Unlocking the Power of Gender Diversity

Jenelle CobbIt’s a fact, diversity matters – from the front lines of the workplace to a company’s bottom line. According to a recent McKinsey & Company report, the link between diversity and company financial performance has never been stronger, yet while gender and ethnic diversity are clearly correlated with profitability, “Women and minorities remain underrepresented.” That diversity is key on the executive level too, and McKinsey’s research finds that “gender diversity on executive teams is strongly correlated with profitability and value creation.”

Unlocking the power of diversity for men and women, and overcoming barriers to leadership requires Jenelle Cobb’s special understanding of diversity dynamics. A former software executive turned entrepreneur and business coach, Jenelle works with business leaders as a coach and mentor with a focus on conscious leadership, empowering her clients to accelerate their impact, ignite their teams and make a difference in the health and well-being of everyone involved.

How does unlocking the power of diversity help men, and women? Jenelle said her experiences as a female in very male dominated industry led her to believe that most men don’t know what to do. It’s not that they’re not supportive, but no one has given them a language pattern or a set of standards or behaviors of which to aspire to, or to model.

Encouraging the dialog, and helping her clients leverage the power of their differences across their teams has shown her that diversity can help teams succeed and enable women to do their best work. Jenelle said, “I really care about the gender differences in the workplace and have realized that now I actually get to help men be part of the solution for this rather than blame or shame them.”

With two stepdaughters recently graduating and entering the workforce, Jenelle feels an increased urgency to create a better workplace culture and support everyone’s best work. That’s why she, and her stepdaughter Nikki, decided to put together the Gender Diversity Master Class. “In the Master Class we’ll be talking about diversity and inclusion, creating a more trusting work culture; we’ll talk about empowerment for women, leadership skills in general, and then lastly about male sponsors and allies, calling them out now more specifically than ever,” she said.

“I’ve learned a lot during the Master Class, and one thing was that everyone gets to be an ally. It’s not just men, and it’s not just certain types of men, it’s women and men together,” Jenelle added. “Whether you identify as male or as female, you have a role to play in your work life, as an ally, as a sponsor to someone else.”

Allies can make a big difference in terms of progress. As Dr. Nancy points out in her book, In This Together, “Asking men to help can create significant gains. In 2017 BCG released a sweeping workplace gender diversity study, ‘Getting the Most from Your Diversity Dollars’ that involved more than 17,500 participants in twenty-one countries. Exhibit 5 in the report indicates that 96 percent of respondents reported progress in companies where men were actively involved in gender diversity, compared to only 30 percent at companies where men didn’t actively promote diversity. That’s a huge difference!”

Jenelle agrees and finds that when you leverage the power of all of the differences – not just gender and ethnicity, but skillsets, points of view, work experience, backgrounds, and experiences, you are able to create a better solution or product in the marketplace. “There are more ideas behind it. It’s not a central idea that gets refined to a pencil point; it’s a collection of pens and pencils that all get looked at and discussed. When we start to leverage each individual’s own unique strengths instead of the strength of a single person or point of view, the product and solution just gets phenomenally better. A diverse leadership team delivers better on the bottom line.”

To access Jenelle’s FREE Gender Diversity Master Class, learn how to leverage the power of differences across your team, and empower women to do their best work, register HERE.

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