Encouraging Women Into Senior Management Positions: How Coaching Can Help

Andrea Broughton and Linda Miller of the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) have just completed an international research project funded by The Foundation of Coaching, examining the factors underlying women’s progress through organisational structures and the reasons why women in senior management positions in the USA and in Europe decide to accept or decline board-level jobs.

Here is what they have to tell you:

We talked to women about the factors that encouraged and/or slowed their career progression, along with the reasons for their decisions regarding whether or not to take up board-level or senior management positions.

We hope that the research will inform the debate in the US and worldwide and illuminate the development of further coaching topics and strategies that might be needed to help greater numbers of women progress into board positions.

In particular, we aimed to answer the following research questions:
■ what are the main perceived barriers to moving into corporate board-level management, from the point of view of women managers?
■ what types of interventions and coaching are currently offered to women managers to enable them to move into board-level positions,
■ what lessons can be learned from the research to enable the coaching offered to women in the future to be improved and/or extended?
■ are there any differences or similarities between the situation and approach in the countries examined; and if there are differences, what are the lessons that can be learned and could best practice and coaching guidance be transferred across national boundaries?

We first carried out a literature review in order to find out what the key issues were for women in managerial positions in organisations, and the types of studies that had already been conducted on the factors that may help or hinder their progression in organisations. We then conducted semi-structured interviews either face-to-face or by telephone with experts and with senior women in Germany, Greece, Sweden, the USA and the UK. A mixture of senior women were interviewed, some of whom had held board-level positions and some had not. A mixture of techniques was adopted to obtain the sample, including gaining contact through women’s network organisations and academic institutions, snowballing, and through further contacts made when carrying out interviews of expert representatives. In total, 32 interviews were carried out.

Our interviewees had experienced a range of barriers to progression into senior management and board-level positions. These included perceptions about women’s management style, difficulties with masculine organisational cultures, general experiences of discrimination, difficulties in gaining the right experience and gaining access to the right people in an organisation in order to be able to advance. Other issues discussed included overall confidence problems, the difficulties caused by having non-linear careers, and the problems of family commitments.

We asked interviewees how coaching could help them to progress in organisations and to overcome some of the barriers they outlined. From their responses, it is clear that coaching can make a key contribution. The areas in which coaching can help women progress into senior positions included:
■ Confidence building
■ Providing a sounding board for ideas
■ Dealing with organisational cultures
■ Networking
■ Identifying values and goals
■ Identifying and obtaining access to development opportunity
■ Making the right impression
■ Coping with a new role
■ Achieving specific goals

In addition, it was recommended that coaching be offered as early as possible as well as at key career transition points and that coaching for men – as key gatekeepers to board-level positions – should focus on what they can do to help move more women into senior positions.

We hope that this research has fulfilled its original aim of increasing understanding of the factors that influence the career progression of female managers and believe that it provides a useful contribution to the debate.

We next plan to turn our attention to the particular issues faced by people from ethnic minorities in gaining support for progression into senior positions at work, and are currently exploring potential sources of funding for this work.

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Andrea Broughton is a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies (IES), where she has worked since 2006. She has a first degree in modern languages (French and German) and a Masters in international industrial relations and human resource management. She has 19 years of experience of research and writing in the areas of employment relations and industrial relations, specialising in international comparative research. She has managed a wide range of qualitative international research projects in the employment and labour market areas. From 1996 to 2006 she was editor of European Industrial Relations Review, published by Industrial Relations Services (IRS). From 1996 to 2006 she also led the IRS team that functioned as the EU-level national centre for the European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO), managed by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, Dublin, Ireland. She currently undertakes regular surveys for the European Foundation and is also working in collaboration with the ILO on social dialogue projects. Specific areas of interest include workplace-level industrial relations, social dialogue, employee involvement, information and consultation, restructuring and change management, and work-life balance issues.

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Linda Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies in the UK. She was previously a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, where she taught training and development on the Masters course in occupational and organizational psychology. Over the last twenty years much of Linda’s research has examined factors influencing individual’s choice of education, training and employment and the impact of gender segregation and stereotyping on these life choices. A second strand of research has looked at development of individuals working the health sector and organizational development and service delivery in the health sector. Recently she has been involved in the evaluation of coaching initiatives in the health service and in local government and she has just completed a project with Andrea Broughton looking at coaching aimed at encouraging women to take up board level positions. This last project was funded by the Foundation of Coaching. Linda is Europe Editor of the International Journal of Training and Development and is a member of the Editorial teams for the International Journal of Training Research and Research in Post-compulsory Education.