Compared with men, women face unique challenges in their journey to leadership. Mentoring is an established technique for empowering professional women to manage those challenges.
Women in Leadership Challenges
Researchers have identified a variety of factors that contribute to a ‘glass ceiling’ that prevents emerging female leaders from achieving senior executive roles at the same rate as men. These include lower levels of confidence, weaker access to informal networks, lack of role models, and unconscious bias.
The Value in Mentoring
Understanding Mentoring
Mentoring involves the offering of advice, information, and guidance by a person with useful experience, skills or expertise (mentors) for another individual’s personal and professional development (mentees).
How Mentoring Differs From Other Professional Relationships
Mentors act as trusted advisers to the mentee who take responsibility for their own professional development. Executive coaching, in contrast, focuses on achieving specific development goals and the coach may direct the learning and instruction to achieve these. In a manager-subordinate relationship, the manager is a direct and critical stakeholder in the employee’s performance, development, appraisal, and promotion.
Mentoring and Leadership Development
In a study by the Wharton School of Business, 25 percent of employees in a test group who took part in the company’s mentoring program had a salary grade change, compared with just five percent of non-participants. Mentees were promoted five times more often than those not in the program.
The Value of Group Mentoring For Emerging Female Leaders
Benefits that flow to emerging female leaders from group mentoring include:
Peer Support
Provides a supportive group environment to explore challenges and solutions for achieving personal and professional goals as an emerging female leader.
Self-Awareness
Offers an opportunity to gain insight and understanding into one’s own and other’s perceptions of their value, abilities, and potential.
Personal & Professional Growth
Supports the acquisition of deeper and more varied perspectives from the group and from experienced mentors.
Collaborative Effectiveness
Strengthens improved management of various stakeholder interests.
Goal Clarity and Accountability
Develops greater clarity of career goals through the articulation of the participant’s ambitions and career aspirations, as well as encouraging personal accountability for career development.
Networking and Influencing Skills
Builds skills for more effective relationships across diverse groups and levels of authority in the organisation. Participants develop skills for nurturing and harnessing professional networks, identifying role-models and securing informal mentors.
Performance
Improves individual effectiveness, develops leadership competencies and delivers a positive return on investment for the organisation.
Organisational Benefits
Progression
Studies have shown that women with mentors are more likely to achieve career success than those without. Sixty-seven percent of women rate mentorship as highly important in career advancement.
Retention
Because the presence or absence of a supportive mentorship program is a critical driver of commitment for female talent, a formal mentoring program for emerging women leaders contributes to retention of top female talent by the organisation.
Engagement
Formal mentoring is one of the best methods of communicating to your female leaders that you value their contribution and will support them in their career aspirations. This can lead to better employee engagement over time: 78 percent of mentees report that mentoring made them feel more engaged with their organisation.
Program Outline
Modules
Each mentoring session addresses a predefined challenge facing emerging female leaders in their progression to executive roles.
Customised Solutions
For clients seeking to address issues outside of our recommended modules, our experts will work with you to design and deliver customised modules.
The best outcomes are achieved when session content aligns with the most pressing concerns and needs of the participants. In this regard, engagement surveys may be useful for identifying critical issues for this cohort of employees.
Managing Gender Bias
Topics
- The Nature & Origin of Gender Bias
- Types of Gender Bias
- Techniques for Responding to Bias
- Supporting Other Women
- Managing Flex Arrangements and Career Advancement
Network Intelligence
Topics
- The Value of Networks
- Corporate Politics
- Building a Strong Professional Network
- Nurturing Your Network
- Harnessing Your Network
Leading with Confidence
Topics
- Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewriting the Narrative
- Recognising Your Value and Owning Your Achievements
- Identifying and Applying Your Character Strengths
- The Importance of Role Models
- Imagining Your Best Possible Future
- Values-Based Decision Making
Image & Impact
Topics
- Building a Strong Personal Brand
- Executive Presence
- Finding Your Voice and Communicating with Confidence
- Effective Presentation Skills
- Social Media Influence
Developing Resilience
Topics
- Mindset Theory and Developing a Growth Mindset
- Understanding & Managing Stress and Anxiety
- Work-Life Balance
Influencing & Negotiating
Topics
- Understanding Influencing Styles
- Identifying Your Dominant Influencing Style
- Mapping Influencing Styles to Different Scenarios
- Negotiation Fundamentals
Meet Your Mentor
As a senior executive with over 15 years experience in global markets and demonstrable thought leadership in gender parity and diversity and inclusion more broadly, it is with great enthusiasm that I take on the role of your trusted adviser.
As one of few females to have successfully navigated a career move from a support role to a revenue-generating role during my tenure at UBS, I have always been passionate about empowering women in business and am acutely aware of the challenges facing women in achieving executive roles.
After a successful corporate career, most recently as CEO of executive coaching and mentoring firm, Stephenson Mansell Group (SMG), and prior as Head of Private Bank, Westpac, in Singapore, I now apply my passion for and expertise in diversity and inclusion to drive cultural change and to support other women in their careers. I am committed to change so that my daughters may enter their working life with inspiring roles models and with the confidence that they are able to achieve their full potential.
I look forward to working with you,
Felicity
Outcomes
Outcomes for emerging female leaders from Include-Empower.Com’s group mentoring program include:
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Articulation of ambition and career aspirations
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Personal accountability for career development
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Access to professional networks and role models
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Improved leadership capability
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Enhanced self-awareness
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Improved ability to influence and negotiate
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Greater willingness to apply for promotions and take on stretch assignments
High potential emerging female leaders with more than 5 years experience in a professional role.
Recommended group size is 6-10 participants.
We recommend a minimum of three x 2.5-hour sessions for each group of ten participants over 4-6 months. For clients seeking a more intensive program, we recommend a program of six x 2.5-hour sessions over 6-12 months.
Participants would complete the VIA Character Strengths Assessment as important input into the program.
Please contact us for details of our fee structure.