The New Agenda for Women's Leadership

For a long time, women’s leadership development programs were designed as spaces for building confidence, providing training, and fostering career advancement. In many cases, they played an important role, brought attention to the issue, created opportunities for reflection, and supported women in advancing their careers. But today’s world demands more. It demands a reevaluation of their purpose, structure, and ambition.

The first change is, above all, a shift in perspective. We must stop viewing these programs as solutions to “address the challenges women face.” This framing, though common, contains a subtle pitfall: it suggests that the problem lies with women themselves. As if the main goal were to prepare them to better navigate contexts that remain, to a large extent, unquestioned. However, the development of women’s leadership should not be based on a logic of integration, but on a logic of expansion. These programs should exist to strengthen leadership skills, strategic vision, business acumen, decision-making ability, influence, and contribution.  

The development agenda—the architecture of development solutions—must also become more rigorous. Self-awareness, of course, remains an essential starting point. Understanding one’s own values, leadership style, internal resources, areas of tension, and potential for growth is indispensable. But it is not enough! Leadership is a journey that involves leading oneself and one’s teams, understanding the organization as a system, and having a clear grasp of the broader social, economic, and political landscape. In a world marked by sudden, unexpected, and often difficult-to-explain changes, developing leaders means preparing them to interpret complexity, navigate ambiguity, and act with discernment in contexts of high uncertainty. It is this ability to alternate between depth and breadth—between zooming in and zooming out —that has become a core competency today.

There is also a third unavoidable change: men must be an integral part of this agenda. The development of women’s leadership cannot continue to be treated as a side conversation, confined to women, as if transformation could take place in a space separate from the actual system where leadership is exercised. Organizations are relational ecosystems. Men and women inhabit them, influence them, and co-create them. Therefore, they are also co-authors of the solutions. Integrating men into this agenda does not mean refocusing the debate on them; it means recognizing that there is no structural change without shared responsibility. It means inviting them to participate, to learn, to review practices, and to contribute to more conscious and equitable cultures.

Finally, it is important to bring to the forefront an agenda that has been treated as secondary for far too long: care and well-being. In a context where burnout, fragmentation, and constant acceleration have become almost the norm, care is neither a luxury nor a concession. It is a leadership competency and a prerequisite for organizational sustainability. Strengthening this agenda means recognizing that professional life does not exist in isolation from social, family, and personal life. It means building more meaningful, healthier, and more humane organizations—true extensions of environments that promote balance, well-being, and purpose. And it also means valuing a decisive contribution that so many women have brought to the contemporary discussion on leadership: the ability to balance high standards with humanity, performance with care, and ambition with purpose.

Ultimately, what needs to change most in leadership development programs is a shift away from focusing on preparing women to survive within the system as it currently exists, and toward focusing on preparing them—and the organizations they work for—to support the transformation of organizational systems in a clear-sighted, collaborative, and meaningful way.

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Article originally published on March 14, 2026, in Observador.