Centered leadership: How talented women thrive

Women start careers in business and other professions with the same level of intelligence, education, and commitment as men. Yet comparatively few reach the top echelons.
This gap matters not only because the familiar glass ceiling is unfair, but also because the world has an increasingly urgent need for more leaders. All men and women with the brains, the desire, and the perseverance to lead should be encouraged to fulfill their potential and leave their mark.

The challenge of hiring and retaining women

In an era of ever-intensifying competition for talent, companies that can appeal to and retain different kinds of workers are more likely to succeed. Understanding diversity in the workforce has been a professional interest of Axelrod’s since 1989, when she was asked, as a young McKinsey consultant, to help figure out why the firm was losing so many women and what could be done to keep them. In the late 1990s, Axelrod was a leader of McKinsey’s War for Talent project, which quantified the challenges that leading US companies faced in finding talented executives. She later moved on to executive roles at the global marketing communications group WPP and then to eBay.

Can an organisation evolve itself to become an employer of its choice

In todays business, people are the key differentiator and getting the right type of talent, in time and retaining them has become the primary focus of almost all organisations. Becoming a beacon to attract talent has become the secret ambition which has spurted organisations to take note of how they are perceived by employees, both current and prospective.

Organisations have started adopting various novel ways of becoming attractive. And like a peacock displaying its plumes during mating seasons, organisations too have started publicizing their uniqueness.

Economic and hiring outlook, third quarter 2008: A McKinsey Global Survey

Although executives indicate that their companies have greater pricing power, it isn’t translating into stability for workers. Hiring plans have dwindled over the past year. Almost 30 percent of the executives now expect their companies to shrink the size of the workforce in the next six months (Exhibit 4), up from 18 percent a year ago. Executives in manufacturing and financial services, where workforce cutbacks have been more common than in other industries, are even more likely than executives in general to say the workforce will decrease than increase. By contrast, 43 percent of the executives in energy expect hiring levels to rise—by far the most in any industry. It seems likely that energy companies are drawing on their enormous profits to continue exploring.