By Rick Grbavac
Smart women in management make companies stronger and keeping them requires concentrated programs. This comes from the research that economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett performed in preparing her newest book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down. In tough times, “high-powered women were more than twice as likely as men - 84 percent compared with 40 percent - to be seriously thinking” of leaving their companies.
In her article “Are Your Best Female Employees a Flight Risk?” Hewlett asserts that women were not thinking about leaving to spend more time with their families but, rather, because “they no longer felt challenged by or passionate about their work.” So companies such as Intel and Johnson and Johnson have created programs to address issues directly related to their senior management women.
The idea in the article that jumped out at me was the idea of women managers losing their passion. I don’t think that this is a problem only for women executives. All knowledge workers from time to time need to re-energize and passion-up. The lull in business activity over the past year weighs heavily on all of us. It is time to re-vision, energize yourself and passion-up for this economic recovery.