Why comparatively few women reach the top echelons while start careers in business and other professions with the same level of intelligence, education, and commitment as men?

The investigation was done by McKinsey Leadership Project team in order to help professional women learn what drives and sustains successful female leaders as well as help younger women navigate the paths to leadership. More than 85 women around the world who are successful in diverse fields were interviewed.
As a result the leadership model was distilled with five broad and interrelated dimensions: meaning, managing energy, positive framing, connecting and engaging.

So let?s have a deeper look on each of them.

Meaning enables people to discover what interests them and to push themselves to the limit, makes the heart beat faster and provides energy, inspires passion. It starts with happiness, it translates into greater job satisfaction, higher productivity, lower turn-over and increased loyalty. You can start to define what is meaningful by being honest with yourself about what you?re good at and what you enjoy doing?. Although there is no simple formula for matching your strengths to any single industry or function, you can look for patterns in job that have and haven?t worked out and talk with others about your experiences. However the connection between signature strengths and work can change because of priorities. The key to success is being aware of the shifts and making conscious choices in the context of bigger personal or professional goals.

Managing energy.
You should be able to identify the conditions and situations that replenish your energy and those that sap it. Self-awareness lets you deliberately incorporate restorative elements into your day and to space out your energy-sapping tasks throughout the day. If we will consider work-life balance as a myth, so the only hope women have is to balance their energy flows. This means basing your priorities on the activities that energize you, both at work and at home and actively managing your resources to avoid dipping into reserves. A founder of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, studied this topic deeply with thousands of people. He found that those who frequently experienced ?flow? ? a sense of being so engaged by activities that don?t notice the passage of time ? were more productive and derived greater satisfaction from their work than those who did not.

Positive framing ? a frame of mind that can be crucial to making the right business decisions.
Optimists are not afraid to frame the world as it actually is- they are confident that they can manage its challenges and move their teams quickly to action. On the contrary pessimists are more likely to feel helpless and to get stuck in downward spirals that lead to energy-depleting rumination. No matter how pessimistic you are by nature, you can learn to view situations as optimists do. Self-awareness is the key to this. For example, if a meeting goes badly, you should limit your thoughts about it to its temporary and specific impact and keep them impersonal. Go and talk with trusted colleagues about the reasons for the poor meeting and ways to do better next time, make a specific plan and act on it. Than undertake some activity that will restore both your energy and your faith in yourself (e.g. doing some sport, going out with friends).

Connecting ? people with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more promotions, higher pay, and greater career satisfaction.
A great note from Harvard Business Review about what differentiates a leader from a manager ?is the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to get there.? A social psychologist who studies social belonging and rejection, believes that men tend to build broader, shallower networks than women do and that the networks of men give them a wider range of resources for gaining knowledge and professional opportunities.
The interviewed for the article leaders also talked about the importance of having individual relationships with senior colleagues willing to go beyond the role of mentor ? someone willing to stick out his or her own neck to create opportunity for or help a protégée. Such person is being called as a sponsor. So find a sponsor and build networks.

Engaging.
Engagement is equally about risk taking.
Successful businesswomen accept risk as a part of opportunity. Some have the confidence to dive in; others use analytic problem solving to assess risks and then proceed to action. Researches indicate that people who make a choice for risk and work with it, rather than avoid it, report a greater degree of happiness than others do.
Many people think that hard work will eventually be noticed and rewarded. Than can indeed happen ? but usually doesn?t. Even senior women on boards still lose out by not speaking up: they hang back if they think that they have nothing new to say or that their ideas fall short of profound.
Women who want to grow as leaders should also take ownership of their professional development. Instead of waiting for someone to tell you what to do, take by yourself a systematic approach to self-improvement.