Why Female Leadership Development Needs to Get More Commercial

For years, we have been investing in female leadership development, and much of that investment has focused on helping women become more confident, find their voice, build their personal brand, overcome imposter syndrome and develop the courage to take up more space. And none of that is wrong.

In fact, as someone who has spent years coaching women around confidence, self-leadership, influence and impact, I know just how transformational that work can be.

But I also think we are missing something.

Because if we genuinely want more women progressing into senior leadership, sitting at executive tables, growing successful businesses and having greater influence over the decisions that shape organisations, then confidence alone is not enough.

We need to talk about commercial capability.

We need women who understand how businesses grow, where revenue comes from, what drives profitability, how opportunities are created, why some relationships matter commercially, how strategic decisions affect the wider organisation and, ultimately, how their own role connects to the money.

And yet, somehow, this is still largely absent from the female leadership conversation.

We Have Spent a Lot of Time Trying to Make Women More Confident

There has been a long-held assumption that one of the biggest things standing between women and senior leadership is confidence.

So we encourage women to speak up, be more visible, silence their inner critic, overcome imposter syndrome, develop executive presence and believe in themselves more. Again, all useful things.

But I have always believed that confidence is a muscle, and muscles are built through use. We become more confident because we do things, learn things, make decisions, get things wrong, recover, develop competence and gradually collect the evidence that tells us: I can handle this.

Which is why I think there is a danger in treating confidence as something we can develop entirely in isolation from capability. Because imagine walking into a senior leadership meeting feeling wonderfully confident in yourself, but having no idea what the conversation about margin means, how the company actually wins new business, which clients are most profitable, where future growth is likely to come from or what commercial impact your own function is having. That confidence is going to disappear pretty quickly.

Real confidence at senior level comes, at least in part, from knowing that you understand the business you are helping to lead.

Commercial Understanding Changes How You Show Up

This is something I feel increasingly strongly about, because I have seen the difference commercial understanding makes throughout my own career.

I spent years working in corporate marketing before building and running my own marketing agency for eighteen years, and today, alongside my coaching and consultancy work, I am also a Director of a tech start-up. And if there is one thing that experience has taught me, it is that understanding how a business actually works changes the way you think.

You stop looking only at your own role, department or list of responsibilities and start looking at the organisation as a whole. You begin asking different questions:

• Where is the growth going to come from?

• What is stopping us from getting there?

• Which activities are genuinely generating value?

• Where are we wasting money or effort?

• Which relationships should we be developing? What opportunities are sitting right under our noses?

• What does the customer actually need?

• What happens commercially if we make this decision?

That is the shift from being excellent at your job to thinking like a commercial leader.

And it is a shift I believe far more women need the opportunity to make.

The Commercial Gap Has Consequences

I meet incredibly capable women all the time who are brilliant at what they do, highly experienced, conscientious, intelligent and trusted by the people around them, yet who become noticeably less comfortable when the conversation moves towards revenue, pipeline, pricing, business development or P&L responsibility.

Not because they are incapable of understanding it. Far from it. Often, nobody has ever really taught them. Historically, women have been heavily represented in functions centred around people, delivery, operations, HR, marketing and support, while commercial ownership, financial decision-making and revenue generation have too often been treated as someone else's territory.

And that matters, because the further you progress in leadership, the harder it becomes to separate leadership from commercial responsibility.

At senior level, you are not simply being asked whether your department is functioning well. You are being asked whether you understand where the organisation is going, how it will grow, what might threaten that growth and what decisions need to be made next.

That is commercial leadership.

And it isn't about turning every woman into a salesperson or expecting her to become an accountant overnight. It is about giving women the confidence and capability to understand the commercial levers around them and empowering them to pull those levers.

Female Founders Need This Too

And this isn't just a corporate problem. I see exactly the same commercial gap among female founders. Women who are exceptional at delivering their service, deeply committed to their clients and incredibly good at what they do, but who haven't necessarily developed the commercial infrastructure around that expertise.

They over-deliver. They undercharge. They rely too heavily on referrals.

They avoid business development because it feels uncomfortable or "salesy".

They become incredibly busy serving the clients they already have, while quietly neglecting the pipeline that will determine what their business looks like six months from now. And then suddenly revenue dips and panic sets in.

This is why I am becoming increasingly passionate about helping women develop commercial confidence, because being brilliant at your craft is only one part of building a brilliant business.

You also have to know how to create demand, build relationships, spot opportunities, price your expertise, develop a healthy pipeline and make strategic decisions about where your time, money and energy will generate the greatest return. That isn't somehow separate from leadership. It is leadership.

We Need to Develop the Woman AND the Commercial Leader

This is where I think leadership development needs to evolve. I don't want us to throw out the work around confidence, self-leadership, communication, influence or personal development. Quite the opposite.

My entire philosophy at Ignite starts with the belief that sustainable leadership begins with the individual, because how we lead ourselves inevitably affects how we lead businesses, teams and other people.

But I want us to go further. Because the magic happens when we combine those things.

When a woman understands herself, trusts her judgement and knows how to communicate with influence and understands the commercial world around her, something shifts.

• She asks better questions

• She contributes differently

• She spots opportunities

• She challenges assumptions

• She becomes more comfortable talking about money

• She understands how her decisions affect the wider organisation

• And she starts moving from simply participating in commercial conversations to actively shaping them

That is the kind of female leadership development I want to see more of.

What This Looks Like at Ignite

This thinking sits at the heart of the work we are developing at Ignite, both with ambitious women individually and with organisations that want to develop and retain their female talent.

Starting with our 3 high-impact workshops:

• Our Female Rainmakers™ workshop, for example, was created specifically to help women become more commercially confident, moving beyond the traditional perception of business development as "selling" and instead understanding how opportunities are really created through relationships, curiosity, credibility, value and strategic thinking.

  
  

• Our Future Female Leaders™ workshop helps ambitious women prepare for greater leadership responsibility, not simply by encouraging them to feel ready for the next level, but by helping them understand what that next level actually requires.

  
  

• And Own Your Impact™ focuses on influence, communication and professional impact, helping women recognise the value they already bring and become much more intentional about how they use it.

This is practical work, because leadership development should create change outside the training room.

Following a recent programme with a national professional services firm, we saw an average uplift of approximately two points out of ten across measures including confidence, visibility and feeling valued, while 100% of attendees rated the session as engaging and relevant and 100% said they would recommend it.

Our work has also been trusted by organisations including Fujifilm Sonosite and FRP, with participants describing the sessions as engaging, practical, highly relevant and, in the words of Fujifilm Sonosite's Women in Sonosite Committee, "one of the most valuable sessions we have attended."

And this thinking will continue to shape where Ignite goes next, including the development of our POWERHOUSE™ Leadership Programme, launching in 2027, which will bring together self-leadership, strategic thinking, commercial confidence, peer learning and practical implementation.

Because I believe the next generation of female leadership development needs to prepare women for the reality of leadership, not simply the idea of it.

It Is Time to Raise the Bar

We have spent long enough asking women to be more confident. Now we need to make sure they have the commercial understanding, strategic experience and opportunities to back that confidence up.

Because when women understand not only how to lead themselves and other people, but how to drive growth, influence commercial decisions, build valuable relationships and contribute meaningfully to the future direction of an organisation, they become incredibly powerful.

They stop waiting to be invited into the important conversations. They belong in them.

And eventually, they start leading them.

If you are responsible for developing female talent within your organisation and want to explore a more commercially grounded approach to leadership development, or you are an ambitious woman who wants to strengthen your own commercial confidence and influence, get in touch and let's talk about how Ignite can help.