Leadership Lesson-Women in Leadership Roles
Posted by Celia Couture on Thu, Aug 20, 2009 @ 09:30 AM
The recent issue of HR Magazine had an interesting article with the following title: When Women Rank High, Companies Profit. The article talked about conducting a survey of 1,500 U.S. companies to investigate the connection between female senior management and company performance. David Ross of Columbia University Business School and Christian Dezso at teh University of Maryland examined such performance based on market-to-book ratio, return on assets, retun on equity and annual sales growth from 1992 to 2006. They looked at postion up to, but not including, the CEO level but separately studeis these performance measures in companies that had female CEOs.
The research suggests promoting women to top ranks may help the bottom Line. For those of us who are currently in executive roles in companies or for those of us who own and operate our own companies, these statistics are not at all surprising. Women work hard each day to prove that they belong in executive roles. Consequently, they typically pay more attention to the details, work very hard at creating a collaborative work environment and they hire people who share the same cultural values.
Ross and Dezso refer to the "female participating effect" as being of particular strenght in companies with a strong emphasis on research and development. "The positve impact is found in firms that are invovled with innovation, where a democratic and participatory approach to management is known to be important."
If you have an opportunity to work through your business plan and ensure that the women in your organization have the oppotunity to lead major initiatives, have access to decision-makers and can demonstrate their abilities to think strategically just having a single femail is positively associate with better company performance.