Women in leadership roles

In today’s uncertain, complex conditions it is essential for organizations to select leaders who have the abilities and experience to face new challenges.

SHL’s study has identified 27 challenges that are relevant for leader roles. Based on the results, women performed better in 21 of 27 challenges than men. Challenges included leading a geographically leading geographically dispersed teams, transforming a high conflict culture, delivering under high uncertainty, delivering high profit margins and operating with high resource constraints. Despite this, women are still unrepresented in leadership roles and they are still likely to get paid less for the same job as men.

Many organizations choose their leaders without taking objective data as a basis. Making a mistake in leader selection is highly harmful to the company. Women perform great in leadership roles – therefore, gender diversity is not only a moral, but a business question, too.

It is HR managers’ and leaders’ mutual responsibility to use tools during selection processes that accurately predict performance, without relying on biases or subjective impressions. The right personality questionnaires and ability tests provide great help in this function.

The original blogpost can be accessed here.