Revvell interviews Rebecca Shambaugh

Apr-9-2008 By Revvell

A nationally known leadership strategist, Rebecca Shambaugh has over twenty years of experience helping organizations and executives respond to critical leadership challenges and opportunities in today’s business environment. Rebecca is President and CEO of SHAMBAUGH, where she founded Women In Leadership and Learning (WILL), an organization dedicated to the research, advancement, and retention of women leaders and executives.
Forget the old boys’ club: women are the ones holding themselves back from top-level career success, advises Shambaugh. Though more businesswomen are in successful positions of power, they are still lagging behind men at the highest levels: more than a third of Fortune 500 managers and more than half of those with multidisciplinary master’s degrees are women, yet women hold only 13% of Fortune 500 CEO positions. This lack of forward motion is due more substantially to women’s own career-inhibiting behavior than to cultural impediments, Shambaugh claims. Women are more likely than men to shy away from leadership roles, to get bogged down in perfectionism and to avoid career-boosting changes out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. Through a series of exercises and self-appraisals, Shambaugh guides readers with executive suite aspirations through an evaluation of their own behaviors and skills, gauging which serve their ambitions and which are holding them back. Emphasizing strategic relationships, communication and the elements of executive presence, she writes in an encouraging tone with a refreshing lack of blame, making this a satisfying read for women stuck in middle management limbo.