I love working with women, because they are naturally empathetic and nurturing, exceptionally good listeners, great at multitasking, and typically all-round strong communicators. They have a strong focus on teamwork, are flexible, able to wear many hats, and are incredibly capable in a crisis — often making their difficult jobs appear effortless.
Top that with a high level of emotional intelligence, and the ability to dream big (while leaving egos at the door), and you’ve got a powerful formula for business leadership. In fact, research published in the Harvard Business Review revealed that women in leadership roles were just as competent as their male peers, and more effective in 84% of frequently measured leadership skills.
Why Women Excel as Leaders
Initiative, Resilience & Development
Women leaders often take initiative, persist through challenges, and pursue self-improvement while uplifting those around them. However – despite these strengths – many women tend to underestimate their own achievements, which can hold them back.
The Confidence Gap
The Harvard Business Review also found that women often rate themselves lower in self-reflection tasks compared to men, who generally express more confidence in their capabilities. Additionally, women are less likely to apply for a role unless they meet all qualifications, while men will often apply even if they meet only some.
The Power of Emotion & Feedback
Many of the traits that make women strong leaders — empathy, emotional intelligence, receptiveness to feedback — also enable them to create stronger, more resilient teams. Women are often more open to constructive criticism, able to reflect non-judgmentally on decisions, and willing to adjust course when needed.
Leadership isn’t about how loudly you speak or how many titles you hold. True leadership is measured by team performance and how you nurture potential. Women often excel here because of their natural attentiveness to wellbeing, communication, and trust.
Leadership in Action: Real Examples
- Indra Nooyi — As former CEO of PepsiCo, she led the company for over 12 years and grew sales by 80%. Her success was built not just through business acumen, but her personable leadership style, ability to overcome challenges, and long-term vision.
- Michelle Obama — Rather than staying confined to the traditional First Lady role, she used her platform to advocate for education, health, and community empowerment — showing how leadership can extend beyond formal titles.
These figures show how effective leadership isn’t about domination but about inspiration, clarity, empathy, and adaptability. Women often bring all of those qualities to the table.
Embrace Your Leadership Potential
Studies consistently show that women tend to be more receptive to feedback and better at self-awareness — critical traits for growth. With a strong emotional IQ, women are able to read & respond to the emotions of those around them. This helps in team building, conflict resolution, and leading with authenticity.
As a coach with Business House Group, I’m passionate about helping smart women break through perceived barriers, step into their full strength, and lead with purpose. If you have a vision, a dream, or a business you want to elevate, let’s chat – together, we can be unstoppable.
References:
https://hbr.org/2019/06/research-women-score-higher-than-men-in-most-leadership-skills https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2019/03/04/women-make-great-leaders-four-ways-to-embrace-and-advance-your-leadership-skills/#559453ecf35c
How to make your company irresistible to outstanding talent…
I have segmented this blog post into two sections – starting with the high level, straight to the point home hitters, followed by the detailed, max the juice, extended version for those of you who want to get as much out of this topic as possible.
Let’s get emotional – people work for you for their reasons, not yours. If you align your reasons with theirs, magic happens.
Everything we do is to seek pleasure, or avoid pain. Do your homework, find out what ideal team members desire in their lives, short term and long term, and what displeasure they wish to avoid.
Get to know your team’s emotional drivers.
Create, refine and perfect a dynamic recruitment system.
Hire slow, fire fast.
The right team will build your business – remember, business is a team sport!
The more control you have, the slower your business will grow, the less control you have, the faster your business will grow.
OK – if that’s not quite enough for you, read on for a more in-depth look at creating your winning team…
The challenge for any growing business is to attract and engage the right team to take their business where they want to go. As we talked about in our previous blog, the starting point must always be the creation of a strategic plan, setting of measurable goals and milestones, the scoping of divisions, combined with a skills gap analysis, and last but definitely not least, the identification and articulation of the business’s core values.
Having outlined plan for particular areas of growth, you may well find a proposition emerging that will require a whole new skills base.
An organisational structure needs to be created, with all roles clearly defined and fully described. This will allow you to approach the process systematically, starting with the pivotal roles to the company’s next phase of growth, then matching appropriate talent, personal values and skills to each of the newly defined roles.
In this part of the blog, we’re going to look a little more closely into what it takes to attract the right people – and ‘speak to their hearts’. If that sounds a bit ‘soft’ for your tastes, stick with us and let us explain further…
Here’s a typical job advertising scenario you can probably identify with this.
- The management team carefully create a detailed a job description, and reporting line.
- They write an ad that contains an overview of said job description and position within the company.
- The ad is launched, and the team wait for the applications to flood in with much excitement and anticipation.
- Hmmm, so the response has been a little underwhelming, but the team stride ahead undeterred, and send the full job description to the candidates that expressed an interest.
- A shortlist is made, and interviews conducted, at which time, the job description is discussed in detail, along with terms, conditions, pay rates, holidays etc. etc.
Disappointingly, despite the team’s efforts, the exercise has netted them just a couple of viable candidates – neither of which really fulfil the criteria of their vision for the role.
Where does it go wrong?
It’s all a matter of perspective – the team don’t necessarily do anything ‘wrong’ – they simply approach the task as most people do. They see the role as a job they need to fill, a set of skills and professional accomplishments to which they need to match a candidate.
This, of course is a requirement, but laying out a job description and a list of tasks is not going to connect with a living, breathing person, full of their own ambitions, hopes and professional dreams. It won’t reach their heart, capture their imagination or fire their passion. And the candidates you’re missing the mark with are the very people you want in your business.
So what’s the right way?
First, remember that although important, a job description is little more than a tick list, which will never stimulate the calibre of professional you hope to entice. It’s essential to understand what might drive the profile of candidate you are looking to recruit. Perhaps you need a true visionary, an inspirational leader, an innovative thinker, pioneering and passionate. So where do you find these people?
You don’t! You attract them.
You need to create an advertisement that is so compelling, they simply can’t ignore it. No job description, no list of tasks – these are pretty smart people, who can work such things out for themselves!
What to do instead, is create a vision of the future they can identify with. Paint a picture of your dynamic, young, home-grown, Australian company, taking on the world and changing the future of your industry (for example). Allow them to picture themselves in the role, spearheading their division, building an elite team, driving the business forward, feeling the thrill of their achievements.
To help you do this, as mentioned in our opening, you need to take a deep dive into the soul of your company to identify its passion and reveal its stories. Only then can you write a story of your own, to attract like-minded souls into the fold.
It’s also smart to conduct some research into the profile of the demographic / psychographic group you are targeting. Take the time to understand how to communicate with these immensely passionate people and create a vision that they want to be a part of.
When Steve Jobs convinced John Sculley to leave Pepsi with the famous line: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” I can’t help but wonder if he’d have been as quite successful in his recruitment endeavours if he’d simply handed Sculley a job description.
Jobs knew who he wanted, understood what made him tick and enticed him with a dream that ignited his passion.
The world is ever changing and the world of recruitment is changing with it. We are all much more in touch with our emotions than ever before – we respond daily to the stories of advertisers, retailers, brands, industry and technology leaders, etc. etc.
Why should recruitment be any different?
As business leaders, we are no longer recruiters – we are storytellers, in the business of attraction. Connecting people with an idea, identifying with their purpose and compelling them to reach out to the employers that share their values and beliefs.
This approach, admittedly, requires a great deal more work up-front. Crafting the right story takes a lot of research, but it’s well worth the effort. Learning about your ideal candidate takes just as much work, but is the most important thing – you need to learn who they really are and what they care about.
Getting to know people in your industry, and spending time with them, and even on industry forums can be a good source of intelligence. It’s important to really listen to people talk freely about what they love, hate, want and feel. Knowing what your ideal candidates are looking for from their current or next roles makes it much easier to plan how you can attract them and motivate them to apply. Take particular notice of the actual language people are using, so you can hit exactly the right tone with your communication and form an immediate connection.
What’s Interesting, is that with a killer recruitment strategy such as this, businesses frequently find that many of the candidates they attract, had not actually been looking for a new job – the communication simply struck a chord with them.
So, next time you have a role to fill, take the time to really think about the kind of person you’re looking for. Invest time to understand what drives them and therefore what will attract them to you.
Your next great leader may not even be thinking about a career move, so how can you compel them to apply, when a new challenge is currently not on their radar?
If you’d like a guidance chart of how to create a superb add, email me with the subject – FREE AD CHART and I will send it to you.
You can have the most amazing product or service, off the charts customer relations, heaps of passion and a great eye for innovation, but without the right team of people in your business, your success will be limited.
In fact, getting the right team in place, as part of your strategic plan is one of the single most important factors in the success of any business.
Yet most small to medium businesses – of say, 50 people or less, have no recruitment strategy or clear vision of what their dream-team looks like.
I’m generalising, of course, but let’s look at the way most businesses of this size approach talent acquisition – typically those with no HR function or dedicated executive with responsibility for the workforce.
- Recruitment tends to be ad hoc and reactive:
- Someone leaves and needs to be replaced
- A skills set is identified as lacking and needs to be filled
- (As Bigweld (Robots movie) would say, “See a need, fill a need.” Maybe I watch too much Disney ;))
- A division of the business grows faster than others and needs more staff.
- An ad is quickly put together and circulated – or maybe someone knows someone, who knows someone that could do the job.
- I’m exaggerating to make a point, but the point is there is no strategic approach to attracting exactly the right talent to support the business’s future development and success – no plan.
- The approach is messy and lacks organisation.
Successful recruitment system
So now let’s look at a successful recruitment system.
First, it’s important to understand that people, both the people you currently employ and those you want to employ, (and yes, you too) have a wide variety of different behavioural profiles and personal values.
People behave according to belief systems they have built in their minds over time – or have trained themselves to believe – or their environment has trained them to believe.
What each of us holds to be true directly affects the way we will behave in the work place and how we interact with colleagues.
Understanding this fact is critically important when attracting talent.
There are two layers of behavioural profiling to navigate. First and foremost, we need to ensure all new team members, share the cultural values of the company. This is far more important than specific skills, qualifications, or experience. If these values are aligned, you’ll find almost no issue becomes insurmountable, skill gaps can be easily addressed, and any problems will be quickly resolved.
Going a layer deeper, we then need to understand the belief systems that are typically associated with people in different types of roles. A sales department candidate will have very different beliefs to that of an accountant or contracts manager. For example;
The belief systems of an accountant might be:
- The devil is in the detail
- It is bad to make mistakes
- The rules prevent anarchy
Whereas, the belief systems of a sales professional might be:
- “Life is about the people we meet.”
- “Success is in relationships.”
- “The happier I make people, the more success I will have.”
Now let’s backtrack to the first point – how do we ensure the values of our recruits are fully aligned with our business?
We need to get very clear on what is culturally important to the business and the management team. We call these our core values.
If you haven’t yet identified and articulated your core values, it should be at the top of your ‘to-do list’.
Once you’ve done this, it’s a worthwhile exercise to assess your existing workforce against your defined values. If you have any problem staff, chances are it’s because, a) their values are inconsistent with your company values, and/or b) their belief systems are not appropriate for the role in which they are employed.
Now we have our core values, we need to create a business plan. This should outline your vision for the company, and defined goals, objectives and outcomes you want to achieve in the next 1, 3 and 5 years.
Once this plan is in place, we are better able to identify the roles and team structure we will need in the short, medium and long term – and create profiles of the team members we need to help us reach our goals and business vision.
We can create divisions in the business, underpinned with an organisational structure, defining the roles and activities required to drive the business. We can plan where each role sits, combined with the characteristics we need in all our employees – as well as those required for specific roles.
Now we can create a great set of interview questions that are fully aligned with our values, and compile a compelling advertisement.
- Examples of our favourite interview questions:
- What is most appealing to you about this role?
- What makes you feel you are very valued?
- What needs to happen for you to feel like leaving a company?
- Who is someone you respect? And Why?
- Who is someone you don’t respect? And Why?
We also suggest once you have identified your company values, come up with 2 questions related to each of them in your interview process.
Components of a great ad:
- First we need to create a vision of the future our candidates can identify with.
- Then, outline who we are – our reason for being, our core values, our leadership style, etc.
- Describe who we are looking for (qualities and character style – rather than skills or qualifications)
- Highlight 3 main benefits of working in our company
- And finally, provide a role outline and skills required
Yes, in that order – create the vision, sell the dream, build the attraction.
Before you hit them with a job description.
Finally, we reach the interview process.
Depending on the number of applicants, you may need to make a shortlist based on submitted CVs.
Then pre-qualify a final shortlist by conducting telephone interviews.
Only hold direct interviews with people as close as possible to your defined profile – don’t be swayed by impressive qualifications or experience if the cultural fit is not right – the appointment will never be a success.
At interview time, we also conduct behavioural profile assessments to gain a deeper understanding of our candidates’ values, beliefs and preferences.
If appropriate to the role, candidates may be asked to take part in a trial, or complete a task.
For general staff, one face-to-face interview should be enough to establish their suitability for the role in question.
For executive level staff, more than one interview may be required with key members of the management team.
Once appointed, a probationary period follows (usually 3 or 6 months). It needs to be really clear to successful candidates that the recruitment process is not finished until the probation period is complete. This is our opportunity to check we are a good fit for each other.
And remember, it’s ok to let someone go if they turn out not to be the right fit.
The best advice is to recruit slowly and fire fast, as soon as it becomes apparent the match is not a good one. This may feel brutal, but is most definitely in the best interest of both, the company and the employee – who could be flourishing in a more fitting role or team culture.
Here are four examples of culture-based businesses that can be an inspiration to any business leader with a passion to embrace this route to success:
Zappos
Zappos continually reinforces its corporate culture, through (among other things) creating a particular working environment that epitomises the company’s core values. Zappos accept that this environment is not right for everyone, and won’t attract every job searcher, and that’s ok. It’s not for every employee – but the people that do fit the corporate culture, absolutely thrive working for Zappos.
Read more about Zappos culture and working practices here:
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/zappos-company-culture-1918813
Amazon
Amazon has manifested its core values into defined Leadership Principles that guide every manager and member of staff in the business, and is employed daily as their recruitment framework.
Learn Amazon’s Leadership Principals here:
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
TJX Companies
This US retail giant has a global presence of over 3800 stores. You may know them in Australia as TK Maxx.
TJX is notoriously media shy and there is little published about their corporate culture, but I happen to know one of their senior executives.
My contact was employed by TJX simply because they felt he was a strong fit with their corporate culture. There was no specific role available at the time, but the match was more important to them. He was flown over to their HQ in the US, where he spent 3 months immersed in the culture before they matched him to the perfect role.
This may seem like an unusual approach, but if you needed any evidence that their culture-driven model is a successful one, check out these two articles:
https://www.wayup.com/guide/community/tjx-companies-inc-1115328-sponsored-work-life-balance
Job site, ‘Comparably’ named Google as the tech company with the best corporate culture for 2018. Stories of the company’s employee perks and unspeakably cool workspaces, have become corporate folklore, but the culture goes much deeper than that, and is largely responsible for its incredible growth and market domination.
What’s interesting about the Comparably award, is that to determine the winner, they asked employees of the shortlisted companies to anonymously rate their organisations—and those anonymous voters said Google was tops.
Delve into Google’s core values here: