Member Article

“Positive attitudes of male senior management and investment in training are the keys to more women taking leadership roles”

Chelsey Hutchinson, Director of People & Culture, Wyboston Lakes Resort

The key to opening opportunities for more women to take senior management roles is the attitudes of male senior managers. If they are open-minded, positively supportive and invest in training, then the proportion of leadership roles held by women will increase faster.

At Wyboston Lakes Resort, the UK’s largest privately-owned single site conference and leisure venue, the 300 plus workforce is 63 per cent female. Of the senior management team 60 per cent are female and our Gender Pay Gap Report shows that 49 per cent of staff in the upper quartile are women. Over the past 12 months, 68 per cent of staff promoted on merit were female and we have signed the Diversity in Hospitality, Travel and Leisure Charter.

Our performance is above the industry average and the driving force behind these initiatives and trends is Mark Jones, our Managing Director. With the support of the whole senior management team, he pioneers the company’s commitment to ensuring that everyone is rewarded equally for their work regardless of gender, to closing the pay gap and to giving everyone equal opportunities to progress to the highest level in their careers with us.

We believe that training for leadership is also essential to help ensure staff are developed for the future and able to progress. The venue has created the Wyboston Signature Training programme. Open to all managers, supervisors and team leaders, half of the staff on the programme are female.

On our Mentor Programme for middle managers, now in its third year and a 54 per cent of the participants are female. These and many other initiatives have helped the venue to be highly ranked in the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For over the past five years and it is no coincidence that this significant progress has been made since Mark Jones arrived here seven years ago.

It has been said that the rise of women into senior roles will be slow until there are more female CEOs and MDs. But if male CEOs are open-minded about recruiting and promoting and encourage women to lead, then the leadership gap will close much faster.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Wyboston Lakes .