Many of the women in leadership that I coach want to elevate the voices of other women in their organisation and create opportunities for them to succeed.  

Sponsoring is a brilliant way to do this.  

Mentoring is common in the UK and is usually a supporter who will share advice and their experiences, and be a sounding board for you.  

A sponsor goes a step further than that. This is an individual within your organisation who will champion you, advocate for you, help you to raise your profile and get new opportunities.   

If you’re in the position to sponsor some of the women that work for you and champion them in your organisation, here’s 6 ways you can do that.

Special thanks to Mylene Sylvestre and Elizabeth Bachman who shared impactful ways to sponsor women and how to avoid the Glass Cliff on recent episodes of my podcast.

1: Raise Their Profile in the...

As a leader approaching team building proactively and creating an environment that allows everyone to flourish is a very powerful skill to learn.   

A great way to start is sitting down with your team and deciding what your definition of a successful team looks like. Together you can set your visions, values and culture and use these to guide all your work both individually and collectively.  

Listen to my podcast episode - The Secrets to Leading Successful Teams – for some practical exercises on how you can do this.  

Make a difference to how your team comes together and build your skill as a leader with these 6 essential responsibilities for leading a successful team:  
 

1: Setting Direction 

In your team, everybody needs to be clear on where the team is going together and where they fit into that individually. It’s simply making sure that everyone knows what they’re working...

Being great at delegating can make a big difference to your workload, stress levels and how you develop your team... but are you making these delegation mistakes? 

Delegating effectively saves time, reduces your workload and stress levels, ensures individual skills and resources are utilised, gives your team chances to develop and is vital for succession planning. But we often don’t delegate as much as we should. 

How do you know if you need to delegate more?  

Here are some signs:

• You’re struggling to get through your to do list 
• You’re lacking time to focus on your priorities 
• You’re working in a very reactivr way and fighting fires 
• Your team rarely step out of their routine responsibilities 
• The organisation or your team would be completely lost if you moved on 

Although delegating is important, it’s also something that many managers and leaders struggle with....

As you develop your career and become more senior, there’s a good chance that you’ll move from being a specialist to a generalist.

In a typical office environment, many of us start off in a generalist role as an assistant or coordinator, helping the team with anything and everything.  

As you progress you become more specialised and when you reach management or head of level, you’re an expert in your area.  

But then the time comes when you move above that level and instead of just managing people from your specialism, you find yourself having to lead, manage and trust people from different specialisms. All who know more about their areas than you do. 

This transition from successful specialist to a successful generalist can be difficult to navigate. 

The more senior you are, the more important this transition becomes.  After all, a great Chief Executive is...

There’s a reason why we need women’s leadership coaches and women’s leadership programmes.

The playing field that women operate on in the workplace is shockingly unlevel. 

The Current Environment 

Let’s start with some stats to see the real picture of the current environment we work in.  

I learnt some very interesting facts on this from Why Women Win At Work by Gill Whitty-Collins – a book I highly recommend. 

At the beginning of their career, 43% of women and 34% of men aspire to reach top management. Surprisingly, it's actually more women than men aspire for that.  

Just two years later, 34% of men still aspire to reach top management. However, the percentage of women has dropped to 16%.  

The question on my mind is what’s happening in those two years of experiencing the workplace that is changing women's minds about what they want to do or what they think is...

Are you a perfectionist and is it pushing you towards overwork and burnout? 

For years I thought that I was doing well in my career because I worked so hard and held myself to such high standards. Then I realised that those strategies were actually perfectionism in disguise and were causing as much harm as they were good.  

I coach a lot of high achieving women, at all levels and perfectionism in its various guises, crops up all the time. If you struggle with overworking, trying to be in control of everything in your life, procrastinating and fear of failure, you might be a perfectionist.  
 

What is a perfectionist?  

There are many definitions but essentially, people who experience perfectionism are very focused on how things should be done and feel that they need to perform perfectly every time with nothing short of this being acceptable.  

I love this quote from Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s...