EXECUTIVE EDUCATION

Women’s Senior Leadership Program: Helping women in senior management positions move to the highest levels

When Marina Lubinsky, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Oakwood Temporary Housing, enrolled in the Women’s Senior Leadership Program, offered by the Center for Executive Women at the Kellogg School of Management, her job title was Vice President, Information Technology. She received a promotion to the senior management position she currently holds shortly before the end of the program. Lubinsky says there was a direct connection between the two.

“It was a good ceiling breaker for me,” she says. “Women have shown that they are excellent in general management. Through this program I learned what it takes to get to the next step, and that was invaluable to me.”

Lubinsky credits Oakwood Temporary Housing with having a strong commitment to developing key talent, despite the challenge of the economy. “Taking the program over a period of time and having the opportunity to go back and apply what was learned while the program was still going on was something that was really appealing to me,” she said.

She put her learning into action by recommending that Oakwood undertake a multi-million dollar investment in new technology, despite the economic environment, a project that put her negotiation skills to the test. “The change in my approach was to focus on the company's strategic objections,” she said. “How can this investment at this time help the company grow profitably?”

Building a Powerful Network
Lubinsky's classmate Marta Clark, Managing Director for Latin America and Caribbean at Adobe Systems Inc. in Miami, Florida, feels that the immediate value of the program came through a determination to expand her professional network and adjust the way she relates to her team. “It encouraged me to be more straight forward and get to the point with them,” she said, noting the value of taking her team “out of its comfort zone as part of moving forward. Change brings opportunity.”

To expand her professional network, Clark joined an organization in Miami named WorldCity, and participated in its CEO Club Breakfast sessions. As a direct result, she was nominated for and won an award as “International Business Woman of the Year” from the Organization of Women in International Trade.

Statistics Tell an Important Story
A recent study titled “Women Corporate Offices and Top Earners in the Fortune 500” done by Catalyst, reveals that only 2.4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women and only 9.4 percent of the highest corporate titles.

“Those are exactly the statistics that the Center for Executive Women is designed to address,” said Professor Victoria Medvec, Executive Director and Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School. “We focus on the question of why women are significantly underrepresented on boards of directors and among CEOs and senior officers of publicly held companies.”

The Center for Executive Women is dedicated to helping senior level women advance to top executive and board positions. Its home at the Kellogg School puts it in a unique position to draw upon the skills and research of the Kellogg faculty. “One thing we know about the current economy is that the business environment we will see as we emerge from the recession will be very different from what existed before,” said Medvec. “One of the best possible changes will be a much larger role for women in the most senior management positions. We are helping bring that vision to reality.”

Preparing for Senior Leadership Positions
The Women’s Senior Leadership Program is one of the flagship programs of the Center. Participants gather for four two-day sessions over the course of a year and senior members of the Kellogg faculty guide them through four main topics.

• The first session is built around the value of networks as a source of intelligence and power in an organization and techniques for making effective decisions.
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• The second focuses on the tools needed for the many different paths to success in an organization. Topics include strategies for motivating people, negotiation skills, and confident self-promotion.
  
  
• In the third session participants learn about driving change in their organization and techniques for generating support for new initiatives.
  
  
• The concluding session is built around managing outside influences on organizations, including stakeholders, Wall Street, and investors. Also included is how to work effectively with the board of directors.

Woven throughout the program, and one of its key components, is the CEW Leadership Tool. “We conducted interviews with successful female executives to create our own measure of what it takes for a woman to move to the highest levels in an organization,” said Medvec. “Each participant in the Senior Leadership Program learns where she stands with respect to these highly successful women and what it will take to move strongly in the direction of achieving similar success.”