Our Gender Partnership™ Initiative is a multi-year, multi-faceted, business-imperative program designed to achieve large-system change in order to tap into the extraordinary global business opportunity of our time.
We focus on helping you change your company’s culture so that every member of your team works productively with every other member, regardless of gender. Men and women learn from and leverage each other’s special skills and talents. Creativity, productivity, and decision-making are no longer hobbled by miscommunication, misunderstandings, or unconscious bias.
Our Gender Partnership™ Initiative engages men to help accelerate and sustain the advancement of women into leadership because your company values and needs what women bring to the business and the bottom line.
The strategy of this initiative addresses three domains.
- Empowering women as leaders with and for each other
- Engaging men as allies and change agents for women and to achieve gender balance at all levels
- Eliminating the institutional barriers and blind spots that impede diversity and inclusion.
The goal of our Gender Partnership™ Initiative is to help your organization create a more diverse and gender-balanced culture with a common commitment to maximize all talent. The target audience for this initiative includes male and female leaders at VP level and above, but it also provides e-learning and action-learning opportunities for employees at any level.
These individuals will be trained in three skill sets:
- Advancing female middle managers (and above)
- Building a stronger entry-level pipeline for women
- Being role models for Gender Partnership™ throughout the enterprise.
The Gender Partnership™ Initiative’s authentic cultural transformation moves the organization from compliance to choice, bringing greater economic value to companies and contributing significantly to the personal and professional growth and happiness of employees.
Our Gender Partnership™ Initiative will evoke – especially in men – an emergent emotional intelligence, demonstrated by their taking actions that support women to advance. These actions include equitable hiring, coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring by male allies; advocating for women’s success and gender balance on mission-critical initiatives; as well as fostering many other positive and intentional behaviors.
Together, men and women at your organization will build relationships of reciprocity to deliver substantial business value. By the close of the initiative, engaged cohorts of men from all domains of the company will be stepping forward to be allies and advocates for women and drive the desired impact.
The behavioral measure for our Gender Partnership™ Initiative is: Women will consistently say that they feel heard, valued, and rewarded for their contribution to your company.
This Initiative transforms corporate culture so all team members can view and experience gender from a strength-through-differences standpoint. It is not about achieving equality in numbers or sameness in behavior.
The Initiative is a multi-pronged effort that may include some or all of the elements listed below, based on your organization’s needs.
- Gender Partnership™ Diagnostic
- Immersive Trainings for Executives Leading Change
- Breakthrough Gender Partnership™ Projects
- Senior Leader Steering Committee
- C-Suite Coaching Structure
- Immersive Trainings for Optimizing Recruiting and Hiring
- E-Learning and New-Employee Orientation Gender Partnership™ Programs
Here are some of the projected outcomes of the multi-year Gender Partnership™ Initiative at your organization.
- Executive men and women who are engaged and equipped to deliver exceptional business outcomes through being gender savvy and engaging in cross-gender relationships distinguished by superior collaboration.
- Measurable improvement in key opportunities for women in the company in terms of hiring, coaching, mentoring, sponsoring, promotions, and other success metrics that build on the Gender Partnership™ Initiative’s breakthrough projects and engagements.
- Better retention of high-potential and high-performing women.
- Among men in the company, an emerging fluency in how to build more effective relationships with their female colleagues in order to get more done, faster and better, thus fueling their own career opportunities.
- Leveraging their learning about gender differences (such as use of language, behaviors, and preferences) to grow connections with customers for new revenue; and with suppliers, partners, and other external parties for new and improved collaboration.
- Creating an organizational culture with a level of transparency that your underrepresented and millennial employees expect.
- Tangibly demonstrating to women that the organization’s culture is becoming more inclusive, through actions they participate in and benefit from.
- Giving women the agility to navigate the business impact of varying gender norms so they can work productively with populations across global markets that may still evince gender bias and practice micro-aggressions.
- Creating an influence center for disruptive inclusion, that is making your organization a place where people approach gender diversity very differently. (For example, men will listen more to women in meetings and acknowledge them more for their ideas. They will demand to work on gender-balanced teams. For folks who are used to “business as usual,” these changes will appear disruptive.)
- Sourcing innovative solutions from your diverse in-house talent and from the broadest possible marketplace, and driving ally development across all your selected dimensions of diversity.
- Branding the company as a global leader where women and men thrive.