Accelerating Women with Responsive and Responsible Leadership

Skills and talent matter now more than ever, and learnability will be the equalizer for women. Discover how responsive and responsible leadership can accelerate your female workers. 

Our global workforce is experiencing a time of certain uncertainty. The velocity of change is driven by shifting demographics, individual choice, client sophistication and advancing technology. This upheaval of constant change makes it absolutely critical for companies to be agile, and an organization’s talent is now the single most important factor to that agility. 

With automation, artificial intelligence and robotics becoming the norm of business models, there is great concern that these defining technologies will impact female workers more than males. Organizations and leaders must ensure that they are alleviating digital impacts in a way that creates equal workforce opportunities for all women. This is the skills revolution.  

Investing in learnability  

In the skills revolution, an organization’s success will be defined by the skill sets of its employees. Advancements in technology can bring great opportunities for new job creation and career progression, but only to those who are ready.  

A person’s employability is no longer dependent on what they know, but on what they are likely to learn. Women need new skills, and they will need them more often, to remain employable for the unknown jobs of the future. This is why it is critical for leaders to begin investing in their employee’s learnability – the desire and ability to learn new skills to be employable for the long term.  

Responsive and responsible leadership   

In these times of rapid change, it’s necessary to rethink the structure of work and rethink which roles can be done where, by whom or by what. Technology has the ability to facilitate lifelong learning and provide work and life flexibility.  

This not only allows women to upskill and remain relevant throughout their careers but allows them to do so in an environment that offers the flexibility needed to successfully balance work and home. As Millennials research shows, women plan to take more time out than men to care for others, and organizations that support this will become talent magnets.   

Now is the time to be responsive and responsible by ensuring that organization’s leadership development models offer consistent upskilling and reskilling opportunities in order to accelerate working women into leadership positions.  

ManpowerGroup’s P3 Leadership Model – people, purpose and performance – provides a fundamental approach to building a strong leadership pipeline with relevant skills and an appetite for learnability. Through effective leadership outcomes, enablers and capabilities, this model gives organizations a chance to win in today’s dynamic and uncertain business climate.