5 Key Benefits Of Hiring Women With Great Leadership Capital
There are five key ways that hiring or promoting female professionals with great leadership capital will directly benefit your organisation.
Our blogs over the past few weeks have shared how professional women can consistently build on their relationship, performance and reputation capital – together these three components create strong leadership capital.
At Elevate Talent, we know that there is no training manual for new leaders. A successful leader will have been self-motivated to strategically rise through the ranks, and will have invested heavily in building their capital across all three pots; they recognise that this is vital to their career progression and business development.
The right capital will have supported them to create a winning operating system that will go on to install a solid foundation for their team (which directly benefits your organisation as a whole).
The benefits of hiring or promoting women with great leadership capital
There are significant benefits to your organisation when you hire or promote women with strong leadership capital.
These include:
-1- Great working relationships
The ease with which they influence, maintain and build relationships inside and outside the team creates harmonious working (and increases productivity).
-2- Easier succession planning
Supporting succession planning by providing a positive role model for team members and colleagues (helping them develop a strong skill set and their own relationship, performance and reputation capital).
-3- Diversity
The diversity that a “well-rounded” leader can bring to the organisation through their own personal and professional growth and their wealth of experience.
-4- Streamlined working
Hiring or promoting someone with great leadership capital also makes their job and the roles of those around them easier, because people with great capital tend to be liked, respected and held in high regard (which can also lead to increased productivity and profit).
-5- Enhanced opportunities to win new business
Your organisation also sets itself in good stead to win new business if your leaders have a reputation for being people with whom everybody wants to work.
Why finding the right balance is crucial
However, unless your leaders strike the right balance in terms of being available, offering support and working “on” versus “in” their career, they risk becoming overwhelmed and stressed, and consequently this could negatively impact their health (and your organisation).
The shortcuts designed to help them create more capital must be used strategically and carefully; and crucially, leaders must set firm boundaries to avoid burnout.
As a leader, they will be looking after their team, reporting to people more senior than themselves, and managing their own projects. Without good boundaries, they will likely be overwhelmed.
When to reassess boundaries
There will be many situations where their boundaries are pushed, and they will need to stand firm or consider whether each request brings a cost or a benefit to them or the organisation as a whole.
For example, you can encourage your leaders to:
- Consider when to stop committing to giving five-minute favours. As individuals who have banked capital over the years, they’ll likely be keen to continue to offer favours; but if it goes unchecked, they’ll potentially jeopardise the time they have available for their own projects.
- If they continue to be “too available”, their contribution is likely to be appreciated less, and they risk not being seen as a leader because they are still participating in most of the tasks they were involved with previously.
Tapping into a wealth of experience
Having said that there is no training manual for new leaders, it is useful for them to tap into the knowledge of more senior and experienced leaders. What lessons did you learn when you rose up through the ranks? Did you find it easy to make a switch from being “one of the team” to being a leader? Which of your boundaries did you need to bolster and how did you do it?
Come and join the conversation on LinkedIn. And if you’d like to understand more about the training programmes that we offer ambitious mid-level executive women in order to help them catalyse their careers and bring a host of benefits to your organisation in the process, please get in touch.
P.S. If this blog is the first one you’ve seen with regard to building relationship, performance or reputation capital, you’ll benefit from revising the rest of the series:
