Every spring, two things land on the Chief People Officer’s desk in quick succession. International Women’s Day in March brings the conversation about women in leadership. Gender pay gap reporting in April brings the data. Together, they create a window when organisations are forced to reconcile what they say about women’s advancement with what the numbers actually show.
The conversation usually centres on representation: how many women are in senior roles, what the pipeline looks like, what programmes exist to close the gap. These are important questions. But they frame women’s advancement as something the organisation does for women — a fairness exercise, a compliance commitment. They rarely frame it as something women do for the organisation.
That is a missed opportunity, because the evidence tells a story that boards should find genuinely compelling. When a woman is promoted into a senior leadership role, the effects ripple outward. Her team becomes more engaged. The people beneath her develop faster. The organisation gets better at the thing every Chief Executive says matters most: building the next generation of leaders.
What the research shows
Gallup’s research on manager effectiveness, drawn from millions of employee surveys, found that employees who work for women managers are six percentage points more engaged. That may sound modest. In engagement terms, it is not — engagement is directly correlated with productivity, customer satisfaction, profitability, and retention. A six-point shift across a leadership population is a measurable commercial improvement.
The research goes further. Employees who work for women managers are 1.3 times more likely to say that someone at work encourages their development and has spoken to them about their progress in the past six months. These are not soft measures. They are the specific leadership behaviours that predict whether a talented person stays, grows, and performs — or quietly disengages and eventually leaves.
Every senior leader appointment is also a talent development decision. The question is not just who can do the job, but who will build the people around them while they do it.
And the context makes this even more significant. Gallup estimates that the manager accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement — not the strategy, not the technology, not the office environment. When the person leading the team is the single biggest determinant of how that team performs, who you appoint becomes a commercial decision with compounding consequences.
70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager. The single biggest determinant of whether a team performs is the quality of the person leading it — and the leadership behaviours they bring. — Gallup, State of the American Manager
The multiplier in practice
In banking, where the competition for talented people is intense and the cost of losing them is high, this matters particularly. A mid-career professional who feels developed, challenged, and invested in is significantly less likely to leave. A team where the leader checks in on progress regularly and actively encourages growth retains its best people for longer.
I have seen this across every organisation I have worked in. The leaders who build the strongest teams — the ones whose people get promoted, take on bigger roles, and perform at the next level — tend to share a set of characteristics. They treat developing people as a core part of the job rather than an administrative obligation. They give honest, regular feedback. They invest in the careers of the people around them as deliberately as they invest in their own commercial delivery.
The multiplier effect is not an abstract concept. It is a retention strategy, a capability-building strategy, and a succession strategy, all operating through the same mechanism: the leadership behaviour of the person at the top of the team.
What the Chief People Officer can do
Measure leadership impact, not just performance. Most frameworks assess what a leader delivers. Few assess what a leader builds. The Chief People Officer who adds development outcomes to the leadership scorecard — team engagement, internal promotion rates, retention of high-potential employees — makes the multiplier effect visible and valued. When you measure it, you reward it. When you reward it, you get more of it.
Use development track record in succession decisions. When a shortlist for a senior role is being discussed, the conversation typically centres on commercial results, stakeholder credibility, and strategic capability. The Chief People Officer can add a question that is just as important: what is this person’s record of developing others? Who have they built? Whose career is stronger because this person led them?
Celebrate the leaders who multiply. Most organisations recognise individual achievement. Few celebrate the leader whose team produces the next generation of leaders. Shifting the internal narrative to recognise capability-building — not just delivery — creates permission for others to lead the same way.
Beyond the numbers
As International Women’s Day prompts the annual conversation and gender pay gap reports follow in April, the most useful thing a Chief People Officer can do is shift the framing. Not “how many women do we have in senior roles?” but “what difference is it making that they are there?”
The answer, if the research is any guide, is: a significant one. Higher engagement. Stronger development cultures. Better retention. Leadership capability that compounds over time.
Every leadership appointment is a bet on the future. The multiplier effect says that some bets pay off not just in performance, but in the capability of the entire team. A Chief People Officer who builds succession decisions around that insight is not making a diversity argument. They are making a commercial one — and it happens to be the most compelling argument of all.
Domi Alzapiedi is a Chief People Officer in banking, focused on the intersection of people strategy, organisational design, and commercial performance. She writes about the questions that keep leadership teams honest.