BusinessLife Spotlight: Maria Hernandez & Women’s Professional Development

In this week’s BusinessLife Spotlight, we are focusing back on Maria Hernandez as she uses her talents and experiences to support working women. Today, we are focusing on her Women’s Professional Development Program.

About Maria

We introduced Maria Hernandez last month as a business and innovation coach, with a focus on culture as it pertains to business. She has been Chief Innovation Officer at IBM, where she created a supportive mentoring community for women called La Red Familia, the first IBM’s virtual network Latina women and founded Madrinas, a non-profit for Corporate Latina leaders across America.

Leaving IBM, her efforts with women in the workplace wasn’t finished. Maria is currently working with Modernizing Medicine as their Innovation Culture Advisor.  There, she has founded Modernizing Medicine’s Women In Innovation and Technology (MMwit), a network for employee engagement and talent management.

In her new business as a coach, Maria has started women in business development programs. She draws inspiration from her own experiences in the workplace as well as from research and studies done in recent years about the importance of diversity.

The Need For Diversity

A recent study by McKinsey & Company looked at the value of diversity in the workplace. They uncovered that ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to outperform non-diverse companies, and gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform gender-heavy companies.

As the author of the study pointed out, “More diverse companies, we believe, are better able to win top talent and improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making, and all that leads to a virtuous cycle of increasing returns.” They even found that the relationship between diversity and success is proportional: the more diverse the company, the more they will see in financial returns relationally.  

In addition, women make up 59% of today’s workforce. But most organizations don’t promote women to higher ranking roles. However, those companies that have women at the top, a Catalyst study revealed, have higher financial performance: those companies with the highest representation of women on senior management had a 35% higher return on investment and 34% higher total return to shareholders than companies with a low representation of women.

Unfortunately, despite the need for gender and cultural equality in the workplace, there are still significant gaps of diversity in today’s leadership. Women often get locked into lower-end jobs without a strong chance for growth. According to an article in Palm Beach Woman magazine, women face a number of obstacles to growth, including “pipeline, unconscious bias, balance of work and family, and many others.”

Although companies see and appreciate the strengths that women contribute to the working environment, women still haven’t been groomed in the same way as men have. Thus, women struggle to rise to leadership positions because they lack the social training men have.

This is where Maria steps in.

Maria has a range of services meant to help businesses help women in the workplace prosper and grow. Her offerings include mentoring circles and rotational programs. Today, we will focus specifically on her program for Women’s Professional Development.

Women’s Professional Development Program

Maria founded her Women’s Professional Development Program when she saw the disparity between the number of women in the workforce and the number of women being promoted to higher positions.

It is not enough to develop powerful women—women already have many of the capacities and capabilities to be strong leaders. Instead, Maria focuses on training and coaching women and changing the cultural norms of businesses. Her program is not only about women, but about women within their work environment.

It is this idea of double-sided training that informs the Women’s Professional Development Program. This program unleashes the power of women through diversity, community, relationships, skill building, and confidence building. This, in turn, enriches the company’s bottom line by providing a robust set of female workers who are innovative, creative, hardworking, determined, and looking to grow both themselves and their company.

Maria offers this program to businesses as a way to enrich female workers beyond their current capabilities, develop greater confidence, and grow their workplace skills. She understands that in order to prove the strength of her program, and of women in general, she must to demonstrate a tangible metric and return on investment. In this way, her program focuses on three core ideas where she delivers the most value: innovation, diversity of thought, and development.

Innovation

Companies want to be ahead of the competition. They want to be on the cutting-edge of the market. In order to do so, they must constantly be growing and training their employees—because the employees are the engine of the company. They need to hire and train individuals who will bring new perspectives and ideas in order to drive effective innovation.

Women can be that diversity of innovation. The Women’s Professional Development program teaches women how to bring their whole self to the workplace. It helps unlock power and creativity—along with the confidence to share their ideas with others. The goal is to use the creative, compassionate, brilliant female mind to boost company-wide innovation.

Diversity of thought

In tandem with innovation, companies need diverse employees to reflect the diversity of their customers and clients. To develop strong products and services, organizations need a range of minds coming together to meet the range of consumers in the marketplace. Diversity allows a business to mirror the needs of the market.

Women can bring diversity of thought and experience. Maria’s program brings together women from different backgrounds to present diversity of thoughts and experience.  

Community development

The Women’s Professional Development Program creates a community of strong women who grow their skills while sharing their experiences and ideas. This community fosters relationships and mentorships that help further encourage women in the workplace.

As the founder and president of Madrinas, a non-profit that encourages, supports, and assembles corporate Latina leaders across the U.S., Maria understands the importance of community development. Just as bringing together women across the country helps members encourage and teach one another, so does fostering a community within a company help to develop the business and inspire staff.

Getting Started With Maria

Do you want your company to see the benefits of a diverse workforce? Are you struggling to hire and train for diversity? If your company is at a standstill, it’s likely because you aren’t harnessing the diversity in your workforce. The Women’s Professional Development Program helps your company and its employees open up to grow your business through diversity.

To start with a Women’s Professional Development program, Maria first defines your community vision and mission. Where does a diversity plan fit into your company’s current and future strategy?

From there, she takes a look at your organization’s values, strategy, and culture. Which areas do you need to focus on? She will pick certain topics and showcase them with panels and discussions. For example, Modernizing Medicine had a goal of sharing best practices amongst their workers, so Maria set up forums and speakers from the company to help foster a knowledge-based community. Some of the panel topics have included transitions and managing change, the art of networking, Mentoring 101.

Maria connects companies to development programs in their local communities with outreach programs. These programs develop women and girls to become their best selves both personally and professionally. This, in turn, seeps into the workplace to create a highly capable, competent, and extraordinary female work staff.

Even though Maria focuses on building communities for women, her programs are open to all. Men are also invited to attend these events; in fact, they’re encouraged to. Many men attend these conferences because they know the importance of supporting and encouraging women in the workplace. In Maria’s experience, often men become great sponsors and supporters for their peers and coworkers, and in turn, they too reap the benefits of a diverse workplace.

Conclusion

Although there are many factors that influence the ROI of a diverse workforce, time and time again diversity has proven strong financial results.

If you would like to learn more, Maria will be speaking at two upcoming conferences. On December 1, she will be a panelist on Developing A Culture of Innovation at the Women Across Technology event. She will also be talking about Modernizing Medicine’s culture and innovation processes at the 5th Annual Extraordinary Women Leading Change conference in Hollywood, Florida.

Maria is a co-coach with Peter Marcus in BusinessLife Global Coaching. If you would like to contact Maria, you may do so through her site, InnoGuia.com. She looks forward to meeting and partnering with you to improve your company’s diversity for a stronger workforce, culture, and bottom line.