Women in Leadership: A Strategic Vision

We at CC&L Investment Management believe that if we can successfully tackle the key issues contributing to the leadership gender imbalance, we will substantially broaden the talent pool from which great leaders emerge and create better business outcomes.

This belief led to the founding of our Women in Leadership (WiL) initiative in 2021, which focuses on expanding leadership talent by identifying and addressing issues that have contributed to gender gaps within our organization, industry and society at large.

The work of our collective initiative has resulted in recommendations for new strategic priorities that directly target issues uncovered through discussions and research. An important – and unexpected – discovery has been that the solutions identified to break down the leadership gender imbalance also solve issues that extend beyond gender. In other words, while our focus began with women, the outcomes of our recommendations benefit everyone.

What follows is a high-level summary of WiL’s findings and proposed solutions; however, if you’re interested in learning more about our work, we would love to connect. Please contact us through this link.

Collaborating to unleash potential

Led by a committee with engagement from the majority of women in our organization, WiL’s primary objectives are:

1. Identifying the root causes and key issues regarding gender imbalance both within and outside of our organization.
2. Proposing solutions to proactively right size that imbalance.

Underpinning our initiative is a considerable volume of academic, media and industry research on workplace gender (in)equality. In aggregate, these findings overwhelmingly point to a systemic and persistent theme that spans almost every industry: the more senior, technical and higher-profile the jobs, the smaller the proportion of women in these roles.

We recognize that many drivers of gender inequality are outside our organization’s control, but also that our interconnectedness as industry players and members of society has tangible implications for CC&L’s ability to effect change.

Our approach in action

When examining this multi-dimensional problem, we took a bottom-up approach as to why women weren’t reaching their full potential at work. For instance, we conducted extensive interviews internally and externally as well as brainstorming sessions and in-depth research. Through this process, we identified key issues facing women in our workplace and distilled these further to determine their underlying root causes. From there, we crafted solutions to directly address the most important root causes. This involved breaking down the WiL initiative into four key areas:

A brighter future for all

We adopted a gender-neutral approach in designing our solutions, which not only promotes inclusivity and diversity but also enhances the overall quality of our work environment. While the task of implementing the more than 20 solutions (outlined in our full report) may seem ambitious, we believe that by breaking it down into smaller, actionable steps, we can effectively prioritize and execute our recommendations over a multi-year period, ensuring we achieve our objectives. We expect that the WiL initiative will continue to grow and evolve over time as needs and expectations change through the implementation process.  This will likely result in periodic adjustments to the longer-term implementation roadmap.

By coming together to reinforce a culture of fairness, open dialogue and opportunities, we create conditions for success. With this in mind, we are hopeful that the positive impacts of our WiL initiative will ripple across our organization and into the communities where we live and do business – leading to better leadership, stronger teams and a brighter future for all.