Behavioral scientists believe in the power of our environments to shape our behaviors. The systems and structures in place influence us in one way or another; this is especially true in the workplace. As such, the kind of workplace environment we have determines the kind of leaders and success we produce. The Head of Behavioral Science Insights for Torch, Elizabeth Weingarten, joins us in this episode to dive deep into the science of workplace behavior, revealing along the way the six strategies that top companies are using to develop leaders. Leadership development is evolving, and we can learn from organizations that are achieving the best results from their leadership development programs. Let Elizabeth guide you to transform your organization through key structural changes that bring out the best in your people. Take advantage of this golden information by tuning in to this conversation!

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The Six Strategies Top Companies Are Using To Develop Their Leaders With Elizabeth Weingarten

We get together each and every episode, and we always have an awesome guest speaker. In this episode, we are discussing the Six Strategies That Top Companies Are Using to Develop Their Leaders with Elizabeth Weingarten who I will introduce in a moment. Again, if this is your first time here or you’ve been here before and you need a quick reminder about what we do, the whole idea is to bring a panel of hosts and a guest speaker to help engage, energize, and elevate your company and your employees. We focus on strategies, human resources, diversity, and inclusion. So many different topics are covered in each and every episode.

I did say that we do have a panel of hosts, so let me introduce you to everyone. We have Char who is a former HR professional to an entrepreneur. She is an expert when it comes to starting and running small businesses. She’s worked in the health advocacy space and now she’s venturing into seniors and helping seniors through her new company, which is Mountain & Sea Strategy.

We also have Howard who works with CompTeam. He has a long background in corporate and in compensation. He helps organizations implement newer compensation practices so they can be more efficient, get rid of the spreadsheets, and be more up-to-date in business and in life. We also have Sam, who is the Founder and CEO of CompTeam. He’s also a global-certified compensation consultant. His company and Sam as well, help companies implement new and improved rewards programs for their talent. They help with talent management and compensation.

That brings me to our guest speaker and she is lovely. Her name is Elizabeth Weingarten. We are so excited to have her here because she is the Head of Behavioral Science Insights for a leadership company called Torch. She has been working with this company for a while, but she also has a journalism background as well. She does a lot of freelance journalism for multiple publications, including the Chicago Tribune, CNN, The Atlantic, and many more. She has shared and presented her work to some large organizations including the United Nations and South by Southwest. We’re very excited to have her here. Elizabeth, thank you again so much for being here with us.

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for the introduction.

Elizabeth, I love to hear about your background. First of all, a thing about behavioral science. When I started my career, it wasn’t quite a thing that I was aware of, at least. My wife being European, I go to Europe a lot. I started hearing some of my colleagues over there express that they were getting into behavioral science but they call it something else because it’s a different language. I then started seeing this happen in the US with companies that came out years ago. What generated your interest in behavioral science and what led you to that career?

When I was in college, I remember taking a Social Psychology class. This was probably my first exposure to anything in the behavioral sciences. I thought that it was boring, honestly. I ignored it and thought maybe that could be interesting, but not so much. I went on my way. At the time, I was pursuing a Degree in Journalism. Journalism, at its core, is a lot of times about understanding human motivation. It’s about understanding, “Why are people over there doing that thing? Why does that thing matter to all of us? How do we ask people questions to get to the heart of what’s going on?” However, I didn’t see those connections at the time. All I knew was that was a boring class and let’s move on.

Later on in my career, I started out more traditionally as a journalist. I worked at publications like The Atlantic and Slate. I then found my way to a think tank called New America. At that point, I was starting to develop a more focused interest in doing journalism and research on gender equality. This was something that I became interested in during a study abroad program. I went to Doha, Qatar in the Gulf. When I was there, I was doing a lot of reporting on gender inequality, particularly looking at women in the Middle East, the gender distinctions, and opportunities for women in that region of the world. Coming back to the US and realizing, “There’s also a long way that we have to go here too. There are similarities in some of the global issues that we’re facing.”

I had started to get interested in that subject in my career. When I was at this think tank, I started to develop a program called the Global Gender Parity Initiative. While I was doing that, I’m curious if you all have had this experience. I read a book that completely changed my worldview in my life. That book was called What Works: Gender Equality by Design. It was written by a behavioral economist at Harvard. Her name was Iris Bohnet. Iris took this subject of gender equality and combined it with behavioral science. She completely changed the way that I saw what I thought were the solutions to the problems of gender equality.

Up until that point, I had seen or thought as a journalist. I can raise awareness about these issues. I can help people understand them. I can educate and that would be a solution to some of the problems that we were seeing in the world. What Iris’ book and what this whole field helped me see is that is only part of the equation. Behavioral economists talk about this a lot. You have to consider, “How are our environments shaping our behavior? How are the systems and structures that undergird our lives influencing our behaviors much more than or sometimes equally as much as our individual personalities or things that we think we want to do?”

From there, my mind was opened up to this whole new way of thinking about these problems that I had been wanting to solve through journalism and through research. I pivoted my career at that point and started working at an applied behavioral science firm. Became managing editor at a magazine called Behavioral Scientist, trying to learn as much as I could about the field. That was how I became interested. It was all due to a book that changed the way that I saw the world, and then that curiosity and following that curiosity.

Gender equality and so forth is a noble reason to inspire interest in this field. I often deal a lot with that in my field because we’re looking at creating fair pay structures for individuals, whether it’s gender-based or ethnicity and so forth. Setting up that infrastructure is important. In your experience as a behavioral scientist, how have things changed over the years to create an infrastructure where we can study the science and behavior overall?

Are you talking about specifically in the workplace or just in general?

Let’s talk about it in general first, and then we can move into the workplace area.

One of the big changes for me is more of an understanding and an emphasis on learning from those environmental, structural, and systemic influences. Several years ago, you didn’t hear as much conversation, particularly in the DEI space about the importance of understanding what systems and structures we need to understand and shift in order to see differences in equality and outcomes at an organizational level. That conversation has been a big change.

You’re also seeing shifts at the organizational level and seeing organizations that are more open to testing and more open to experimental mindset. Whereas, you know, a lot of the research and studying used to be consolidated in academic institutions. Now, with the applied behavioral science movement, you’re seeing a lot more organizations, “We want to try out some of these interventions and see if they work here.”

Taking that experimental mindset and applying it to challenges in the workplace. That’s where you’re seeing a lot of folks maybe coming from academia or coming from different backgrounds, working in different places, and applying that scientific method, but in an accelerated and different way to see if, “Can we maybe try to solve some of these problems using interventions that we know have worked in other places?”

When we drill into these interventions, how would you explain? Can you give us a couple of examples?

One example that we can think about is when you talk about promotion equality and promotions. One thing that we know is that sometimes we see a disparity in terms of women not getting promoted as much as men. That breaks down to, in terms of fewer women of color getting promoted into top senior-level positions. There’s a finding in the behavioral science that shows if you have a system at your organization where people are nominating others to get a promotion or you have a self-nomination. Some researchers have found that if you have a default for a certain population to be opted-in to that promotion process. You’re going to see more equal outcomes at the end of the day.

If you have a default for a certain population to be opted into that promotion process, you're going to see more equal outcomes at the end of the day. Click To Tweet

Instead of trying to get a population that maybe wouldn’t always put themselves up for promotion, you’re instead opting them in and equalizing the playing field in doing that. That’s one finding that organizations I know have tested and found that tends to work and you see more equal outcomes in terms of promotions.

We get off on that one. Is it the intent of having a proactive advocate in terms of preventing that injustice from happening? You mentioned having women opt-in. Another way is potentially perhaps having a committee that looks at people of different genders and ethnicities that are proactively trying to ensure that we’re considering these people.

The distinction there is changing the system versus trying to de-bias a process. When you change the system of promotion, you’re saying, “We’re not going to have this committee making these decisions. We’re going to opt folks into being considered.” Maybe down the line, you still have people that are evaluating all of the people that are up for promotion. It’s getting the same outcome that we want just in a different way.

What you’re talking about having a group of people who are trying to select people for promotions and you’re looking across a whole population of potential managers and trying to see, “Who do we want to get promoted to senior management?” You’re still going to face there if you don’t have an opt-in model or if some folks defaulted into that potential promotion pool. You still may have potential biases coming into play there. There, you would still want some structured way of making sure that the decisions that you’re making in that process are the least biased that they can be.

Perhaps I can give you an example. What we do in my paid practice is to ensure that when we do a job valuation, we’re classifying roles into functions and levels. We’ll have a bucket of people who are in a particular level that potentially could be part of that pool to be promoted to the next level above. We already know that the groups of people are to be considered in that same function. We can also look into other functions to explore people who may be interested in that next role.

The next thing to consider is readiness. Some people are ready to be promoted and some people are still developing. That’s where there could be some debates about selecting people. As organizations, if we have these structures in place, it’s easier for us to be more fair and just with our methodologies, especially in this capacity. Would you agree?

I do agree because it’s interesting. Even with concepts like readiness or even when we think about how organizations define potential, who has potential, and who doesn’t. It’s so important to get clear on what those concepts mean and what they mean in an objective way. People throw around these ideas a lot. I might have one idea in mind when I say somebody’s ready to be promoted. You might have a totally separate idea of what that means. I might have one idea of what it means to have potential in an organization. You might have a different one.

We see that even these concepts that we use to help us evaluate our direct reports or whoever is in an organization can be a little bit slippery and ripe for bias. That’s why it can be important to evaluate what are some ways that we can change the systems that we use or the structures that we use to circumvent that bias where we can and acknowledge that we’re not ever going to get away from human decision-making entirely, nor would we want to. Some bias is good. There are lots of ways in which our biases as humans serve us and our good. What we want to do is be aware of the places where we don’t want them and they’re going to hurt us at the end of the day.

Can we dig into that a little bit more? Usually, when we talk about bias, it’s a negative connotation. Where can we use the word bias in a positive sense?

When we think about biases and heuristics are like shortcuts. They are tools that we use all the time to help us make decisions in our lives. We developed the decision-making shortcuts that we have because there’s so much information coming at us all day every day. We don’t have time a lot of times to fully evaluate, “What are the pros and cons of responding to this email? What should I order for this meal? What should I wear?” There are so many decisions that we’re making during the day and we’ve come up with shortcuts that help us evaluate whether to do something or not to do something or what choice to make.

Sometimes those choices are good and they lead us in the right direction. If you are approached by somebody who seems like you get an instinct that maybe somebody sends you an email and you get the sense that, “Something doesn’t seem right here. There are some misspellings in this email. I don’t know the sender and this person is asking me for bank information.” This doesn’t seem right, but it may be coming from your bank.

You’re using some heuristics there that are leading you to the right place, which is like, “Ignore this. Delete this.” There are ways in which our built-in filters, biases, and heuristics, whatever word you want to use, were helping us navigate away from threats, make decisions easier, and navigate the world. Sometimes those shortcuts can lead us astray. It depends on the situation that you’re facing.

 

I would love to tap Howard on the shoulder here. This is in a non-human perspective when we’re talking about using bias, because when sometimes we look at systems, there are those systems that are our favorites and that we advise clients on. Sometimes where bias might creep in, we’re biased on the systems because then we know they work. We know they work well and they would serve our clients well in that particular situation. Sometimes systems, just like people, evolve. Sometimes we need to be aware of that bias and take another glance. What do you think, Howard?

You’re right. We all have biases that are built in unconsciously and innate. What’s critical when we’re working with our clients is digging deep, understanding their issues, their concerns, and putting that first above our personal biases. Sure, by experience, we’re going to know what solutions might be the best fit, but the first starting place is trying to put that aside and get at the heart of their issues.

Another piece that I was thinking about is from a cultural perspective and submit on some of these pieces when we’re thinking about bias as well. What Elizabeth was talking about was that there are certain norms that we use as filters to make decisions. Some of that is when we’re looking from a cultural perspective, there’s a sense of awareness that we need to come up with when we’re speaking from a particular culture, and then relating it to another culture. We talked about this in our offsite about understanding, for instance, the Indian culture where you come from, and then also understanding the US culture and how we have to change how we’re addressing businesses in certain geographics. Can you give us a little bit of your thoughts on that?

In fact, I was thinking of this while watching an episode of Suits. They’re trying to look for the lowest-performing associates and firing them. They build a system, they create a complex algorithm, and it works. They’re able to narrow down who is rock bottom as a performer. They decide to fire this person until somebody points out that this person is a team player.

If you look at the performance of all the people around them, you find that they’re exponentially higher performance. While this person as a sole individual may not be a great performer, he was improving the performance of everyone who sat around them because he was focusing less on his own assignment. However, in the process, he was improving five different projects.

A biased system or a system where we assume that technology algorithms, they’re not thrown to human biases would be fair and just, we would’ve thrown that person out of the door. He’s a great contributor. While it’s a Netflix show, it was good learning about how assuming AI or technology or systems will help us remain bias-free will not happen. Irrespective of the culture we are operating in, human biases will creep in even when systems because who’s building those systems? Us. We need to be cognizant of getting diverse perspectives to make sure our systems are not as biased or more biased than we are.

I couldn’t agree more. That point also takes us back to this idea of how we gauge readiness for promotion and how we gauge performance. Thinking about how often our definition of that is narrow. From your point, how do we open it up beyond this idea of what performance rating somebody gets? What did their metrics show?

How is that person supporting the members of their team? How are they talking about leadership? How are they helping others reach their potential and unlocking talent inside an organization? Is that person a mentor? There are all sorts of dimensions of somebody’s work performance that don’t always get wrapped up in that question of, “Is somebody ready to get promoted? Do they have leadership potential?” That’s so important for making those decisions.

I would like to return back because we’re talking about some leadership concepts here and how this relates. I know we do have a series of leadership concepts to visit, so can we jump back in there? I want to make sure we go through those steps.

Just to give us a little bit of context here. Torch is the company that I work for. To tell you a little bit about Torch too. Torch is a people development platform. What we do is unlock the potential of people, teams, and organizations by making coaching more inclusive, more integrated with strategy, and more impactful for the businesses and organizations that we work with.

Essentially, what I’m going to talk about is some of the research that we commissioned from Harvard Business Review analytics services. What we were looking at is all about how leadership development is evolving and what we can learn from organizations that are achieving the best results from their leadership development programs. This was research where we talked to 665 different respondents, executives, or senior managers. We learned a lot from this research. I’ll share a link so folks can access all of it.

One of the first things we learned was, “What were the biggest challenges for folks who are doing leadership development?” The two biggest challenges we found were related to strategy and getting resources for their initiatives. We’ll be curious to hear from all of you if those resonate. What was interesting to me about those two challenges was that they’re quite connected. If you set up your strategy correctly, it can help you prove the ROI of your programs and with that ROI you have a better chance of getting the resources that you need.

 

The question for us as a result of that was, “What does a best-in-class leadership development strategy look like?” What we found was that there were six key strategic practices among the organizations that reported the strongest results from their leadership development programs. Again, these were the organizations that were seeing ROI from their programs like increased revenue, increased productivity, performance, and engagement. What I can do now is I’m happy to talk through those six strategies. We can always pause in between some of them if you have comments, want to share, or ask questions.

Align Leadership Development With Business Objectives

The first strategy is to align leadership development with business objectives. What that means is that, from the start, these leading organizations that are getting great results from their programs are designing them to address a specific business challenge. For instance, that could be retention, engagement, or performance productivity. I’ll give you an example of one of our customers, the tech company, Reddit. They designed a leadership development program to enhance employee performance. The program allowed employees to invest in professional learning and development from sources that were external to the company. It gave them choices like coaching classes and conferences.

Coaching ended up emerging as the top choice for them. In a study of impact, we found that employees who completed one of our coaching programs were 71% more likely to receive an exceptional performance rating on their review. That’s strategy number one. It’s aligning your leadership development with business objectives.

Measure Your Results

The second strategy sounds pretty straightforward. It’s not as easy to do in practice and that’s measuring your results. We found leading organizations are much more likely to use multiple metrics to evaluate the results of their programs. They’re also more likely to measure ROI. At Torch, we use something called the Kirkpatrick Model as a guide for measurement. For folks who are maybe less familiar with it, there are four levels of the Kirkpatrick Model. Each level tells you something different about the effectiveness of your program. Level 1 is reactions, do folks like it? Level 2 is learning. Level 3 is behavior change. Level 4 is business results. I won’t go into too many details on this. We can dig in a little bit more if you’re interested.

The fourth step is what I want to focus on. That’s often the hardest step that business results level. That’s the one that can be most impactful for the business. To go back to that Reddit example, we worked with them at the start to identify the key metrics that they wanted to measure to show ROI as a result of their programs. We looked at retention, promotion, and performance. We set up a study that allowed us to compare the results of people who went through the programs against a similar group or a control group. I already told you about the results on performance, but the team found also that people who went through the coaching program had a 38% higher retention rate compared with a control group that didn’t. They were also 2.5 times more likely to get promoted.

One of the organizations, I was in charge of the learning and development department. It was a challenge because when I finally sat down with the Financial CFO and started looking at the budget invested in learning development, the budget was slashed down to about a third. I was unfortunate because that was my first year to take over that department. Love the concept of outside development and maybe being creative. However, I did find that it was typically the, “Out of 9,000 employees, top 30 leaders,” that most of the investment dollars we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars including off retreats and you can imagine university training and learning development.

I always questioned the ROI because those top 30 leaders, sadly, if we were to go back and take a look at the turnover, I would say about 25% to 30% of those leaders went through the leadership programs, and then they left the organization. When you talk about the return on investment, I challenge the vice presidents. You can’t throw out that we’re going to give every employee 51 hours of “development” and not invest as we are investing in the top 30 leaders that statistically are leaving anyway. We had a retention issue.

You can’t just throw out to a leader saying, “Every employee needs an IDP or Individual Development Plan with no structure, with no strategy behind it, and they need to keep it as cheap as possible. Learning and Development Department, Char Miller, figure it out.” Most of those dollars went to the top 30 in a 9,000-employee organization. Thank you for what you shared. I didn’t touch everything you talked about.

My colleagues have heard me say, “I felt like I was sitting on an island with executives trying to convey the importance that this development needs to be at all levels of an organization.” You know what that organization I’m referring to is. How do you convince an executive level how this return on investment truly improves productivity and quality initiatives as well as a great ROI particularly when they’re siloed and thinking we only need to focus on this small group of individuals? What would your recommendation be to convey that to an executive team?

It’s something that a lot of our customers face. It’s like, “How do you move those senior-level executives?” One of the things that we’ve found and that we try to convey is that leadership development can have a big impact even if it’s focused on one group of individuals. If you have the budget and if you can do it across an organization, that’s great, but the key distinction that we try to make, and that I heard in your story too, is the difference between point-in-time leadership training, somebody going through a program as a start and an end date, you learn something and then you go back to your job, versus something like coaching.

The difference that we see, we seek a leadership development training effectiveness gap where you put somebody in through training, they learn a lot, and they’re excited, but something happens a few days after that training, which some people call the forgetting curve, but it’s a steep drop off. You forget something like 75% of what you learn a couple of weeks after the training ends.

The difference for something like coaching, you’re applying the lessons that you learn continuously to your work and to your life. You have an accountability partner. Somebody’s holding you accountable for the changes that you say that you’re going to make. You’re also in a place of psychological safety. You’re able to be more honest about the challenges that are coming up for you. What do you need help with?

With coaching, somebody is holding you accountable for the changes that you say that you're going to make your own. Click To Tweet

What I’m getting at is one of these things, coaching is designed with behavior change in mind. At the end of the day, an intervention is shown to be much more effective in changing the behavior of leaders. What we found is that change can have a ripple effect across the organization. You have leaders changing, and then you have folks on their teams changing, and then you see that change rippling across the broader organizational impact.

One of the things that we’ve seen that moves the needle and helps make the case is not necessarily saying, which can be true, that this needs to be offered to everybody, but more so, the modality needs to shift the way that we think about how we’re developing leaders. It needs to shift away from one-size-fits-all training, which has its place. That’s not to say that trainings aren’t good and can’t be useful. They can be. An important compliment to them is this one-size-fits-one application. How do we pair folks, whether it’s top leaders at an organization? What we’ve found too is folks that are going through what we’re starting to call moments that matter or transitional moments in their careers and lives.

What we know again from behavioral science is there’s something called the fresh start effect. When you are going through a change and it feels like you’re almost passing a temporal or a time-based landmark, whether it’s like the start of a new year, you’re going out on parental leave, or you’re becoming a new manager. All of these moments in time where because time seems separated, it’s like the old me versus the new me, you’re more likely to change your behavior in those periods. Coaching can be an especially effective thing to throw into the mix of folks who are in those periods. To me, it’s about sharing some of those narratives and changing some of those mindsets.

What we also have found in terms of working with senior executives. A couple of my colleagues have called it the water cooler effect. That is, if you get folks around that executive the experience of coaching and they’re able to experience for themselves what transformational change feels like, the changes that they’re seeing on their team, encourage them to talk about it with others, and talk about it with those executives, you have this social influence thing happening where the executives are saying, “That sounds pretty good. Maybe I should have that experience or maybe I should do that.” Those are all the things that I would offer up. I don’t know if any of that resonates and I’m curious if other folks have thoughts too.

I do think it’s excellent. Our executives all had executive coaches. Even at one point, I had my own executive coach because I was in training to be a Chief HR Officer. I utilized that personal coaching, which I needed. However, I was also trying to influence leaders as coach concept. In my opinion, now with new technology like AI, Sam and his team hosted an excellent conference shortly.

Anyway, now that technology is going to help our leaders be more effective with writing, communication, performance management, job description review, compensation, etc., we can help our leaders pull themselves from their offices and cubicles or wherever their seats or corner offices and become leaders as coaches. The competency to be a coach, in my opinion, every leader should be a coach. Every leader should have the competencies to learn how to coach because every leader is like a sports team coach and that’s what they do. They should be on the sidelines, rooting their team along in a positive way and sometimes a more direct way to improve performance because that’s what a leader should be doing.

In my opinion, instead of managing all the time and impressing the higher-ups, it’s more important to impress your direct reports and give them personal love, attention, and focus. That doesn’t cost a lot. It’s a matter of changing the mindset and direction of what a leader is and what their day-to-day responsibilities are. I assume you agree, Elizabeth.

I completely agree. What we’re seeing too, you’re pointing to what we call relational skills. In the past, we talked about them as soft skills, but that devalues the importance that these skills have in the modern workplace. Those skills are crucially important. Being able to actively listen and to ask great questions. Understand what motivates your teammates. How do you inspire a team? How do you communicate in the most effective way for different types of people?

Investing In Relationship-Based Leadership Development Initiatives

That brings me to the next practice we see these successful organizations utilizing, which is investing in relationship-based leadership development initiatives. That means coaching. That also means mentoring. We saw that leading organizations weren’t more likely to leverage those types of programs. They were also more likely to cite those programs as their most effective. I talked about this earlier, but this wasn’t too surprising to us. Coaching, much more so than these traditional leadership training programs, one day spent in training, are designed to change behavior. Again, they do that by holding leaders accountable for changes, creating that psychologically safe space for learning and exploration, and then helping folks apply what they learn directly to their work.

Ensuring Consistency

The next practice we found was ensuring consistency leader organizations being more likely to have organizational controls in place to make sure that their programs are delivered and managed consistently. Consistency is valuable in part because it helps leaders measure the effectiveness and ROI over time. Ultimately, we found that that can give folks the ammunition that they need to be able to secure that sustainable funding.

Customizing An Organization’s Needs

The next practice that I’ll share is the importance of customizing to an organization’s needs. We found leading organizations don’t rely on out-of-the-box programs. Instead, they’re working to tailor their approach to the unique culture of the workplace. Again, that concept of culture and context comes up. We can dig into that. The final one and this is maybe one that we’ll also want to dig into, is the importance of designing your strategy and your programs inclusively. We found leading organizations are also more likely to use a broader range of methods to identify potential participants for programs in service of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. They’re also more likely to offer development opportunities to people across different levels.

Leading organizations really don't rely on out-of-the-box programs. Instead, they are really working to tailor their approach to the unique culture of the workplace. Click To Tweet

What we know is that organizations understand that this isn’t the right thing to do for their businesses but the smart thing. Inclusive development we know has clear links to business outcomes like retention, engagement, and performance. The final thing I’ll say here is that even though so many of us know this, from our research, we also found that nearly half of organizational leaders thought they could be designing their programs more inclusively. There was a gap between where they are and where they want it to be. Many of them reported that they thought they could be excluding people from opportunities like coaching and mentoring that they thought could benefit from it the most.

Designing Strategies And Programs Inclusively

Those insights that you mentioned are hugely impactful. Thank you very much. Anyway, as we come to a close here, how can people reach out to you and learn more about what you do and how Torch can help them?

You’re welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can connect with me by email, [email protected]. I also wanted to share what I mentioned, a tip of the iceberg with our research, but I also have the link to it if folks want to read more. That is the link to more of that research. Please take a look and reach out to me if you have any questions or want to chat about it more. Thank you. It was so fun to be here with all of you and I appreciate the opportunity.

It’s a true pleasure. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for sharing your wisdom with us.

Thank you.

Thank you everyone for joining us here in the People Strategy Forum. We’ll see you in the next episode. Looking forward to it. Take care.

Thanks, everybody.

 

Important Links

• Elizabeth Weingarten – LinkedIn
• Char Miller – LinkedIn
• CompTeam
• Torch
• What Works: Gender Equality by Design
• [email protected]

 

About Elizabeth Weingarten

Managing editor of Behavioral Scientist, a digital magazine that translates the latest behavioral science research into accessible and compelling narratives. I’m still a senior advisor and contributing editor.

Senior Associate at ideas42, where I investigated and helped solve social problems with behavioral science.

Founder of the Global Gender Parity Initiative, a policy and research project that elevates stories about gender, security, diversity and inclusion; 

Editor of Humans of Cybersecurity;

Consultant and Collaborator at Artemis Connection. 

I speak about gender, diversity & inclusion issues.

Elizabeth Weingarten is the Head of Behavioral Science Insights for Torch. In this capacity, she works with the behavioral science team to identify and share with broad audiences what Torch is learning about the science of leadership development. Prior to Torch, Elizabeth was managing editor of Behavioral Scientist magazine, worked at the behavioral science design firm ideas42, directed the Global Gender Parity Initiative at the think tank New America and was a senior fellow in its Better Life Lab. She has also worked on the editorial staffs of Slate, The Atlantic, and Qatar Today Magazine. She graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.