Back on Track: Helping Women Leaders Thrive in the Face of Derailment

While significant progress has been made in recent years for women in terms of advancement into management positions, fewer women are advancing into and remaining in senior leadership roles. Often, women leaders don’t receive the developmental support they need to effectively manage the challenges they encounter as leaders. Our ongoing research on derailment and resiliency indicates that coaching can play an instrumental role in helping women leaders not just survive, but thrive, when faced with potentially derailing work challenges.

Career derailment occurs when an individual who was placed in leadership role in an organization and judged to have the ability to be successful in this role is instead perceived not to be capable. This perception can result in the leader being demoted, fired, asked to resign or forced out of the organization. Career derailment can be a challenging, painful and life-changing experience.

Resiliency is one of several potential outcomes of the coping process people use when faced with adversity. Although resilient people bounce back from adversity, it does not necessarily mean they were transformed by the experience.

Thriving involves growth beyond the pre-adversity baseline level of functioning and is often a conscious choice people can make when faced with tough times.

Through our interviews with Executive Coaches, six strategies emerged that are critical for helping women leaders first establish resiliency and ultimately thrive when faced with career derailment:

1. Strengthening support networks, including both personal and professional relationships.

2. Enhancing self-care, including diet and exercise.

3. Building self-awareness.

4. Broadening coping skills, including reframing adversity, asking for help and embracing a growth mindset.

5. Actualizing strengths, including confidence, self-regard
and self-esteem.

6. Clarifying purpose, including core values, whole life perspective, and personal mission or purpose.

In addition to inviting clients to adopt the six resiliency strategies, we found that Executive Coaches needed to demonstrate an especially high level of competence in five specific ICF Core Competencies:

Establishing Trust and Intimacy with the Client: The ability for the coach to create a safe and supportive environment based on mutual trust was very important, especially in situations where the client did not choose coaching.

Coaching Presence: Given the nature of derailment, the coach had to be comfortable working with strong emotions without being overpowered.

Creating Awareness: The coach was required to create awareness in a very direct way to defuse the denial the client may have been experiencing and to help the client recognize the choices she had to grow from adversity.

Designing Actions: The actions that the coach and client co-created were critical to developing the ability to develop the resiliency that could lead to transformation.

Managing Progress and Accountability: Because of the visibility of the coaching engagement with key stakeholders, demonstrating progress and maintaining accountability was essential for both the client and the coach.

The leaders were able to thrive personally and professionally when the six strategies were combined with skillful coaching. The four transformative outcomes that women leaders experienced were improved self-development, stronger support networks, enhanced leadership skills and increased professional success.

The most common outcome for women leaders facing derailment was improved self-development and satisfaction that transcended their professional lives into personal domains. A major component of this outcome was increased self-awareness. The clients gained greater awareness of their own
value and talents, leading to enhanced confidence, presence and ability to advocate for themselves. As a result, many of these women leaders set stronger boundaries with their professional duties, allowing them achieve a more satisfying balance between their work and personal lives.

Enhanced resiliency for the women leaders took the form of stronger support networks in both the personal and professional domains. This included extending or broadening their networks and deepening existing relationships. In some cases, the women leaders being coached had lost a number of their professional connections when they lost their jobs. This led many of them to reach out in their personal lives to form new supportive relationships. Many of the women also drew upon the support offered by their spouses or significant others.

Many of the women leaders who received coaching enhanced or augmented their leadership skills, demonstrating increased delegation to and accountability for direct reports, clearer identity as a leader, improved professional appearance, and increased assertiveness at work.

Finally, despite experiencing career derailment, a number of women landed new, better compensated leadership roles in their current organizations or new, more satisfying job opportunities in other organizations. Furthermore, some earned promotions and achieved significant performance improvements that benefited their organizations’ bottom lines.

Women leaders who face derailment present unique challenges to coaches as a result of the highly charged emotional intensity of the engagement and expectations of key organizational stakeholders. However, our research indicates that coaches can be instrumental in helping clients overcome these setbacks. Coaches who develop awareness of resilience-building strategies and skills with key coaching competencies can coach their clients to achieve transformational outcomes beyond mere survival. That is what the coaching profession is all about.