Insights on Leadership

Glass Balls and Rubber Balls

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMT

What strong leaders know about what they can afford to drop

It may look like she’s doing it all.

She isn’t.

She’s rotating what she drops.

This is one of the most important things I’ve learned from watching genuinely effective senior leaders operate under sustained pressure — and one of the least discussed. The image of the leader who handles everything, drops nothing, and somehow maintains perfect execution across every domain is not a model of excellence. It’s a myth. And chasing it is exhausting, unsustainable, and ultimately counterproductive.

Strong leaders don’t try to keep every ball in the air. They’ve developed a more sophisticated skill: knowing which balls are glass and which are rubber.

A delayed response, a rescheduled meeting, a report that goes out a day late — these are rubber balls. The consequence of dropping them is real but recoverable.

A key relationship, your team’s trust, a board commitment, your own integrity under pressure — these don’t bounce. Drop them and the damage is lasting.

The leaders who sustain performance over time — not just sprint through a crisis but actually lead with consistency across years — have gotten very clear about which category their current responsibilities fall into. They drop rubber balls deliberately, without guilt, because dropping them is the only way to keep the glass ones safely in hand.

This sounds simple. It is not easy.

It requires letting go of the belief that everything on your list carries equal weight. It requires tolerating the discomfort of imperfection in some areas in order to protect what actually matters. It requires the confidence to make that call without apologizing for it.

It also requires knowing yourself well enough to distinguish between the balls you’re dropping because they’re genuinely rubber — and the ones you’re dropping because they’re hard, or uncomfortable, or because you’ve quietly decided they’re rubber when they aren’t.

That’s the real work. And it’s worth doing deliberately rather than finding out under pressure which of the balls you let fall were glass all along.

I write about leadership, influence, and what it takes to lead at this level on LinkedIn .

Leadership Is Presence, Not Perfection

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:00:00 GMT

What a young client taught me about the real cost of avoidance

A young client said something to me recently that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

He’d just walked away from a role — a good role, at a company he’d believed in — because a simple, human conversation with his manager never happened. A conversation that would have taken fifteen minutes. That would have cost nothing. That might have changed everything.

No malice. No drama. No spectacular failure of leadership. Just avoidance.

His manager wasn’t a bad person. His manager was uncomfortable. And rather than sit with that discomfort long enough to have an honest conversation, his manager circled it, deferred it, and eventually let the moment pass entirely.

And my client — a thoughtful, high-performing, genuinely good professional — made the entirely reasonable decision that an organization led by people who couldn’t have hard conversations wasn’t a place he wanted to build his career.

The organization lost a good person. And with that person went institutional knowledge, client relationships, and whatever he would have built if he’d stayed.

All of it avoidable.

He’s right. And he’s also describing something that is apparently harder than it looks.

Because the barrier isn’t knowledge. Most managers know they should have the conversation. The barrier is discomfort. The willingness to say something true that might land badly, to be in the room with someone’s disappointment or frustration, to care enough about another person’s growth and experience to be temporarily uncomfortable yourself.

Leadership isn’t about perfection. It’s not about always having the right answer or never making a mistake. It’s about showing up — consistently, honestly, and with enough care for the people in your charge to do the uncomfortable thing when it needs doing.

Have the conversation.

Say the thing.

Care enough to be uncomfortable.

That’s the job. All of it, really.

I write about leadership, influence, and what it takes to lead at this level on LinkedIn .

What Your Promotion Decisions Are Really Saying

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The fastest way to read your organization’s real culture

Want a quick read on your real culture?

Ignore the values statement.

Instead, look at your last five promotion decisions.

Who got accelerated. Who got protected. Who advanced — and why.

That’s the story your people are paying attention to. Not the town halls. Not the slogans. Not the carefully designed slide decks about organizational values. The decisions. The visible, consequential, observable decisions about who moves forward and who doesn’t.

If collaboration is a stated value but the people who advance are the ones who protect their turf and hoard credit — your people know. They’ve noticed. They’ve adjusted their behavior accordingly, whether or not anyone has said it out loud.

If accountability is written on the wall but leaders who miss their numbers face no real consequence while those who deliver get quietly overlooked — your people have done that math. They know what’s actually rewarded here.

If candor is celebrated in theory but the person who told an uncomfortable truth in the last leadership meeting is somehow no longer in the room — no one needs a memo to understand what candor actually costs.

This isn’t abstract or theoretical. It is one of the most practical diagnostics available to any senior leader who wants to understand the gap between the culture they believe they have and the culture they have actually built.

The values on the wall are aspirational. The promotion decisions are operational. When they diverge, people follow the operational signal every time.

If you’re senior enough to influence those decisions, this matters directly. You are not just evaluating individuals. You are teaching your organization what leadership actually looks like here. What gets rewarded. What gets tolerated. What gets advanced.

That’s not HR’s job. That’s not a culture initiative. That’s leadership. And it’s yours.

I write about leadership, influence, and what it takes to lead at this level on LinkedIn .

They Are Not Struggling With Confidence

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

What women in leadership are actually navigating

Most women in leadership aren’t struggling with confidence.

That’s not what’s getting in the way.

What’s actually happening is more specific — and more useful to understand. Women in leadership are often navigating environments where the same leadership behaviors are read differently depending on who is demonstrating them.

Directness from a man reads as decisive. From a woman, it can read as aggressive.

Asking questions is curiosity from a man. From a woman, it can signal uncertainty.

Stating a boundary is strength from a man. From a woman, it can be interpreted as difficult.

Because of that gap — between intent and interpretation — many women leaders become deeply thoughtful, sometimes hypervigilant, about how they show up. How direct to be. How much context to provide. How to advocate without being dismissed. How to speak with confidence without being labeled something else entirely.

What often gets missed in conversations about women and leadership is this: the issue isn’t capability or clarity. It’s interpretation. The environment is reading her differently than it reads her male peers — and over time, she adapts. She softens. She qualifies. She over-explains. Not because she lacks conviction, but because she has learned, often through hard experience, what happens when she doesn’t.

That adaptation may be understandable. It is also costly — to her clarity, her credibility, and her leadership presence.

This is why I push back on the framing that women’s leadership development is about building confidence. Confidence is rarely the gap. The gap is between how she actually leads and how she is being perceived — and that gap requires a different kind of work. Not motivational. Diagnostic. Strategic. Sustained.

It also means that this isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s a leadership issue and an organizational one. When talented women are spending cognitive and emotional energy managing interpretation rather than leading, everyone loses.

The question worth asking — in coaching, in organizations, in leadership development — isn’t “how do we make her more confident?” It’s “what is the environment asking her to manage that it isn’t asking of her peers?”

That’s where the real work begins.

I write about leadership, influence, and what it takes to lead at this level on LinkedIn .

The Candy Bowl and the Cost of Approachability

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:00:00 GMT

On warmth, authority, and what it took to understand the difference

I used to keep a bowl of M&Ms on my desk at work.

Yes, because I like M&Ms.

And also because I liked being the approachable one. The warm one. The leader people felt comfortable stopping by to see. My door was always open. I remembered birthdays. I asked about people’s families. I made the office feel a little more human.

At the time, it felt like good leadership. And in some ways, it was.

What I didn’t understand — not for years — was how easily “approachable” can become your primary leadership identity. Especially as a woman.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about how this works: women are often rewarded for being warm. Genuinely rewarded — with positive feedback, with people who say they love working for you, with a reputation as someone who creates psychological safety. Those things matter. They’re real.

And then we get evaluated primarily for that warmth.

Meanwhile, the men around us are evaluated for strategy. For vision. For results.

We become the approachable one. The supportive one. The one who holds the team together. Important work. Rarely the work that gets you to the next level.

The candy bowl wasn’t the issue. The positioning was.

It took me years to fully understand that I didn’t need to earn authority through constant accessibility. That being strategic and being warm weren’t in conflict. That my work already spoke for itself — and that my job wasn’t to make everyone comfortable with my authority, but to exercise it.

That shift doesn’t happen overnight. And it doesn’t happen by simply deciding to be different. It happens when you get clear on how you’re being perceived versus how you intend to lead — and when you have the support to close that gap deliberately, not just hope it closes on its own.

I’m curious: what’s something you used to do — or maybe still do — that felt small, but you later realized was shaping how others perceived your leadership?

I write about leadership, influence, and what it takes to lead at this level on LinkedIn .

Already Capable. Ready for More.

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 09:00:00 GMT

On the quieter questions that signal it’s time

There’s a particular kind of woman I work with.

She’s not in crisis.

She’s thoughtful. Capable. Self-aware. She’s built something meaningful — a career, a team, a reputation that reflects years of real work. She leads well. People know it.

And lately she’s been asking herself quieter questions.

Is this the way I want to show up?

Am I using my voice fully?

What would “next level” look like — on my terms?

Nothing is wrong.

But something is stretching.

The women I work with aren’t looking to be rescued or repaired. They’re looking for a thinking partner who takes their actual experience seriously. Someone who will engage with the complexity of leading at this level — the competing priorities, the political terrain, the moments when doing the right thing and doing the easy thing aren’t the same — and who will tell them the truth.

They want to lead with more clarity. More substance. More of themselves.

Not a different version of themselves. More fully themselves.

If this feels familiar — if something is stretching and you’re ready to stop navigating it alone — I’d love to talk. You can schedule an introductory call here .

I write about leadership, influence, and what it takes to lead at this level on LinkedIn .