The problem: Organizations are still struggling with building sustainable pipelines of female talent with a clear path to the CEO role.
Why it matters: Despite gains in the number of female CEOs in recent years, experts worry that momentum may stall out.
The solution: Accelerate female leadership through deliberate career-mapping, incentives for managers, and early board access.
Kate Stevenson credits landing her first public company board role with the opportunity to build her reputation with her own board of directors. When she was a telecommunications executive at a company steering through a crisis, she found herself suddenly playing a leading role in board briefings. At one point, Stevenson says she was presenting in front of the board “every single week.”
Though she didn’t know it at the time, that experience would set her on a path of board service for the rest of her career. She had built a rapport with her board, which gave her the benefit of mentorship that directly led to her landing her first director role. One of the members of her company’s board also doubled as the Lead Director of a Nasdaq-listed company’s board, which had a vacant seat that it wanted to fill with a financial expert to help navigate newly instituted audit and accounting disclosure regulations born from the passing of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. He recommended Stevenson to the firm running the search, and she not only got the open seat but also was named chair of the audit committee. “My exposure to the board when I was in management led to sponsorship from one of our board members,” says Stevenson, who has served on numerous corporate boards and currently chairs the board of CIBC.
Having board exposure as an executive, both to her own company’s board and as a director on an outside board, led to a supportive circle of advisors —Stevenson refers to such access as a “golden ticket” to professional growth and top leadership opportunities. Indeed, according to a new study of 21 female CEOs—a post-COVID update to the landmark “Women CEOs Speak” study in 2017—early board service is an integral part that women leaders say leads to the top role. Roughly 70% of the female CEOs in the study said serving on boards early in their careers helped develop leadership skills, boosted visibility, and prepared them to manage their own boards once they became CEOs. And to get there, they said, they need to be put in the right leadership positions, less in roles as in human resources and marketing and more in functional enterprise-wide roles with profit and loss responsibilities. The problem: “The kind of systemic change needed to put women on clear tracks for CEO and board director positions is not happening fast enough,” says Tanya van Biesen, managing partner of Korn Ferry’s Board and CEO Services practice for Canada.