A CEO who's worked with Hillary Clinton to mentor 16,000 female leaders across the world reveals 5 habits all women should adopt immediately to get ahead in the workplace

Women leaders, in general, are more comfortable asking for feedback than men, according to Zenger Folkman. The reason stems from male leaders' tendency to, over time, stop asking for ways to improve. Women tend to continue to ask for feedback even as they age, the consultancy found.

Nelson also says women who ask for feedback from everyone in their organization — from the bottom level to the top player — will succeed as leaders more often.

"You need to be constantly listening and learning," she said. "I think also you need to be willing to admit failures. These are all traits that I think come more naturally for women than men."

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Being able to work with different groups of people sets successful women apart.

Research has shown diversity in decision making tends to lead to better results. Gender and racially diverse teams reexamine facts, better process information, innovate more often, and remain objective more often than monolithic boards, according to the Harvard Business Review. Tufts University psychologist Samuel Sommers even found racially diverse juries raise more case facts and made fewer factual errors than all-white juries.

Allowing for this kind of diversity in perspectives and viewpoints will ensure female leaders thrive, Nelson said.

"It's very easy to work with people who we agree with and get along with," she said. "It's more difficult to work with people who don't agree with us on 20 different things."

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Nelson said oftentimes, struggling companies will bring in a woman to lead only after "traditional" male leaders fail to turn the ship around, a statistic shown through research from Utah State University. Marissa Mayer, for instance, took over Yahoo! in 2012 to change the culture of the dysfunctional tech giant.

Nelson said companies do this because they know successful women think outside the box. Oftentimes, they had to take bold risks to set themselves apart early in their career, she said. This quality often leads to more success for women.

"We tend to think more outside the box," she said. "So many of the women we work with don't even know there is a box."

After facing greater adversity to become leaders, women and minorities have spoken about "paying it forward," or investing in other underserved communities to get them into high-paying jobs.

Private-equity billionaire Robert F. Smith, one of just 13 black billionaires in the world, according to Forbes, said he decided to pay off the student loans of Morehouse College grads in part to give back to his community. Axiom CEO Elena Donio, a powerful tech and now law executive, invests in women at her company and in underserved populations through charity work.

Nelson said she sees this characteristic repeated globally among women in power.

"You invest in women and they immediately turn around to invest and support other people in their communities," she said. "And that's the power of it. I mean, that is the power of investing in women leaders: that ripple effects that you see."