Happy New Year everyone. hope you all enjoyed the break and are settling back into 2013. With so much going on at Talking Talent right now we are approaching 2013 with a real sense of anticipation.
We’ve recently launched our Progression Coaching which places a firm focus on the next generation of board-level women and at the weekend I saw a good article in the Observer which highlighted how board representation is a challenge that will be with us for the medium term at the very least. The article was a great catch-all of the key issues which have dominated the media coverage of female talent in business over the past 12 months – pay gap, board level targets, non-executive vs. executive director representation – but as a footnote also referred to the level of representation one below the UK board.
The Guardian had analysed 50 of the most valuable companies in the UK and discovered that representation at executive committee level was at only 14%, so scarcely any better than one rung up the ladder at board level. It demonstrated how much time it’s going to take for the pipeline to correct itself, for the mistakes of the past to be rectified. The current senior layer of executives is a product of the environment of the past 10, 20 years, 30 years and so it’s what organisations are doing now which will shape the makeup and gender balance of the executive boards of 2020 and beyond. Of course, there is plenty of need to support the current senior executives as they strive to progress forward but the real paradigm shift will come from the makeup of the current pipeline, from the next generation of talent.
Waiting to see who will be knocking on the door for a board vacancy is not the time to try and help the next wave of high-talent women….by then many will already be lost to the commercial world.
