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...

Right now, we’re in the middle of what is being termed The Great Resignation.

In 2020, there were a lot of redundancies and many people didn't feel comfortable leaving their job because the market didn't feel secure.  

Now things have changed. It’s now a candidate-led market and every week I see at least one Influence & Impact member interviewing or celebrating the success of a new job.  

I always see interviews as a bit of a game.  What you need to do at interview is show that you understand the game and that you can jump through the hoops. Once you’ve done that successfully, then the balance of power moves from the organisation to you. 

Here’s 7 rules I share with my I&I members in my audio course Instant Interview Confidence.   

1: The balance of power starts with the interview panel 

They set the rules of the game and bar anything...

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....

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...