Women in leadership in Vietnam: reframing the conversation

In most Vietnamese organisations the shortage of women in senior roles is not a shortage of capable women. It is the accumulation of who gets the stretch assignment and whose potential a manager backs. The most effective intervention is therefore the line manager, not another programme aimed at the women themselves.

Most programmes aimed at developing women leaders start from an unspoken premise: that the women need fixing. More confidence, more assertiveness, more of whatever the room is thought to reward. LHH's global work on women in leadership starts from a different premise, and that premise matters even more in Vietnam, where the gap between the number of capable women in an organisation and the number in its senior roles is usually not a gap in ability. It is a gap in how the system around them works.

The problem is rarely the pipeline

Vietnamese organisations often have a strong base of women in professional and middle-management roles. What thins out higher up is not talent. It is the accumulation of smaller things: who gets the stretch assignment, whose potential a manager notices and backs, how a career conversation goes when family and work decisions collide. None of those are solved by sending women on a course to be more like the men above them. They are solved by changing what the people around them do.

The manager is the intervention

The single most powerful lever is the line manager. A manager who sponsors rather than merely mentors, who hands over genuinely visible work, who has an honest development conversation instead of a polite one, changes a career trajectory more than any workshop the individual attends alone. This is why our leadership work puts the manager population in scope, not just the high-potential women themselves. Developing women leaders and developing the managers who enable them are the same project, and treating them separately is why so many well-meaning programmes produce a graduation photo and little change.

What good looks like here

In a Vietnamese context, three things tend to separate a programme that moves the numbers from one that does not.

It develops the manager and the individual together. The women build the capabilities and the visibility to lead at the next level; their managers build the habits of sponsorship, feedback and fair opportunity that let that happen. One without the other stalls.

It is honest about the local reality. How a difficult conversation lands, how family and career decisions are weighed, how authority is read in a Vietnamese workplace: these are not footnotes. A programme designed elsewhere and translated misses them. One built by people who advise in this market every day does not.

It is tied to real decisions, not a calendar. The development connects to actual moments: a promotion under consideration, a critical role opening, a stretch project that needs an owner. Capability built against a real decision sticks; capability built in the abstract fades.

Beyond a single programme

Reframing the conversation also means being clear about what a "women in leadership" initiative is for. It is not a diversity gesture to be reported once a year. It is part of building a leadership pipeline that does not quietly lose half its potential on the way up, which is a straightforward performance question for any organisation competing for scarce senior capability in Vietnam. The organisations that treat it that way, as leadership development that happens to address a systemic leak, get further than the ones that treat it as a standalone women's programme.

Where does your pipeline actually thin out?

Establish that before anyone designs a programme, because the answer is usually a specific level and a specific group of managers rather than a general shortage of capable women. Our Women in Leadership programme is built for exactly this problem and includes a module for line managers, because progress rarely happens without them. Tell us where the drop-off sits in your organisation and we will say whether that is the work, or whether the honest answer lies somewhere else.

Our leadership programmes draw on a catalogue of more than fifty development modules, run off the shelf, customised, or assembled around a specific capability gap.

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