Owning your leadership

Who It's For

Women leaders and aspiring leaders in local government, health, housing and voluntary organisations, and those who sponsor them

Overview

At senior levels good work rarely speaks for itself. The first half of the Immerse Leading on your own terms begins with leadership identity and confidence through Ely, Ibarra and Kolb, Eagly's meta-analysis and Dame Stephanie Shirley, then visibility, non-promotable work and amplification in the Obama White House. It explores sponsorship through the Xerox succession from Anne Mulcahy to Ursula Burns, negotiation and pay through the BBC cases of Carrie Gracie and Samira Ahmed and the glass cliff, and bias from role congruity to Crenshaw's intersectionality. It rounds off with Jacinda Ardern, fair sponsorship by design and leading self through values.

Aims

What it sets out to do is help women leaders shape how they are seen, ask for what their work is worth and navigate bias with clear sight, while equipping everyone who holds influence to build sponsorship that is fair by design rather than left to familiarity.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Explain how leadership identity forms and use research on visibility and non-promotable work to shape how your contribution is seen.
2. 2Plan a negotiation about pay or role, drawing on the BBC equal pay cases and an awareness of the risks of the glass cliff.
3. 3Design fairer sponsorship in your organisation, recognising double binds and intersectionality and acting from your own values.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Explain how leadership identity develops through being seen, and seeing yourself, as a leader, and why identity comes before skills.
2. 2Explain how non-promotable work and credit attribution create a visibility gap, and plan a strategic no or a fairer sharing of that work.
3. 3Distinguish mentoring from sponsorship, using Kram's career and psychosocial functions and the evidence that mentoring alone does not lead to promotion.
4. 4Explain what the research shows about gender, starting negotiations and the social cost of asking, and why individual advice alone is not enough.
5. 5Explain second-generation gender bias, the double bind and role congruity theory, and how they shape the way capable women are judged.
6. 6Explain Ibarra's authenticity paradox and how adaptive authenticity lets your leadership identity grow while staying anchored in your values.
7. 7Explain how homophily, the broken rung and the glass cliff mean that sponsorship left to chance can reproduce existing advantage.
8. 8Distinguish stated from revealed values and use Goleman's five components of emotional intelligence to assess how you show up under pressure.