The Women’s Leadership Experience (WLE), the brainchild of several motivated and empowered members of the Women’s Alliance Business Resource Group (now named Women of Stellantis) has earned its third consecutive Brandon Hall Award, in Silver, for Excellence in Leadership Development for women.
The award recognizes the best organizations that have successfully deployed programs, strategies, modalities, processes, systems and tools that have achieved measurable results; attracting entrants from leading global corporations.
The WLE program, now in its fourth year, was established to reverse the effect of several troubling societal trends identified in McKinsey & Company’s Women in the Workplace Report:
- Women remain significantly underrepresented in the corporate pipeline, even at the entry level
- At every subsequent career step, the representation of women further declines, and women of color face an even more dramatic drop-off at senior levels
- As a result, only one in five senior executive leaders is a woman, and fewer than one in 30 is a woman of color
- Moreover, compared to the modest gains women made in prior years, there are signs that women’s progress may be stalling
The WLE program is an eight-month program offering participants a mix of experiences, including executive coaching, executive sponsors (both men and women), 360 surveys and customized leadership training opportunities designed to enrich perspectives of the business, connect to senior leaders and enhance the leadership toolkits of participants.
To date, 62% of WLE graduates have experienced professional growth through promotion or developmental assignments.
In January 2022, Stellantis launched two new leadership development programs focused on training and growing emerging Black and multicultural talent for future leadership opportunities with the company.
The programs, called BLAC (Black Leaders Advancement Collective) and LEAD (Leaders Embracing All Diversity), are modeled after the award-winning WLE program. Each program ran concurrently for the first time in January and their first collective cohort graduated in August.
“Our leaders know that building a sustainably successful company requires being intentional about identifying, developing and fully engaging diverse future leadership talent and providing tangible growth opportunities for diverse people and communities,” said Daniela Antovski, human resources business partner – SVPs engineering, software, technology, design, customer experience and planning, and co-lead of the WLE committee for the Women of Stellantis.
These three leadership development programs are managed by the company’s 11 Business Resource Groups, in collaboration with its Diversity & Inclusion Office and delivered by the Center for Creative Leadership.
The company’s 11 BRGs represent a range of affinity communities and provide leadership on many staff networking and development programs, as well as engagement with diverse communities and issues.
