IWD 2025: Accelerate Action with Executive Coaching

International Women’s Day has been championing progressive change on behalf of women for over 100 years. Every year a key theme is signalled as the north star of the campaign. 2025 is the year of Accelerate Action.

“Focusing on the need to Accelerate Action emphasizes the importance of taking swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality. It calls for increased momentum and urgency in addressing the systemic barriers and biases that women face, both in personal and professional spheres.”

IWD 2025

Pinnacle HR is dedicated to helping companies build powerful executive teams. As women make up 45% of the workforce in the United States (46.8% in Ireland) it seems obvious that this figure should be a goal in terms of representation at a senior level.

What is executive coaching?

Executive coaching is how people in senior roles learn to develop and improve their own work performance.  An executive coach will help senior leaders; identify their own strengths and weaknesses, better support their teams and plot a route to success that works for them.  In short, executive coaching is one of the best ways to invest in your career.

For example, Pinnacle HR works with those who want to develop their emotional intelligence, build their leadership skills and work on becoming more resilient during times of company growth or transformation. 

How can executive coaching boost the International Women's Day message?

Executive coaching is strongly aligned with the core mission of International Women’s Day. It’s been much reported that women outperform men at school (at all levels) but this trend reverses in the workplace. What happens that causes this advantage to slip away?

According to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace Report women are less likely to receive the critical feedback they need to position themselves as a potential leader. This is where executive coaching can close the gap and accelerate action. Coaching can provide a space for women to interrogate the areas they need to improve with a neutral mediator.

Executive coaching works both ways to accelerate action

Executive coaching can have a tremendous impact in more ways than one.

In one way it can help women in the workplace help advance their careers and take ownership of their success. In another, it can educate people who already hold senior leadership roles to question their own unconscious bias towards female employees. 

The Broken Rung When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women--and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It book highlights that when it comes to promotions to manager level, for every 100 men promoted only 81 women (this number drops to 77 for women of colour) get promoted. The data doesn’t lie when it comes to women’s experience in the workplace. Not only are women struggling to position themselves correctly, those that do are often overlooked for senior roles.

How can you support women in your business?

As a leader in your organisation you’re constantly thinking of ways to scale your business and to do that you need the right people working for you.

 “The success of emerging women leaders depends heavily on the mid-level and senior managers” by taking the time to actively prepare your employees, particularly women, for leadership roles you’re investing in your company’s future.

Executive coaching is a hugely rewarding endeavour whether it’s funded by a company or a personal investment in your own success. Consider how you can use it to level up your business and rebalance the scales in terms of equal opportunities.

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Pinnacle HR partners with executives and their teams to deliver organizational growth

through people. They enable executives to achieve clarity, gain results, and use emotional intelligence to achieve rapid growth. Managing and navigating change with

confidence and ease during these periods of change is crucial for executives, their

businesses and their teams.