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Brain Circuits
Is your leadership machinery impeding progress for women?
Consult the Power Triad below, then use the checklist to assess whether your systems are standing in the way of women’s progression.
The Power Triad: Redesigning the machinery of leadership
Redesigning leadership machinery means shifting from reliance on individual goodwill to creating a system that consistently produces equitable access to opportunity, accountability in decision-making, and predictable outcomes in executive advancement.
To redress the balance in terms of who reaches the top, organizations must redesign the mechanisms that decide who becomes visible, who gains critical experience, and who is actively advanced. This can be understood as a Power Triad that targets these three control points simultaneously:
Checklist
Executive feeder roles
- Have we formally designated executive feeder roles, and are we governing them accordingly?
- Have we established minimum thresholds for every business unit?
- Do we publish annual gender access rates for these positions?
Sponsorship
- Have we made sponsorship a formal leadership obligation?
- Are we evaluating executives on the women they actively sponsor?
- Does this include stretch roles secured, promotions achieved, visibility created with boards and decision forums, and succession-slate nominations made?
Succession slates
- How are we capturing institutional memory of who is actually being prepared for power?
- Are we striving for a gender-balanced slate of 40–60% ‘ready now’ and ‘ready soon’ candidates for every executive role at vice president level and above?
- Is the executive committee reviewing this metric quarterly and flagging roles that fail to meet this standard as risky, with named executive owners, corrective action plans, and deadlines?
Key takeaway
Women’s progress to the most senior echelons of leadership has been impeded by systemic failures. You cannot fix a broken ladder by coaching the climbers: you fix it by rebuilding the ladder.
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