This week I had the opportunity to interview Sharon Hadary, Co-Author of How Women Lead: 8 Essential Strategies Successful Women Know.  Sharon Hadary is the former executive director of the Center for Women’s Business Research. Dr. Hadary has been a leader in creating social change for women for over two decades.

Her recent articles on women’s business leadership have appeared in Enterprising Women Magazine, MBE Magazine and she is widely quoted on the subject in the media. Currently, she is an adjunct professor at University of Maryland University College teaching leadership.

We covered so much in this interview! It was so inspiring!  The title of our 1-hour call was “How To Show Leadership Potential and Get Ahead In Your Career By Leading”

In the interview with Sharon Hadary we discussed:

• Common strategies of successful women leaders and how not to get stuck in lower level positions

• How a young professional woman just starting out can be viewed as having leadership potential and break into management.

• How to know your leadership strengths and enhance those strengths.

• The best approach to take for asking a woman in leadership to be your mentor

• How to be a manager when you are worried about how to manage your family life as well.

• What you can do daily to ensure that you develop as a leader.

This topic is more important than EVER right now because this is a new world for women in business.  Over half of all managerial and professional positions are held by women. Women are no longer as likely to face the challenge of being the “first” women or the “only” woman. There are now role models for us to learn from and the movement of women in the workforce is having a tremendous economic impact as well.

Mckinsey & Company estimates that America’s gross domestic product is about 25% higher than it would have been without the influx of women. For the first time in history, there is research showing that companies with more women in high-level positions report better financial performance than those with fewer women at these levels. Pepperdine University researchers found that 25 Fortune 500 firms with the best record of promoting women to senior positions are as much as 69% more profitable than the median Fortune 500 companies in their industries. (All statistics came from Sharon’s book, How Women Lead: 8 Essential Strategies Successful Women Know).

And these are all amazing statistics, BUT, despite the substantial evidence of the value that women bring to business leadership, their upward movement is not matching the rate of their overall movement into professional and managerial positions. Women get to middle management and stall.  The growth of numbers of women in executive positions and on boards of directors has remained flat for the last few years.

Other studies show women worldwide are still not advancing through the pipeline at the same rates as men, and women’s compensation has stayed relatively consistent in the last four years instead of getting better for top women executives. So, there is a need for us to learn more about what is holding women leaders back and to learn from other women who have overcome challenges and made it.