Senior Female Leadership: An Exploration of Midlife Experiences and the Relevance of Developmental Coaching

Abstract

The paper aims to increase our understanding of women's experience of senior leadership during midlife and explores how developmental coaching can support women at this career stage. Developmental coaching is identified as relevant to periods of transition in a person's life as it focuses on the person themselves rather than their skills or performance. An interpretivist, qualitative method using semi-structured interviews was applied to a sample of senior midlife female leaders in order to explore the relevance of this coaching approach. Rich data were drawn from a sample of senior female leaders including VPs and C-Suite who shared their midlife experiences, and the role coaching can have at this career stage. Our findings challenge existing narratives of midlife as a period of female decline and confirms the need to understand the diversity of midlife experience across age ranges. More importantly the findings align with previous descriptions of developmental coaching. Critically they support the need to adopt a holistic approach to coaching senior midlife women that takes into account both the professional and personal challenges inherent in this key developmental transition period. This requires a coaching relationship based on an advanced level of coaching maturity and experience on the part of the coach.