EMBEDDING SUSTAINABILITY One aspect where
female
leaders make a clear
difference is around ESG – environmental, social and governance issues,
including sustainability, climate
change, diversity and inclusion, and robust risk and governance policies. As stakeholders and customers start to ask tough questions about sustainability and diversity of the companies they interact with, having an ESG lens is one way that organisations can start to think about how to change business practices for the future. “Another aspect where female leaders can make a
clear impact is around ESG,” she says. “When women are in senior positions, ESG considerations play a greater
role in decision-making and strategy within
organisations and companies. “All people deserve to have the same opportunities, and decision-making is better when you have more diverse teams and different views and voices. Your customer base is diverse, so how could you possibly build products and services for those diverse customers if the leadership at the top is chosen from a narrow base?” While some progress is being made, women who
lead in the current environment have to work within the organisations and cultures that currently exist, she says. “We need to fix the organisations and policy, but we also
need to equip women with the skills they need to succeed. One key skill is making yourself visible and communicating to your managers that you are interested in taking on more senior roles and more overseas assignments.
Visibility – “Women should not feel reticent and they should be ready to step up into those roles. Talk about your career progress with your boss. You absolutely have to bring it up. Don't wait for it to happen and don’t wait to be recognised.
Networking – “Find a sponsor within the organisation, someone who is willing to speak up for you as well as a mentor who can share their experiences with you. Build your network of contacts and community – find out what opportunities are out there.
Be ambitious – “Talk about what you do and make sure that you also reflect where you want your future career to go on business networking sites such as LinkedIn. If you are a CFO who is interested in transformation strategy, then talk about it in your posts.
Develop transferable skills – “Sometimes women feel that they lack the experience or previous roles that they need in order to apply for a promotion. Look into making an audit of yourself of the transferable skills you have which could be used in different roles.
Be inclusive – “Leaders, male or female, need to lead teams in an inclusive way. Make an effort to be inclusive and empathetic. Soft skills are critically important to leadership right now.
Reconsider your recruitment processes – “It is easy for managers to hire people who look and sound like them. That is an issue that organisations need to address, and something managers need to think about. It is hard to manage diverse teams if all the managers are one kind of person.
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Create a management style that is progressive – “When you have a diverse workforce you need to have a management style that allows you to get the best out of all your talent. It is about modelling inclusive behaviour right across the organisation, starting from the top.”
The opportunity to rewrite the workplace – While many organisations still have the legacy of homogenous boards and non-inclusive recruitment policies, there is the opportunity to change, she says. Companies active in emerging technologies – Web3, artificial intelligence and the Metaverse – are at the forefront of hiring the best talent globally. Dr Emuwa sees this as a challenge to rethink radically how and why we work, rather than taking for granted the post-industrial culture hard-baked into so much of what we do. “What we don’t want is to create all these new and
exciting technologies and then find we still have the same, 100-year-old structures,” she says. “We need to create inclusive spaces and organisations with the emerging technology.”
100 Women @Davos – Dr Emuwa was moved to create a community of impact-driven women leaders, which she founded alongside the World Economic Forum in 2019. It supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UNSDG) 5 Target 5.5 to: “ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership”. The organisation holds regular 100 Women @Davos Leadership Dialogues with inspirational leaders to generate debate and move the needle on gender diversity in leadership across the world. “At the World Economic Forum, the proportion
of women who attend is much higher than the top leadership in companies,” she explained. “There is now a female representation at the WEF of around 27%, compared to the percentage of female CEOs in organisations which is currently around 5% to 7%. But we still have a lot of progress to make. I felt we needed to have this conversation about female leadership.” As well as promoting women's individual progress and
career progression, Dr Emuwa believes we need to look at how women can play a greater role in decision-making. “Women need to be part of the debate around how
we fix the world’s problems, the impact of the decisions we make,” she says. “Women have a valuable role to play in organisations all around the world and 100 Davos Women is about helping to
facilitate that change.”
THINK WOMEN
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