Women in Leadership training in Lausanne · canton of VaudWomen’s leadership in the canton of Vaud: how should tasks that lead to greater responsibility be allocated?

In the canton of Vaud, connections between EPFL, UNIL, medtech, SMEs, Lake Geneva region scale-ups and food industry groups on the Riviera create substantial coordination needs. For SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “Women’s Leadership” programme, this raises a specific question: how can organisations prevent this necessary work from limiting access to assignments that prepare people to lead?

1. What the literature establishes

Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart (2017, American Economic Review) examine tasks that contribute to collective functioning but carry little weight in promotion decisions. In the settings studied, women volunteer more, receive more requests and accept these requests more often than men. This finding calls for examining how requests are distributed, rather than attributing task allocation solely to individual preferences.

2. Why negotiating task allocation can carry a cost

Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock and Lei Lai (2007, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) show, in compensation negotiation experiments, that social reactions to a request can differ according to gender and the evaluation setting. Their study does not address task allocation, but it highlights a limitation of simply advising people to ask for more for themselves. Negotiating a different portfolio of assignments therefore need not be merely a matter of mastering communication techniques.

3. The premature conclusion: learning to say no is enough

One might conclude that leadership training should primarily teach participants to decline tasks that receive little recognition. This would leave the allocation mechanism intact and shift all responsibility onto those receiving the requests. A more balanced approach combines negotiating priorities with explicit rules for rotation, recognition and access to career-building assignments. (our executive and employee training programmes)

4. The limits of the evidence and the categories

These studies do not measure task allocation in the canton of Vaud and do not establish a uniform pattern across its organisations. In a medtech company or an international sports organisation, for example, document coordination might have low visibility while being critical to compliance or operational continuity; these are hypothetical situations. Before classifying a task as offering little career value, organisations need to check their actual progression criteria and distinguish operational usefulness, visibility and recognition.

A practical check in Lausanne

An exercise suitable for SHR’s “Women’s Leadership” programme would involve a Lausanne-based team recording newly allocated tasks for one month: the person approached, the allocation method, expected time and the explicit link to progression criteria. The team could then test a rotation for necessary but poorly recognised tasks while making access to project responsibilities explicit. The following month, comparing the share of expected working time devoted to each category and the distribution of career-building assignments would help verify a change in allocation, without treating it as evidence of an effect on promotions. To go further: explore the Women in Leadership training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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