Case Study: Empowering Women to Fulfill Their Leadership Potential

 
 

How do you get more women into leadership positions? This Fortune 50 telecommunications and media company chose to invest in women's development—by piloting New Lens® to help prepare more women for leadership.

The world’s fourth largest telecommunications company was facing a challenge: fewer women were advancing from assistant store manager to store manager roles. After some investigation, they found that the women lacked confidence in their readiness for promotion and weren't raising their hands to be considered.

The company knew that investing in women's development would be crucial to solve this. They needed to prepare more women for the next level of leadership by instilling confidence in their capabilities and further bolstering their leadership skills. But how to accomplish this without totally upending the women's work schedules and busy lives? Their existing training solutions would be destined to fail. They had to innovate.

“I like the content and the emphasis on how YOU can develop yourself. Too many development programs miss out on the importance of reflection and deliberate action. This app exemplifies how to make a difference in your own career.”
— Jessica Wooten,Senior Analyst Payroll, AT&T

The Solution: Leadership Development That Actually Fits Into Women's Lives

After careful consideration, the company decided to pilot New Lens, a platform that offers micro-learning that can be accessed anytime, anywhere. The content aligned well with their competency model, and the Core Strategies in New Lens addressed areas where employees had struggled over the years.

“New Lens is more of what we need. This is easy and the content is super meaningful to me. I feel like I’ve got four full-time jobs. What I love about New Lens is that I can work on it in between things in little spurts. It’s great how digestible this is – videos are two to seven minutes and the articles are short. Although I’m an HR Business Partner, these modules have applicability to any role.”
— Marcy Mittendorf, Human Resource Business Partner, AT&T

The Result: Empowerment, Learning, Real-World Application

This group was midway through the pilot when the global pandemic began. After pausing for a few weeks, the women asked to complete the pilot because the content was so relevant to the challenges that they were facing. The feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive. 

 
 
“The New Lens app is a fast, convenient and easy way to practice self-improvement and development throughout your day or week. It takes a practical and focused approach to provide actionable items you can execute on in the real world.”
— Amber Feddes, Integrated Sales Support Specialist, AT&T