What makes this program distinctive is that it is not designed as a remedial model ‘fixing’ women and it is not about teaching women to act more like men.
It is designed around a deep understanding of decades of research on how women’s leadership is experienced and judged, and what it takes for women to succeed as leaders today, while the concept of leadership is still masculine in nature.
It is not about making women get mad and men feel bad. It is not about entitlement or victimhood or special measures. It is about how leader and gender roles conflict at this stage of our social evolution and how that impacts on women’s success as leaders because it creates this ‘double bind’ for women. It is designed around why and how we might approach this challenge skilfully.
Based on learning and development best practice this is a constructive, high impact and flexible 12–18-month program. The program offers leading edge content and a rich mixture of development tools and resources that is time efficient and cost effective, globally inclusive while being fun, engaging, and supportive.
Are we changing the women not the system?
No. So why would women want to become skilful at managing the double-bind if they want to be leaders? Because we know the stubborn ‘default to male’ bias of the current leadership stereotype will only shift when we can normalize women in leadership. We need those women to be able to give it their best shot with all the right tools in their arsenal, not to trip over unseen obstacles, be told they’re not leadership material or drop out exhausted and disappointed in themselves.
Most organizations are doing valuable work on changing the SYSTEM to better enable a level playing field and working on the biases we all have that judge women’s leadership differently to men. This is important work that will make a difference over time.
This program is for women who need to manage the double bind between their gender and leader roles TODAY. And do it with integrity and authenticity. So that their daughters and god-daughters and nieces and their daughter’s daughters won’t have to manage that ‘default to male’ leadership bias. Because having more women in leadership roles will ultimately erode that stereotype, normalising women in leadership so they won’t get that push back. Organizations need to be doing both – working on the system AND giving women the insight and skills to navigate in these transitional times. This program delivers the latter.
