a rock at me, hear me out.

The women I regularly meet are beautifully, wonderfully mature as FUNCTIONAL EXPERTS and they CAN deploy strategic thinking FOR OTHERS. Tragically though, not for themselves, their own careers, and their lives. This is where the whole issue starts, and this is what we need to fix ASAP if we want to have more female wisdom at the top of our companies, communities, and countries.

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Why Can Women Be Strategic for Others, But Not for Themselves?

I can never be grateful enough to all my teachers of systemic thinking because without them I could have never seen this pattern.?

The reason we, women, are so emotionally and strategically mature for others, but not for ourselves is because THIS IS HOW WE SURVIVED as a gender through history.?

By carefully mapping, anticipating, and fulfilling the needs and whimsies of others around us – mainly men, but our children, too, particularly if they were boys – we gave ourselves a fighting chance to stay alive after childbirth, when our biological role had been fulfilled and our lower physical strength turned us into “a burden.”?

This is why the excessive focus on our appearance, and this is why the excessive focus on others. For long I thought we were asking to be loved, when in fact all we were asking for was to be allowed to live.

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Should We Continue Applying an Ancient Mindset to Our Present Circumstances?

For me, the answer to this question is the key for us, women, growing up to mature into our whole personal and professional potential. Because, of course, the answer to this question is NO.?

But here is the trick: in order to realize that a set of beliefs and behaviors is outdated we need to become alert and to start mapping our current circumstances intentionally.?

From running on an automatic pilot made of past patterns that were planted into us without our knowledge we need to shift consciously into an intentional and mindful pilot that turns us into the CEO of our lives first, before becoming the CEO of anything else.?

Can women develop this sense of intentionality on their own??

Of course they can. But without help from companies, this will usually happen outside of corporate organizations. Which is why women’s leadership potential will then shift outside of companies and into various communities, NGOs, and public service at best.?

This is a loss companies cannot afford. Corporate organizations need to do way more to become a fertile ground for women awakening to their full intentionality and leadership potential.?

And what is the key for that??

Emotional intelligence.

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Why Should Companies Invest in People’s Emotional Intelligence from an Early Age?

Before I say more, let me visualize for you how we at VORNICA? conceptualize women’s development as they move through companies’ talent pipeline.

Or:

At the very bottom of the structure we have FUNCTIONAL SKILLS. This is what a young graduate should have after school / university and what should continue being shaped in organizations until the person becomes a fully-fledged expert.

Unfortunately, numerous organizations focus ONLY on this aspect from the moment a young graduate is being recruited to the moment when the person manifests desire to become a people manager.

Why? Because this is how human productivity is still understood today – in a machine-like, industrial manner. Oil the tool and it will yield.

This approach can continue into one’s early 30s or even later – the conform zone is sweet, mainly when being recognized and rewarded by the organization.

What we postulate, however, is that companies should focus EQUALLY on developing functional skills AND two further essential skills that are being ignored today: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE and PERSONAL LEADERSHIP.

When we develop people’s emotional intelligence from the age of 16 to 30, we will have more thoughtful, self-reflective employees who know and understand themselves, who are able to focus and choose their priorities, who honor deadlines, who feature empathy for themselves and others, and who start learning the fundamentals of social intelligence, aka what will catapult them into people leadership later on in a healthy manner.

When we develop people’s PERSONAL LEADERSHIP from the age of 16 to 30 through training focused on their purpose, vision, values and goals, and when we add targeted coaching and mentoring, we develop a solid, emotionally mature basis of a pipeline of healthy future leaders. ?

Imagine what would happen if companies invested more early on in their employees’ emotional intelligence and personal leadership through training, coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring programs.

Imagine how much vision, ambition, and drive would be nurtured, how much more leadership potential unlocked, and how much more strategic thinking and vision would gush into our world without being stifled early on by an exaggerated focus on functional skills.

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Why Is This Approach Even More Important for Women?

Focusing on developing women’s emotional intelligence and personal leadership early on – between the age of 16 and 30 – is an absolutely vital investment into the health of our future as organizations and societies. ?

Why?

Because this is precisely the age when women:

1. Choose their universities and future career tracks.
2. Choose the internships that will catapult or stifle their careers.
3. Choose their life partners, who will turn out to be supportive spouses – or not.
4. Choose whether to have children or not.

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What we do today is that:

1. We focus on functional skills (aka we milk all we can from our youth while they still have energy. Burnout at 27, anyone?!).
2. In parallel, women dive into life – partnership and motherhood – without any support. This is why women get overwhelmed during motherhood because very often they can’t even imagine how to build a solid structure of support for themselves during this critical period of time.
3. At the same time, women’s functional skills wither.
4. Women come back to the labor market after motherhood at the age of 35-40 with blunt functional skills and low self-confidence. This is why we can see so many women at the age of 40+ full of leadership potential, yet in reality fulfilling junior roles that they should have outgrown years back – and, of course, while being paid miserable salaries that feed the gender pay gap.

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And then we wonder why we have so few women in the C-1 talent pipeline ready to lead. ?

In future newsletters I will talk more about the upper layer of our VORNICA? female talent pipeline development model – the distributed leadership, tech and AI leadership, and the storytelling skills that we perceive as vital for women to advance in the direction of people and organizational leadership. But until then suffice to say: if we want more women in top leadership, we need to start with their healthy development at the bottom of the pool.

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I am curious to hear from you all reading this post: what do you think needs to happen for companies to start shifting more of their focus and budget towards young people, and thus start building a more solid, mindful, self-aware pipeline of future leaders, including women? Because an enlightened DEI or HR director is not the answer; their impact will be as fleeting as their role. So, what really needs to happen – and what can each of us do right now to contribute more to the healthier nourishing of talent pipelines in our organizations? Share your perspectives and reflections generously under this post, I am looking forward to our conversations.

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