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Challenges & Solutions: Women in Leadership

I had the tremendous honour of hosting the next event in my Challenges and Solutions series for Local Authorities this Thursday. My aim is to create a community for people to network, discuss challenges and share best practice, so it was fantastic to continue that with ‘Challenges & Solutions: Women in Leadership’.

The session created a lot of discussion and sharing of ideas to overcome some of the common challenges women in leadership positions face within their organisations. Here are the headline takeaways from the challenges part of session:

• Confidence and self-belief are seen as two of the main underlying factors that act as an obstacle for advancement in the workplace.
• There is still an organisational assumption that women will be responsible for the family and put work second, when this is not true in many cases.
• Women can feel too honest and critical about their own talents and when doing so, rule themselves out of going for promotion / career advancement.

And from the solutions focus:

• Coaching is preferred to traditional workshops in developing future leaders, especially round the issue of confidence.
• Gaining an internal sponsor is strongly advised as they will not only provide you with mentoring, but they will work internally for you.
• The higher up you go, the more likely it is your career opportunities will come from conversations, not applications, so become comfortable with having them.

A recording of the session will be made available to all my clients, so if those points are of interest to you or your colleagues and you would like access to the event’s video, please contact me directly. If requested, I will also send you a pdf of the presentation I used throughout the event. This includes the slides everyone contributed to when reporting their challenges and solutions for women in leadership positions.

As we covered so much ground, the depth in which we got to on the above subjects was varied, so if you would like to continue the conversation with any of the participants and your counterparts from different Councils, please let me know and I will connect you.

If you work in the Public Sector, particularly in Local Authorities, and are involved in developing people or organisations, please let me know if you are interested in attending our events. It would be great to have you join us (especially as you got to the end of this article!).

Kyle Hughes
Client Relationship Director