THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Case Study
Thomson Reuters Invests in Future Female Leaders
Winner of the 2020 Minnesota Technology Association Tekne award for Tech Talent – Corporate Initiatives.
By: Rick King
A lmost a decade ago, leaders at Thomson Reuters identified a problem: there were too few women in their technology practice, and even fewer held leadership positions. As Executive Vice President of Operations at Thomson Reuters at the time, I was eager to engage in fixing the problem. I reached out to Susan Davis-Ali, Ph.D., founder and President of Leadhership1 and an expert on the retention and advancement of women technologists.
CONTRIBUTING FACTORS TO RETENTION & ADVANCEMENT Three key factors contribute to the retention and advancement of women technologists, and these factors are the building blocks of the Leadhership1 program. They include: 1. Goal clarity 2. Confidence to achieve career goals 3. A strong network of women in an organization Leadhership1 graduates report significant increases on each of the three key factors comparing metrics before and after the program.
When Susan and I talked about pilot testing the Leadhership1 program at Thomson Reuters, our goal was to stop mid-career departures of our valued women technologists. We studied various factors leading to resignation, and Susan designed a program to change the outcomes. Eleven years and nearly 1,000 female executives later, we continue to achieve our goals. Fast forward to 2020, and the world is in the middle of a global pandemic. While many companies hit pause on their training and development programs, we at Thomson Reuters launched our tenth cohort of women in the virtual Leadhership1 program without a hitch. From its inception, Susan designed the Leadership1 program to be virtual. Our latest cohort included 150 women from all around the world who experienced the program the same way the previous nine had – entirely online and virtual. With a decade of data supporting the online virtual leadership development model, we can disregard the naysayers who said cohort-based leadership development could never be as effective as the more expensive, traditional face-to-face models. Even before the pandemic, we saw the need for more affordable and accessible training to help companies cast a wider net and invest in cultivating diverse talent earlier in the pipeline. Susan was confident that the answer was a virtual, online model and pointed to online dating success. “If people can fall in love online,” she would remind me, “they certainly could acquire leadership development skills online.”
Figure 1: Key Outcomes of the Leadhership1 Program
30 | Retaining a Diverse Workforce
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