In an exciting article in CEO Monthly Office Space in Town Managing Director, Niki Fuchs, discusses her insights and learnings through her journey to becoming a female executive particularly in a male-dominated industry.
While today’s business environment is transitioning from being very male-dominated to being more inclusive, there are still barriers which women face in proving themselves, particularly in certain industries. The real estate and property sector is one such industry.
Niki highlights that although there need to be significant shifts within the corporate world before the benefits of gender diversity are fully embraced, nonetheless every female executive is able to make a difference day to day, and help to drive this change forward.
Constant learning
Being informed helps to drive good decisions. It is important to keep up to date with your team, your industry, your competition and the wider economic environment. It is also important to develop yourself as a leader, and this includes ensuring that your leadership team are not micro-managed but instead feel empowered and involved, whilst ensuring there is a balance approach to communication, reporting and effective decision making.
Planning for success
Some challenges can feel overwhelming at first, however, taking a step back, involving other people and encouraging them to think creatively about the problem, makes it easier to tackle in smaller chunks. Understanding what success looks like makes it easier to plan how to achieve it, and identify the right people to execute the plan.
Creative thinking
Successful female leaders bring diversity, different working styles and viewpoints into a leadership team, and therefore add creativity and innovation to the equation. Women often have valuable insights when designing successful products and services, in particular those that better serve female clients or children.
Inspire by example
In order to affect the changes necessary for more women to take up leadership roles it is important that there are role models in place to inspire the next generation. There are ambitious, successful women in positions of leadership, more needs to be done to shine a light on them. Likewise female leaders are powerfully placed to support other women to achieve positions of influence and power. This could be as simple as making an introduction, passing along an opportunity or investing time in mentoring another woman.
Read the full article here.
