Why Leadership Development Programs Must Teach Networking

During Newberry Solutions’ webinar this month, Yana Melnikova at PepsiCo and I talked about the importance of opening up leadership development to more people, beyond high potentials and high performers. 

But it’s not just about who you include; it’s also about the foundational leadership skills that you help them learn. This raises a vital question: To transform potential into performance, what skills should your leadership development program teach?

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This question was top of mind for us as we developed our New Lens® learning platform. Based on years of experience working with top companies, we identified the biggest levers of high performance. In other words, these are the skills that we have consistently seen have the biggest impact on business results and increasing employee readiness for roles at the next level. One of those skills that often gets discussed but not ineffectively integrated into leadership development programs is building a powerful network.

Results and Relationships 

Too many people put networking on the back burner or think of it as something to squeeze in outside of their “real work.” In fact, I would wager that there are employees at your organization who are talented and hardworking, but who are not considered future leaders because they keep their heads down and believe their work should speak for itself.

Of course, results are important. But leadership isn’t just about individual competencies; it’s also the ability to get things done with and through others. Especially as an employee moves up the leadership ranks, their effectiveness depends on their relationships — with their direct reports, with their boss, with higher-level leaders, with their peers and with colleagues in other departments. That’s why a great leadership development program must set the stage for relationship building.

Ways to Encourage Networking

So how can a leadership development program help your employees build a network that will help them both drive results and advance their careers? Here are a few ideas:

• Teach networking strategies. Many people mistakenly believe that only extroverts can be good at networking. The reality, though, is that anyone can learn best practices that can help them get better at building relationships. For example, I always show my coaching clients how to identify the most critical relationships to success in their role, specific business goals or projects.

• Incorporate mentorship and sponsorship. Mentors can serve as role models for leadership development program participants, providing advice and perspective to help them develop their skills and navigate challenging situations. Sponsors, on the other hand, have clout and yield considerable influence on key decision-makers. Sponsors also give program participants critical exposure to opportunities and visibility to other influential leaders, and advocate on their behalf. While employees can establish these relationships on their own, mentorships and sponsorships are more effective when they’re part of a formal program.

• Utilize collaborative learning. One of the most overlooked but most impactful relationships are peer-to-peer. Integrate collaborative learning to foster employees sharing their knowledge and expertise, help each other navigate through challenging situations, and increase self-awareness.  Combining collaborative learning with high-quality content can even further accelerate results. We’ve already seen the power of this with New Lens, which takes the power of bite-sized lessons on foundational leadership skills and then enables deeper discussion and learning with a cohort. Not only does this accelerate learning; it strengthens workplace relationships that have become harder to build or maintain in this world of hybrid work.

How is your organization helping employees build the relationships they need for success? If you would like to learn more about how New Lens can help build networking skills (or critical leadership skills necessary for every level), check out a preview of sample content and schedule a demo.

Are You Developing Enough Leaders?

One of the biggest things we’ve learned from the pandemic and the other challenges of the past few years, is that we all need to lead today. Leadership skills are critical at every level. But, in too many organizations, leadership development programs are still reserved primarily for employees already identified as “HiPo’s” – high-potential and high-performing employees. In other words, the employees who receive the most leadership development are the very ones who need it the least because there performance is already strong. In an influential article for Harvard Business Review, professors Navio Kwok and Winny Shen call this phenomenon “the leadership development paradox.” In the long-term, this approach affects the quality, diversity, and size of an organization’s pipeline of leaders. But we can address it by providing leadership training opportunities to a wider array of employees.

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How Strong Is Your Leadership Pipeline?

When a company decides whether to invest in leadership development for an employee, they directly shape that employee’s career path. Employees who receive leadership development are more likely to be promoted to senior level, high-exposure roles. Meanwhile, employees outside of that high-potential group are more likely to stay at their current performance level or even get worse — because they’re getting less access to the leadership development programs that could help them improve as well as opportunities for career advancement.                       

When only a select group of employees gets greater access to leadership development, organizations miss out on what others could potentially contribute. Although budget is a key consideration, can we afford to do this? Even small improvements across a broader population can have a big impact on overall company performance and cultivate a sustainable culture of growth and innovation.

According to DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2023, CEOs are already worried about how to develop the next generation of leaders — and only 12% of companies are confident that they have a strong bench of leaders who are prepared to step into key roles.

As a firm with a niche focused on developing women leaders, we’re also concerned about how the leadership development paradox may disproportionately affect women. Ambition has increased, as shown in the McKinsey/LeanIn.org Women in the Workplace 2023 report, which  found that eight out of 10 women want to get promoted. The numbers are even higher for women younger than 30 and women of color (93% and 88%, respectively).

However, the report also found that women are still under-represented at every level of leadership. They’re less likely to get that first promotion to manager than men are. (And the gap is even bigger for women of color.) With fewer women than men rising through the ranks, it only makes sense that fewer women reach the highest levels of leadership.

How to Develop More Leaders

To fix the leadership pipeline, we must offer leadership development more broadly — but in a way that satisfies each individual’s needs while addressing tight schedules and company budgets. 

We embedded those principles into our New Lens® learning platform, added the same expertise we’ve used to help 75% of our clients get promoted, and packaged it all into bite-sized lessons and collaborative learning that employees can easily fit into their days.

Beyond considering something like New Lens, use these strategies to strengthen your leadership pipeline:

• Rethink how you identify potential leaders. DDI recommends using digital assessments to identify hidden talent.  They explain that “leaders may not recognize potential if it doesn’t align with what leadership has traditionally looked like in the organization,” adding that in remote or hybrid environments, some leadership skills may be overlooked.

• Tap into your internal expertise. How are you making the most of the vast knowledge your people can share with each other? Mentorship and sponsorship are surprisingly underused tools for cultivating future leaders. Also look for opportunities to use peer-to-peer cross-training to build relationships and leadership skills.

• Make key experiences more accessible. It’s common for organizations to have roles that are seen as a springboard to higher leadership positions. Is your organization inadvertently funneling only certain groups to these jobs? For example, are women pushed toward marketing and HR vs. operations?

Your organization can unlock limitless potential by investing in more leadership development opportunities for your employees. We live and breathe these issues with our Fortune 500 clients. So, as you consider your company’s short and long-term development needs, schedule a call with us. We would be happy to discuss how you can strengthen your pipeline of talent by unleashing more employees’ potential.

Are You Underutilizing These Powerful Ways to Close the Leadership Gap?

I have some bad news and some good news about mentorship and sponsorship at work. First, the bad news: These two strategies are extremely underused. According to Gallup, only 40% of employees have workplace mentors, and 23% have sponsors. The good news? Improving these numbers is low-hanging fruit and holds huge potential for increasing the number of women in senior leadership, enhancing engagement and retention and even bolstering the bottom line at your organization.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic after serving as one of the mentors at the Dallas Business Journal’s recent Mentoring Monday, a nationwide event sponsored by The Business Journals that brings together successful female business leaders and women who want to tap into their advice and insights.

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As a longtime advocate for advancing women, I’m excited that we’re learning more about how to create meaningful results for individuals and their employers through relationships with mentors and sponsors. In honor of Women’s History Month, let’s take a deeper dive into this topic and make the case for your organization to invest in programs that integrate the power of both mentorship and sponsorship.

What Is the Difference Between Mentors and Sponsors?

Mentors and sponsors serve valuable, but not identical, roles in your network. Mentors typically serve as role models, providing advice and perspective to help you develop your skills and navigate challenging situations. Mentors can be at any level in the organization, with peer and reverse mentoring becoming more frequently used approaches. 

Sponsors, on the other hand, have clout and yield considerable influence on key decision-makers. Sponsors also give you critical exposure to opportunities and visibility to other influential leaders, and advocate on your behalf. 

As a longtime executive coach and the creator of a leadership development platform, I’m not surprised by how underutilized mentorship and sponsorship are. I’ve had many clients fall into the trap of thinking their good work is enough. It often takes people a while to realize that who they know is just as important as the quality of their work. They overlook how much their relationships give them access to resources, information and influence that they need to get work done and to advance their careers.

The Power of Support at Work

While mentorship and sponsorship are good for everyone, I’m especially intrigued by their potential to address an issue that many organizations struggle with: the leadership gap between men and women.

According to the Women in the Workplace 2023 report  from McKinsey in partnership with LeanIn.org, women are underrepresented at all stages of the leadership pipeline. While 48% of all entry-level employees are women, only 40% of managers are. The gap keeps getting broader all the way to the C-Suite, where men outnumber women by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

That’s a problem on many levels. Researchers have found that companies with more female leaders make more money, are more socially responsible and have better customer service. Female CEOs can even drive stock prices. Companies recognize these benefits, and many are increasing their efforts around leadership development for women.

These programs must include opportunities to develop relationships with mentors and sponsors. When you look at data from Gallup, the Women in the Workplace report and other recent research, it becomes clear why these relationships can be so beneficial for women’s careers:

• Women are more ambitious now than they were before the pandemic. In 2019, about 70% of women wanted to get promoted to the next level. Today, that figure is 81%. (For women under 30 — your organization’s rising generation of leaders —93% want promotions.) In other words, high-potential women want to know that they have a future at your organization. Gallup found that when an employee has a mentor or sponsor, they’re much more likely to feel that they have a clear path forward.

• Learning and growth are deeply important to your workforce. More than 9 out of 10 employees said they would stay at their company longer if it invested in helping them learn. Mentorship and sponsorship help address that demand. According to Gallup, employees with mentors are twice as likely to say they’ve had recent opportunities to learn and grow.

• Perhaps the greatest potential for mentorship and sponsorship programs lies in helping more women find sponsors. Currently, 25% of men have a sponsor at work, while only 22% of women do. According to Herminia Ibarra of London Business School:

Too few women are reaching the top of their organizations, and a big reason is that they are not getting the high-stakes assignments that are prerequisite for a shot at the C-suite. Often, this is due to a lack of powerful sponsors demanding and ensuring that they get these stepping-stone jobs.

Ibarra has also found that men and women describe their relationships with supporters differently: Women talk about how these relationships increase their self-understanding, while men talk about others endorsing them and helping them plan their career advancement.

How to Improve Mentorship and Sponsorship

So how can your organization maximize the power of mentorship and sponsorship to advance women leaders?

• Examine how the rise of hybrid work has affected who receives mentorship or sponsorship in your organization. For example, men are more likely than women to receive mentorship and sponsorship when they work onsite, according to the Women in the Workplace report.

• Start thinking about how to weave elements of mentorship or sponsorship into existing programs without overburdening participants or executives. While support relationships that develop on their own are great, formal programs can create even more impressive results, Gallup found.

• Whether or not you have a formal program, make sure your organization is teaching coaching skills. Potential mentors and sponsors are more likely to help when they have the right tools to do so.

• Consider a tool like the New Lens® platform that facilitates mentoring conversations. Our app leverages the power of both peer learning and manager feedback.

Finally, remember that we understand the power of mentorship and sponsorship at Newberry Solutions and we welcome the chance to answer your questions and share how New Lens and our other tools can empower you to support women leaders. Schedule a New Lens demo now, or get in touch with us for more information.

Retain Women Amid ‘the Great Resignation’

I’ve written before about “the Great Resignation” — the record number of people who have been leaving their jobs this year. Now we’re seeing more and more headlines that women are driving this phenomenon.

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The Women in the Workplace 2021 report from McKinsey & Company and Lean In highlighted the growing crisis:

One in three women says that they have considered downshifting their career or leaving the workforce this year, compared with one in four who said this a few months into the pandemic. Additionally, four in ten women have considered leaving their company or switching jobs—and high employee turnover in recent months suggests that many of them are following through. … The risk to women, and to the companies that depend on their contributions, remains very real.

As we look toward the new year, I wanted to share some ideas about how organizations can turn this situation around in 2022. Hopefully, you’ll find at least one strategy on this list that you can bring to your own workplace.

Offer More Flexibility

Remote work and flexible schedules skyrocketed during the pandemic. Now some companies, including tech giants, are making those changes permanent. For example, Microsoft now allows employees to work from anywhere for half of their work week, and even 100% remotely with manager approval.

Flexibility is especially important to women. That makes sense, considering that women make up 75% of caregivers. However, simply offering remote or hybrid work options is not a cure-all when it comes to retaining women. Such changes must be implemented thoughtfully to ensure that women who are working remotely are not penalized for being less visible at the office

Promote Mentorship and Sponsorship

Understandably, women are leaving their jobs when they don’t see opportunities for advancement. And one reason that women don’t move up the ladder at the same rate as men do is that men are sponsored more often. 

What’s the difference between a mentor and a sponsor? While both provide valuable career advice, sponsors also connect you to opportunities and advocate for you.

A program that connects women to mentors and sponsors sends a powerful message. That’s what companies like HERE Technologies have found.

Emphasize Wellbeing

During the pandemic, more organizations began to embrace the idea that employee wellbeing isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s essential for sustainable success. Because women are more stressed and burned out than men are, wellbeing initiatives are a powerful tool for retaining women employees. 

Your company can support employees by offering wellness subsidies, as Deloitte and DocuSign do. Or you could help employees access mental health services, as Starbucks and Target do.

Resources You Can Use

At Newberry Executive Solutions, our focus is providing resources that organizations can use to engage and retain the women leaders that are so crucial to their future. As your company makes plans for 2022, I invite you to explore our programs, books, New Lens app and other offerings that can help you invest in women.