My dad was diagnosed about two and a half weeks ago with very aggressive, stage-four colon cancer. After weeks of significant stomach pain, he needed emergency surgery. Right now, he feels better than he has in months, which is a tremendous relief. And yet we know the cancer is spreading in his body, and we really don’t know what happens next.

There’s a complete lack of control in this. I’m realizing how much of my life has been built around the opposite. When things are stressful or hard, I move into action. I take control. I make things happen. What was always safe was action.

That strength has served me and taken me far. I know how to move through complexity, make decisions, solve problems, and keep going. I imagine you do, too. There are seasons of life when that is exactly what’s required of us.

But there are other seasons when it isn’t. And I’m in one of those now.

With my dad, I can make sure he has the right doctors, the right people, the right resources. I can show up. I can help. But ultimately, I cannot solve this. I’m being asked to develop a different kind of strength: the ability to hold what I cannot change.

That has led me to really think about the difference between doing and holding.

Doing is about movement. It’s about getting somewhere. The better you get at it, the more efficiently you can move through something difficult and keep moving forward. Holding is different. When you’re holding something that is heavy or fragile or full, you don’t move quickly. You get still and steady. That’s what I’m practicing now.

That realization has shown up in another part of my life, too. I hit my revenue goal for the year in August, which is amazing. What a blessing. But instead of enjoying that accomplishment, I was instantly worried about next year, what it means and how I’m going to keep it going. As soon as I caught myself, my next thought was: Really? Even when I had achieved the thing I’d been working toward, I immediately created another thing to manage, another thing to figure out, another thing to make happen.

Do you ever do this?

I don’t want to live that way. I choose something different.

I’m not saying the choice is to stop achieving. I’m not interested in becoming less ambitious or less capable. What’s changing is my definition of success. I’m asking different questions now: Am I using my gifts? Am I having an impact? Am I living a full life?

I see this with my clients, too. Several times a week, someone will apologize to me for crying or for showing emotion. I understand why. So many of us have learned to keep moving, pull it together, and get back to work. That’s part of what I mean by holding. It’s a strength to slow down and be with what we’re feeling.

Not everything in front of us is a problem to solve.

My dad can be very sick and feel better than he has in months. I can be devastated by what’s happening and feel incredibly grateful for the relationship I have with him. I can be worried about what’s ahead and also feel complete in what we’ve already shared.

We don’t have to choose. We can hold all of it, like carrying a big pot full of water. When you’re carrying something like that, you don’t run. You slow down. You steady yourself. You pay attention to what you’re carrying.

A diagnosis like my dad’s puts life and death right in front of you. We all know we die, but most of us have plenty of ways to avoid sitting with that truth. Right now, it’s in our faces. And I find myself asking how I want to show up in this chapter.

My dad has been getting calls from people from all different parts of his life, sometimes every thirty minutes, expressing love and sharing the impact he’s had on them. What a gift it is for him to hear that while he’s here. To look around and feel, “I am loved.”

Watching my dad receive all of that love has made me think about how many people around us are holding something right now that we know nothing about. Your colleague may be worried about a parent. Your friend may be carrying grief. The person who seems to have everything figured out may be trying to make peace with something they can’t control. We just don’t know.

Maybe that’s part of what holding asks of us: to make a little more room for what we’re carrying and what other people are carrying. To slow down enough to feel what’s here instead of immediately trying to fix it, compartmentalize it, or move past it.

For people like us who have gotten very good at doing, holding can be the next growth edge. It gives us a richer way to move through life, with the capacity to stay with what’s here.

– Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

Amanda Breckenridge is an executive leadership coach with seven years of experience working with VP, SVP, and C-suite leaders at high-growth enterprise technology companies. All content on Leading Forward draws on 360 assessment data and coaching insights from 200+ senior executives.

She understood the impact. But the delay sat outside her team, on someone else’s org chart, and that became the reason not to say anything.

Two other leaders brought me different versions of the same story this month. Different situations, same decision underneath: protect how you’re seen, or create friction to protect the outcome.

Healthy friction is one of the highest leverage choices a leader can make. Yet most people don’t make it. Even though they see what’s at stake, protecting how they’re perceived feels safer than doing what’s more useful.

By healthy friction, I mean naming a hard truth early and directly, because it serves the person or the outcome, not because you want to win, prove a point, or vent your frustration.

That’s also what separates it from the kind of friction that people dread. A conversation delayed until frustration builds rarely lands well. A conversation driven by the need to be right or in control feels like a takedown instead of help. The difference isn’t how direct you are. It’s why you’re being direct.

What avoidance really costs

Every excuse has a cost and an opportunity.

A delay left unaddressed erodes results over time, as it did with Miriam’s pipeline. A poorly defined role turns into underperformance that gets blamed on the person instead of the job. A reaction you never examine doesn’t disappear. It shows up later as distance, resentment, or a comment that lands harder than you intended.

The costs are easy to ignore because none of them show up immediately. They build gradually, which makes silence feel like good judgment instead of what it actually is.

The upside gets talked about even less but I’d argue it’s more important. Choosing friction early tells people you’re paying attention. Conversations become more honest because people stop protecting each other from reality.

Healthy friction does more than prevent loss. It builds a level of performance and trust that avoidance can never produce.

So why do so many leaders avoid it?

Why leaders stay quiet

In the moment, silence rarely feels like avoidance. It feels responsible.

These are the reasons I hear most often:

It’s not really my lane.

I don’t want to come across as rude.

It’s probably nothing, I’m probably overreacting.

Have you told yourself any of these when something bothered you?

They sound different but each one protects something: permission, likability, or legitimacy.

Permission

“It’s not really my lane.”

On the surface, that sounds respectful. Staying in your lane, respecting another leader by not interfering with their team.

The belief underneath is less generous:

I can only speak when I have formal authority.

That was Miriam’s story.

She watched the hiring delay for months before realizing she’d been looking at it the wrong way. Instead of asking whose org chart owned the problem, she started asking whose results it affected.

Hers, whether she owned the decision or not.

She posted this in Slack:

“This affects my numbers even though it isn’t my org. Here’s what I’m seeing, and here’s what I need from this partnership going forward.”

The conversation happened sooner than it otherwise would have. More importantly, Miriam stopped excluding herself from discussions she needed to be part of.

Likability

“I don’t want to come across as rude.”

Most leaders describe this as tact or emotional intelligence, but the real concern is likability.

“I am easy to work with, not difficult.”

David noticed that Rachel’s role wasn’t clearly defined, and it was hurting her performance. He saw it months before he said anything. He didn’t want to criticize someone else’s hire or look like he was overstepping.

Eventually he reframed the observation as a conversation about support not criticism.

In a one on one with Rachel’s manager, he said, “I’ve been thinking about Rachel’s role and the impact she’s having here. I have feedback that might help you get more from the role, and I have an idea about a different structure that could help both of you.”

He named the issue without turning it into a judgment. The conversation became collaborative instead of defensive because he stayed focused on improving the work, not evaluating the person.

Legitimacy

“It’s probably nothing, I’m probably overreacting.”

Those thoughts can sound like self awareness. You may think you’re refusing to make a big deal out of something small. The deeper concern is legitimacy.

“I do not get petty or small.”

Kristy had mentored Tara for years. One day she heard Tara describe her leadership style to a new hire using language, almost verbatim, that Kristy had coined years earlier and used to define her own approach. Her reaction surprised her. It felt more like threat than pride. She ignored it because admitting the feeling existed seemed worse than pretending it didn’t.

Eventually she named it to herself and chose a different interpretation. The fact that Tara was building on what Kristy had taught her was evidence the mentoring had worked, not that she was being replaced.

The relationship grew stronger. Kristy also stopped carrying resentment that might have surfaced later in a poorly timed comment or delayed credit.

Every one of these excuses offers immediate relief. And every one of them also hands the problem to your future self.

Leaders who make progress choose that trade deliberately. They notice when a small discomfort now prevents a larger cost later, then act before the problem forces them to.

Three ways to build healthy friction

Clarify the outcome

Naming where you’ve been avoiding a conversation means admitting, on paper, that you’ve been avoiding it, before any actual conversation happens. That’s the uncomfortable part, and it comes first.

Define what healthy friction means for you. What does success look like? How will you know you’re there? What would change, on your team, in your numbers, in how people work together? Write down where you’ve been avoiding it.

The short term cost is an honest, unflattering self assessment. The long term payoff is that friction stops being reactive, something that only happens under pressure, and becomes something you build on purpose.

This is the step Miriam skipped for months. She didn’t see the delay as hers to name until she reframed it.

Use the routines you already have

Putting friction inside a meeting you already run makes it visible and repeated. There’s no quiet way to let it slide, the way a one off conversation could.

Don’t create a new ritual. Look at your existing meetings, one on ones, and check ins, and decide where direct conversations belong instead of waiting for a separate, harder to schedule moment.

The short term cost is more exposure, sooner, in front of more people. The long term payoff is that friction becomes normal instead of a dreaded, rare event, which is what actually changes a team’s culture.

David’s conversation worked partly because it wasn’t staged as a confrontation. It happened inside a normal one on one.

State the facts clearly

Leading with the number or the gap instead of a softened version risks being seen as difficult instead of easy. That’s the exact fear underneath the likability problem.

Start with what you see: the number, the gap, the pattern. Do not soften it until it loses meaning.

The short term cost is a flatter, more direct exchange, and possibly some immediate discomfort or defensiveness. The long term payoff is that the real issue gets addressed once instead of three vague times, and directness earns more trust over time than softness does.

This is nearly verbatim what Miriam and David both did. If you look back at their quotes, you’ll see that neither one softened what they saw. They named it and said what they needed.

—

Healthy friction only works when people believe you’re trying to help. Without that, even honest feedback can feel like punishment.

Intent matters more than wording. You can say the exact same words because you want someone to succeed, or because you’re frustrated, trying to prove a point, or trying to make yourself feel better. Most people can tell the difference.

These conversations will never become comfortable. The discomfort exists to remind you that there’s something real at stake.

What changes over time is how long you’re willing to let that discomfort make the decision for you.

The leaders who move their teams forward have decided the cost of staying quiet is higher than the cost of speaking up.

Speak early, while the problem is still small and the conversation is easier to have. It can be the difference between a hard quarter and a lost one, between a role that gets fixed and a person who gets blamed for it, between a relationship that deepens and one that quietly cools.

– Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

Amanda Breckenridge is an executive leadership coach with seven years of experience working with VP, SVP, and C-suite leaders at high-growth enterprise technology companies. All content on Leading Forward draws on 360 assessment data and coaching insights from 200+ senior executives.

A CRO I work with described a pattern she had seen in herself throughout her entire career.

She would build the complete case. She mapped every aspect of the problem. She knew exactly what to say to the CEO, the board, and the leadership team. Then she would stop before saying it.

“I think I’m going to be really upfront.” “I kind of told him.” “I was pretty clear.”

She named it herself: “It’s like I get 80% there and avoid the final 20%.”

Her extraordinary capability was on display. She saw the whole pattern, identified the misalignment, and diagnosed her own avoidance. She was more precise than any assessment could produce.

She walked in carrying every tool a coach might spend months building with a client. This only left one explanation.

She knew the claim she had earned the right to make, but she wasn’t making it.

That’s the SVP trap.

She wasn’t alone. I hear it from the senior leaders I work with at this level on a regular basis. The words may change, but the structure remains. The case is completely built, but the declaration is still lacking.

You may already recognize yourself in this pattern.

What you built

By the time you reach SVP or C-suite, you have made most of the transitions.

The “doer” identity is in your past. You’ve learned to lead through others and bring people with you. You are now the key person in the organization that others rely on for your weight and judgment. They look to you as a leader, especially when the stakes are high.

The data confirms it. Among over 40+ senior leaders in my practice, the difference between how SVP leaders view themselves and how others see them is one of the biggest at any level. Evaluators rate these leaders higher in three areas: strategic capability, relational capability, and overall effectiveness.

One SVP saw herself at the 50th percentile on leadership effectiveness. Her evaluators: the 80th. Another rated herself at the 81st. Her evaluators: the 96th. A third saw her strategic capability at the 29th percentile. The people around her: the 83rd.

That gap has a specific cause, and in my work, the cause shows up in three distinct forms.

Three ways it shows up

#1: Strategic work described as execution

One SVP designed a three-phase strategy to protect her business segment when the company moved upmarket. She got everyone on the same page, built the business case, and positioned her team before leadership made a decision. It was sophisticated, original work at the enterprise level.

Her description of what she’d done: “This is just what needed to happen.”

She didn’t perceive it as strategy. She saw it as responding to what the situation required.

Your work operates at the level the role demands. Your narration is a level below.

#2: Authority expressed through others rather than claimed

Another SVP shared her observation: “I have to kind of meld into others.” She sensed what people needed and became it. She developed her skills over the years. She used them to help others shine, not for her own visibility. She equipped her boss for high-stakes presentations and watched from the side. She made her peers’ strategic work land and expressed her own contribution as support.

She had built a large following: two hundred people who would move when she said go. She described them as colleagues, not as evidence of authority.

You narrate your own authority through others.

#3: Fully prepared, still hedging

That’s the CRO I mentioned at the beginning. She saw the gap between what she meant to say and what she said. Still, the pattern continued for months.

She could name exactly what was happening: “I manage down much better than I manage up.”

You’ve earned the claim, you just don’t make it.

Three leaders. Three functions. Three different companies. The same gap.

Why the gap forms

You didn’t arrive at this pattern by accident. You gained authority by focusing on others, and that was the right move. It got you here.

Like every ceiling in this series, a strength builds the pattern. In the first article, I called the strength ceiling at this level a commitment to restraint.

When your deepest instinct is to serve, describing your contribution as strategy rather than responsiveness feels like overreach, like you’re taking more credit than you’re owed. The service identity and the authority identity are speaking different languages. And under pressure, the one that’s more practiced wins.

Many SVP leaders I work with have an unanswered question at the root of this: Have I truly earned this seat?

The answer is in the data. Evaluators say: yes, absolutely.

But every time you don’t make the claim, the question stays open. The doubt that was always there, at every level and every role, never gets resolved because resolution requires the thing the pattern keeps withholding: the full declaration.

What it costs

The gap doesn’t stay internal.

For the team: When you absorb complexity instead of letting your people carry it, you limit them. They don’t develop the capability that comes from carrying real weight. The caretaking that feels like an investment functions like a ceiling.

For the organization: the most honest strategic read, the one only someone at this altitude can give, stays filtered. You know what’s true. But you describe it as a perspective rather than a point of view, a question rather than a claim. The unfiltered assessment the business most needs keeps getting softened before it arrives.

Something structural compounds everything above. At this level, the feedback systems that guided you before have mostly fallen silent. The organizational cost of challenging someone at this altitude is simply too high. People manage up. They give you what they think you want rather than what’s actually true.

Your question about whether you have fully earned this never receives external correction. The honest signal that would answer it has stopped arriving.

Every breakthrough I’ve seen at this level came from outside the normal hierarchy: a peer question that landed differently than anything the organization had said. A coaching session that reflected back what evaluators had always seen.

The loneliness at this level is structural, the predictable outcome of altitude. And nobody tells you it’s coming.

The final 20%

The shift requires two moves.

The first is to name the work for what it is, in the moments it happens. When you designed the strategy, say you designed it. When you shaped the outcome, describe it as leadership rather than responsiveness. When you’re in the room with something important to say, say it as a statement rather than a question.

One breakthrough came from this very shift when I said: “That’s COO-level work.” My client had been doing the work for months. She needed to hear it named from outside before she could claim it as hers.

The second is infrastructure. The honest feedback isn’t returning on its own. Build it carefully to avoid isolation. Create a peer relationship with no organizational stakes. Seek an outside voice that has no control over you. Find a space where someone shares what the hierarchy won’t.

Treat this as a leadership necessity, the same way you’d build any critical business resource.

Where are you stopping at 80% — and what would it take to make the full claim?

Leave a comment

— Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

Amanda Breckenridge is an executive leadership coach with seven years of experience working with VP, SVP, and C-suite leaders at high-growth enterprise technology companies. The Leading Forward Study draws on 360 assessment data and coaching insights from 40+ senior leaders, Senior Director through C-suite.

A VP I was working with received feedback from her team that wasn’t what she hoped for.

It was positive feedback. They thought of her as collaborative, approachable, and easy to bring problems to. People wanted to work for her.

But she felt disappointed. The feedback was accurate. What it didn’t say was everything.

Nobody said she gave them direction they could run toward. Nobody said they knew exactly where things were going. Nobody said she was the reason they did their best work.

They liked working with her. Nobody was following her.

The transition to VP

At Senior Director, the main shift is learning to lead through people rather than alongside them. This means stepping back from execution, focusing on developing your team, and translating your expertise to help them grow.

Most VPs make that transition. The data from my study of 40+ senior leaders shows that the tendency to stay close to execution, maintain tight oversight, and step in when things are moving too slowly drops by a third between Senior Director and VP.

But the data shows something else: most VPs never fully give up their doer identity. Instead, they develop a new layer on top of it. They become the person who keeps everyone aligned and moving. They are collaborative, easy to work with. Meanwhile, the doer identity continues to run underneath.

Which means they arrive at VP carrying two identities, while the role hands them a third.

Three jobs, one person

The VP role requires you to be three things at the same time.

The doer: the person who gets things done, has high standards, and can step in and deliver when it matters. That identity fires under pressure. And it gets rewarded because execution still works.

The accommodator: the leader who brings people along, clears the path, removes obstacles, and makes sure the team can move. It’s practiced and sophisticated, and it gets positive reinforcement constantly.

The strategic leader: the one who sets a clear direction, protects it under pressure, and develops others to lead rather than execute. That’s the identity the role most requires, yet is the one with the least development. The other two are louder, more practiced, and faster to fire.

Three legitimate identities are making claims on the same person at the same time. There’s no clear signal on which one to release. That’s why the load feels impossible. Time management can’t solve it.

Under pressure, whichever fires fastest wins, and the strategic leader almost never fires fastest.

Being liked outranks being clear

The feedback my client received told part of the story. What it didn’t say was why direction kept failing to land. She had a point of view, but under pressure she kept releasing it.

Here’s what makes this pattern so hard to see: it doesn’t feel like giving in. It feels like wisdom.

When a senior stakeholder pushes back, and you address their concerns, it shows you’re a skilled leader. When you find common ground after a tense meeting, you feel like you’re doing the job well. Letting go of something to preserve an important relationship, feels like knowing what actually matters.

The accommodation is indistinguishable from good leadership in the moment. And underneath it is a specific fear: if I hold this position, I’ll lose people’s respect. The relationship will fracture. People will see me as inflexible, difficult, or closed to input.

That fear is rational. Getting to VP required you to bring people along. The same instinct that earned you the role now works against it.

But at VP, the cost of losing people is lower than the cost of losing the direction.

The evidence from my work is clear, the instinct to keep everyone with you is the main pattern at VP, by a significant margin. When I look at how VPs are actually rated by the people around them on strategic thinking, prioritization, and driving results, those ratings barely change from Senior Director to VP. VPs believe they’re becoming more strategic. But the people around them aren’t seeing it register at the rate they think. The leader who brings people along is developed. The strategic leader is still catching up.

That instinct costs you twice. The first shows up with your team.

Your team has learned that decisions have an asterisk. What gets said in the meeting may shift after someone else pushes. So they’ve stopped investing fully in a direction that might change. They stop bringing the hard problems. They’ve learned you’ll avoid conflict and smooth things over instead. Problems stay underground. You lose visibility into what’s actually happening until it’s larger than it needs to be.

When your team stops trusting direction, they start managing you. They calibrate what they bring based on what they think will hold. The relationship looks intact. The real working relationship, built on honest exchange and clear direction, has thinned.

The second cost shows up on your calendar. When you were promoted, the expectation was that you’d trade the old job for the new one. Step back from execution, step into strategy. Most VPs never fully make that trade. They add the new job on top of the old one.

The instinct to keep everyone with you is part of why. Saying no to a request, an expanded scope, or picking up a dropped ball means disappointing someone. Each yes feels easier than the conversation that would follow a no.

So the load accumulates. Six months in, the VP who planned to lead strategically is doing, as one of my clients put it, four people’s work.

The more depleted you are, the lower your threshold for holding a position under pressure. The depletion fuels the pattern. The pattern deepens the depletion. It’s structural: the predictable outcome of a role that was added to rather than traded into.

Putting one down

The shift at VP is subtraction, not addition.

The doer is the identity you put down for good.The leader who brings people along stays, but its job changes. It stops being what you lead with and becomes the delivery mechanism for something clearer and harder.

What develops in the space you’ve created is the strategic leader. The person whose direction holds when the meeting gets uncomfortable. Who protects the agenda when competing priorities push against it. Who develops the leaders below them to own their domains rather than just executing within them, so the work moves without them in every conversation.

The fear that makes accommodation feel like the safe choice, losing people, fracturing the relationship is real. But a VP whose direction holds under pressure doesn’t lose people’s respect. They become the leader people follow.

Which identity are you still carrying that was never supposed to make it this far?

Leave a comment

— Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

Amanda Breckenridge is an executive leadership coach with seven years of experience working with VP, SVP, and C-suite leaders at high-growth enterprise technology companies. The Leading Forward Study draws on 360 assessment data and coaching insights from 40+ senior leaders, Senior Director through C-suite.

A Senior Director I worked with shared her operating style with me. Her description of it was precise. Clearly she’d thought about it for a long time.

She told me the specific changes she needed to make. Step back. Develop her team. Let people own the work even though they’d do it slower and messier than she would. She had the language for it. She’d probably even said some version of it in her last performance review.

But then something urgent would pop up, a priority shift, a deliverable at risk, a situation that needed to move fast, and she’d step in. Every time.

She didn’t forget what she was supposed to do. But she was better and faster than anyone on her team, and waiting felt like a choice between doing it right or not doing it at all.

That’s the Senior Director trap. Skills and awareness are level-appropriate, but the leadership identity is still anchored in the previous role’s strength.

What the role actually requires now

The Senior Director role has a specific requirement that most leaders can explain, but few have fully crossed over into.

Your success is no longer measured by what you deliver; it’s measured by what you make possible for others to deliver.

You’re probably doing both the old job and the new one at the same time. This is part of why it feels so heavy. But it’s also why the old pattern is so hard to release, because it’s still producing results. The execution still works. And as long as it works, the case for changing it never becomes urgent enough.

You already know how good you are

Across 40+ senior leaders in my work, Senior Directors are the most accurately calibrated when it comes to execution. The way they see their own capability and the way their evaluators see it are almost the same. They’re not inflating themselves. They’re not telling a story.

They know exactly how good they are, and they’re right.

Which is exactly what makes the pattern so hard to break.

Stepping in and delivering doesn’t just feel good; it’s an identity confirmation. Every time you take action, it proves the thing you know about yourself — I deliver. I have standards. This is who I am. The feedback is immediate. The proof is concrete. You can see the thing you built.

Developing others doesn’t give you that. Setting direction, building capability in your team, having strategic conversations about where things are going — the feedback loop is slow. Results are unclear. And for a long time, it might feel like nothing is happening. Like you’re coasting.

So under pressure, the rubber band snaps back. Not because you’ve lost the thread of what you’re supposed to be doing, but because the old pattern is faster, cleaner, and feels like integrity.

There’s something else the data shows. Senior Directors significantly overestimate the strength of their relationships. Being reliable and having high standards isn’t the same as developing people, but from the inside, it can feel the same.

What you experience as investment, your team experiences as competence and high standards. Real, but not the same thing. And as long as you believe the relationship is strong, you won’t feel the need to change the pattern. So, the cost stays invisible.

What your team stopped doing

There’s a calculation happening on your team that you probably don’t see.

You’re faster. More accurate. The output is better when you’re involved. And so, over time, your team has learned to wait. Not from disengagement but from a completely rational response to their environment. Why work through a hard problem when the person next to them will step in and solve it better?

The energy reads as a closed door even when you don’t intend it that way. Impatience, high standards, and the instinct to step in create an environment where sharing imperfect thinking feels risky. People stop surfacing early ideas. They stop wrestling with the hard problems themselves. They stop building the capability you need them to develop.

What makes this hard is that you’re not getting honest signals that it’s happening. When you’re always the one who delivers, your team stops telling you what isn’t working. The feedback that would make the cost visible doesn’t come. So, the ceiling compounds, while everything on the surface seems fine.

The shift that actually matters

The move from Senior Director to VP is about learning to translate.

Leaders who succeed share three behaviors.

First, they have a clear point of view on where things are going, and they communicate it so well that their team can navigate without them.

Second, they make the calls about what the team works on and what it doesn’t. That’s strategy, not execution.

Third, they develop their team as a deliberate part of how they work.

The data shows that the tendency to stay close to the work — to oversee, to direct, to step in — drops significantly between Senior Director and VP. Not because VPs care less about outcomes, but because they know how to shape those results through people instead of through doing.

The data is also honest about how that shift actually starts.

It starts with a moment when the cost of the old pattern finally outweighs the comfort of it. A team member leaves, a promotion doesn’t happen, or a project fails. When they are clearly the bottleneck and things break, the dopamine hit stops being enough.

The leaders who make this transition aren’t the ones who understand it best. They’re the ones who finally feel the cost enough that staying the same is no longer an option.

If you recognize yourself immediately, chances are, you’ll go back to doing the same thing tomorrow.

But what if you didn’t? What if you make this the moment you release the old way of being and step full into what is now required?

What would it take — not to see it, but to actually be it?

Leave a comment

— Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

Amanda Breckenridge is an executive leadership coach with seven years of experience working with VP, SVP, and C-suite leaders at high-growth enterprise technology companies. The Leading Forward Study draws on 360 assessment data and coaching insights from 40+ senior leaders, Senior Director through C-suite.

“I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing differently. I just keep doing the old thing anyway.”

She wasn’t confused. She wasn’t lacking insight. She’d articulated the problem better than most people I work with. And she still couldn’t stop.

I kept hearing versions of this, across levels, across functions, across companies. So I went looking for what was actually driving it. Not what leaders say is holding them back, but what the data shows. Over the past year, I analyzed 360 assessment data and coaching insights from 40+ senior leaders, Senior Director through C-suite. What I found is level-specific in a way I didn’t expect.

At every level, the strength that earned the role pulls directly against what the next one demands.

This is the strength ceiling.

The bottlenecks your greatest strengths produce show up in days, not quarters. The strength ceiling is no longer a personal plateau. It’s a competitive exposure your team feels before you do.

The commitment to certainty

At Senior Director, the role shifts in a specific way: you are no longer measured by what you deliver but by what you make possible for others to deliver. But under pressure, you execute anyway. You step in because you’re faster, more accurate, and because every time you deliver, it confirms who you are.

Here’s the mechanism that keeps you stuck: when you execute, the feedback is instant and the result is certain. It reinforces your “doer” identity. Developing others is slower, less tangible, and the return comes on someone else’s timeline, not yours. The gap between the two returns, not lack of awareness or intention, is exactly why the pattern persists even when you can see it clearly.

The data confirms it. Senior Directors see their execution as clearly as their teams do. The blind spot is on the other side: they believe they’re developing their people more than their teams say, by nearly 10 points.

The question that will tell you more than any assessment:

What percentage of last week did you spend doing the work versus making the work possible for others?

The commitment to connection

At VP, the execution reflex has loosened. But the skill that replaced it — keeping everyone moving, building alignment, holding the team together — is now the thing working against you. The role demands something harder: holding a direction when others push back. Under pressure, alignment wins every time.

Each accommodation feels like a wise call. That’s what makes the pattern so durable. The problem stays invisible until the strategy stops being a strategy and becomes a list of things everyone agreed to.

The data shows this clearly. At the VP level, self-scores on strategic decisiveness hold steady, leaders believe they’ve made the shift. But evaluator scores don’t move with them. What they see is alignment while what they want is direction.

In the last three weeks, name the decision where holding the line cost you a relationship, or your standing with someone whose opinion you value.

The commitment to restraint

At SVP and above, you’ve made most of the transitions. The pattern at this level is the least visible, and the most costly precisely because of that.

You’re doing the work — designing strategy, building authority, carrying weight others can’t see. But you describe it as something smaller than it is. The case gets built to 80%. The declaration stops short. The impact gets framed as execution rather than vision.

Because the organizational feedback that would correct the picture has largely gone quiet, the question running underneath it all never gets answered:

“Have I fully earned this?”

Once again, I see it in the data. These leaders are consistently rated higher by the people around them than they rate themselves. On leadership effectiveness, the gap runs 14 to 30 points, and on the dimensions closest to vision and strategic authority, it runs deeper.

When you describe the work you’re doing right now, are you sizing it to the impact, or sizing it to your discomfort with claiming the impact?

Share

What did your greatest strength cost you the last time pressure hit?

I encourage you to sit with that question between now and the next installment. Because what the data keeps showing, and what the VP I opened with still represents for me, is that the leaders who get through the ceiling aren’t the ones who understood the pattern first. They’re the ones who stopped trusting that understanding would be enough

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey called this “immunity to change,” which is the way a competing commitment, or in this case a strength that you’re preserving, holds the old pattern in place against your stated intention. What’s new is that the 360 data adds something specific to their frame: the immunity is level-shaped. The pattern holding a Senior Director in place is not the one holding a VP in place, and neither resembles the one running underneath a C-suite leader’s understatement. That’s why the same advice rarely works across levels. And why understanding the pattern isn’t enough on its own.

You can’t renegotiate a ceiling you can’t see. In the deep dives that follow, we go one level at a time, because the ceiling looks different depending on where you’re standing, and the way through it does too.

Leave a comment

I welcome your email replies and thoughts in the comments. I read and respond to every one.

— Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

I have sat across from hundreds of senior leaders in the most unguarded conversations of their professional lives. What I find in those sessions is not what their organizations see.

Their organizations see a capable executive who has it handled. Someone who projects stability, gives sharp answers in the all-hands, and holds steady under pressure.

What I see is the person who was awake at 2 a.m. before that all-hands. The internal monologue of self-criticism their team would not recognize if they heard it. Someone who has not had a genuine, unguarded conversation with a peer in months, because their peers are also the competition. Someone who is, in some fundamental way, alone with all of it.

This is the gap we should be talking about. Not the one between ambition and achievement. The gap between what leadership at this level actually feels like and what it is required to look like.

The standard advice

The standard advice for this gap is well-rehearsed. Be more vulnerable. Be more authentic. Build psychological safety. Each one names something important, but often misses what the leader is actually facing.

Vulnerability is being prescribed to a leader who has nowhere to put it. Authenticity is being asked of someone in an environment that penalizes it. Psychological safety is something the leader is building for the team; it’s not being built for the executive.

At this level, the gap is almost never a failure of effort. The reason this gap exists is structural. And it’s worth being real about these limitations.

Why the gap exists

There are three scenarios where you might be honest about how the role is impacting you. All three of them, for different reasons, are closed.

Your team needs you to be steady.

Your emotional weather sets their organizational weather. Walk in uncertain and they read instability. Show strain in a 1:1 and the person across from you starts wondering if their job is safe. So you contain it, because containment is part of the job.

Your peers are also your competition.

The honest dinner conversation, the one where you would say this year has been brutal, I don’t know how to do this part yet, is the conversation you don’t have with the people who would understand it best. Your peers are often running for the same scope. They are evaluated against you when budget gets allocated, when promotions are decided, when succession is named. What you say in confidence could be referenced the next time your name comes up.

The person above you needs to believe you have it handled.

The board. The CEO. The chair. The reason you have the role is in part because they trust you to handle the role. Every conversation gets remembered. And the remembered version of you needs to stay coherent with the version they hired or promoted.

The circle of people who could receive the real version is closed off. The gap has nowhere to go so it stays.

Your composure keeps the gap locked

The ability to deliver certainty when the ground is moving, to hold a standard nobody else is operating at, to stay steady when other people would crack — those are the strengths that made you senior. They are also what the role still requires of you every day.

One client described it as “having to have the battle in me in order to present the perfect thing to the world.”

The external appearance is polished. The internal process is war. And because the composure holds, nobody sees the war. Including, sometimes, you.

Three behavior patterns

I’ve observed three ways the gap becomes visible in a leader’s behavior.

Carrying it all

On the outside, this leader is performing at the highest level. On the inside, they have not slept properly in months. They are holding themselves to a standard nobody else is operating at, while their team wants to contribute but struggles to find a point of entry.

Losing the thread

This leader appears collaborative, stakeholder-savvy, and smooth across rooms that do not usually agree. On the inside, they’re stretched across so many competing demands that their own clarity has gone missing. They absorb other people’s weight all day and arrive home with nothing left. One told me, “I don’t want to take on anybody else’s problems. I want to go home and be alone. I’ve done this with so many people all day long.”

The internal review that never ends

This leader is polished, capable, and produces high-quality work. On the inside, they run a private performance review of everything they said, every place they fell short, holding themselves to a standard they’d consider unfair if applied to anyone on their team. The internal voice is loud enough they assume it shows. But it doesn’t. The relief at hearing this is a pattern is real. So is the grief of having carried it alone for so long.

If you recognize yourself in one of these, or in some combination, you are in a pattern I see every week.

What it costs the organization

The cost of this is not only personal.

A leader holding the gap alone is making decisions from depletion. Their judgment loses its edge. Risk tolerance narrows. And the energy that would have gone into the harder, longer-horizon question gets spent on the closer, more solvable one. And the pattern is replicated. Every layer of leadership below is watching how composure is performed at the top and learning to operate the same way. By the time it shows up as attrition or burnout at the executive level, it has been compounding for years.

What actually helps

The solution is not bigger than the problem. It is smaller. It’s one safe place.

Instead of advocating for vulnerability everywhere or authenticity for all leaders, I recommend one conversation, with one person, where you can say I don’t know how to do this part yet, or I’m scared of what happens if I slow down, or I feel more alone in this than anyone realizes. Those sentences stay where they are spoken. They carry no consequence. They are heard as truth by someone whose work depends on protecting the conversation.

The reason this is enough is because we are not trying to close the gap. The gap just needs to be witnessed. The reason it fuels the patterns is because it has nowhere to exist except inside your head. The moment it exists in two people’s heads instead, it stops being a private burden and becomes a known one. The pressure starts to release when it stops being solitary.

– Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

David was already on the Zoom when I joined.

Something about how he was sitting told me the day had already cost him something. He shared where he had come from. His marriage was ending. The kids were being divided between two houses. He had spent the morning in a conversation about which weekends would be his.

He didn’t perform his grief or apologize for it. He had insight into how it was showing up in his sleep, his patience, the particular quality of his presence when his team needed him most. He could see himself inside all of it clearly.

I remember thinking: good. This is a leader who can let things in.

Then we opened his 360 report.

The assessment had asked the people around him to rate the degree to which his behavior matched his values. David had rated himself near the top of the global norm. The people who worked with him had rated him near the bottom.

I have been doing this work long enough that I do not flinch at gaps. What I had rarely seen, until that day, was what David did with his.

He looked at the page. His face did not move. His shoulders, which had been loose a moment before, came up about an inch. Something around his jaw set. He didn’t speak for a stretch. Then he set the page down beside him, almost gently, the way you set down something you have decided not to finish.

And he never picked it up again.

He didn’t get aggressive. He didn’t argue with the methodology. He didn’t even seem to disagree with the result, at least not directly. What he did was something harder to interrupt.

Every observation I offered, every question I asked, every reflection from the data refracted. Bent around something.

The team had been through restructuring last quarter. His most senior direct report had been on leave during the survey window. His COO had been running board interference and hadn’t had time to clean up the misalignment that came from it.

Every justification was reasonable. Every one was contextually true.

None of them were the conversation we were supposed to be having.

I was aware of my own body in that moment. Something dropped in me. Almost like sadness. Because the shield he was placing between us was not aimed at me. It was older than our exchange. And I knew from experience that nothing I asked next was going to land.

I could feel the door close from the other side of the screen.

You probably know this moment.

Maybe not from a 360. But from the performance conversation where the words shifted. The board meeting where the temperature changed. The feedback that arrived at the wrong time, from the wrong person, in the wrong week.

David’s shield was not new. It had been built somewhere along the way, in conditions that once made it necessary. By the time we sat down together, he had been trusting it for years.

What happened to David has a name.

It’s called Flex and is a protection pattern, the nervous system’s way of protecting status to maintain safety. The internal logic is simple: if I stay in control, I cannot be threatened.

The body does this all the time. It scans for danger thousands of times a second, well below awareness, and by the time we know we are reacting, the reaction is already underway. The prefrontal cortex starts to step back. And what runs in its place is a strategy that once worked, but is now outdated.

Most writing about Flex describes the loud version. The one who dominates the room. Who sharpens into expertise when things get uncertain. Who takes up space as a way of taking it from someone else.

David’s version was more covert. He was protecting his status by being right about why the data was wrong. Each justification was small and reasonable. Stacked together they made him impenetrable. From the outside it looked like a senior executive metabolizing complex imperfect data. It looked like analysis. Like strong leadership.

This pattern is not a character flaw or an attempt to duck responsibility. It runs because somewhere in David's body, the assessment score stopped being a measurement of behavior and became a verdict on his worth. Once the data has collapsed into identity, the body is no longer being asked to consider feedback. It’s being asked to accept that verdict.

It will not do that. No body will.

I tried, that hour, to get under it. I asked him to take one item his raters had marked low, not to respond to it, just to notice what happened in his body when he read it. He paused. Named the item. And in a measured tone explained why his team would have been thinking about it the way they had.

The shield did not even shift.

He never picked the report back up. By the end of that year his future at the company was no longer promising.

Insight does not unwind this.

David had insight. He could name what he was protecting. None of that was sufficient to put the protection down when it counted.

So if knowing is not enough, what is?

A way to disrupt the pattern.

When the resistance rises, and it will, the system cannot metabolize the whole of the feedback at once. What it can metabolize is one piece. One specific thing a single person said about a single behavior.

Take that one piece. And instead of asking is this true, ask how is this true?

Is this true asks the body to make a verdict. And when the stakes feel high enough, the body will reject the case before the evidence is even heard.

How is this true is a smaller question. It does not ask for agreement. It asks for a look.

Where in my recent actual conduct can I find this? When did I last do something my team might have been describing? What is the kernel, even a small one, that this person was responding to?

The body can answer a small question. A body regulated enough to look will start to find evidence. Not always damning. Sometimes a single moment. But the moment you locate one specific instance of how the feedback is true, the data has stopped being an assault on your identity and started being information about your behavior.

The shield no longer has anything to defend.

I want to be honest. This does not always work. There are days when the body is too activated, the loss too recent, the environment not safe enough. On those days the question itself is not available. That is information, not failure. When you cannot ask the question, the work is upstream. Building enough actual safety in your body, your relationships, and the conditions of your work so that the question becomes possible.

David did not have that safety. Not in his marriage, not in his role, not in his body. The shield held because nothing else was there to hold him.

I am not sure it ever came down.

But the question is small enough to fit inside a single moment.

How is this true?

That is where the shield comes down.

— Amanda

Leave a comment

Frameworks referenced — Flex, the window of capacity, protection patterns — are from the Center for Conscious Leadership, adapted from the work of Dr. Pat Ogden and Dr. Dan Siegel. The practice of asking how is it true is from the Conscious Leadership Group.

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

You’ve probably heard it in a performance review. Maybe this cycle, maybe the last one. Some version of:

“You need to be more visible.”

And every time you hear it, something tightens. Not because you disagree. Somewhere you know it is true.

But because the version of visibility you’ve watched other people perform is not something you are willing to become: the leader who works the room, the one who makes sure everyone knows what they’re doing. Those leaders spend more energy being seen than doing the work. They treat every meeting like a stage and every update like a press release.

That version of visibility makes your skin crawl. It feels political and performative. Like the opposite of how you want to lead.

So you keep your head down. You focus on the work. You believe the results will speak for themselves. And the gap between what you’re building and what anyone around you can see keeps widening.

A client I’m working with recently said:

“I am way less visible than I’ve ever been in my entire time here.”

Like he was saying it out loud for the first time.

The work was excellent. His depth, his standards, his ability to go all-in on building something new, that’s exactly what made him great. It’s also what made him invisible.

That experience isn’t an outlier. And the reasons leaders stay invisible go deeper than most of them realize.

What’s actually in the way

On the surface, it looks practical. You don’t know what to say. You don’t have time. You wouldn’t even know where to start. That’s real, but it’s the top layer.

Underneath that is something harder to pinpoint but it is often a question: what do I actually have to offer that’s worth taking up a senior leader’s time? It can feel like humility. It can look like having exacting standards. But it keeps you out of the conversation.

Go one layer deeper and you hit fear. Visibility is exposure. Putting yourself out there invites scrutiny. What if they look more closely and realize you don’t have it all figured out? Staying under the radar feels safer than finding out.

And then there’s the layer most leaders won’t touch, because it’s tied to who they are. Visibility feels political. The leaders you’ve watched do it made you cringe. It looks like performance, like posturing, like spending energy on something that has nothing to do with the actual work. And that’s just not who you are.

So staying invisible becomes its own values statement. But it costs you more than you know.

What it looks like to move through this

Another executive I was coaching hit this wall in one of our sessions. She was navigating a difficult dynamic with someone on her executive team, and mid conversation she said:

“Maybe he just doesn’t see my value.”

That was the fear, out in the open. She named it out loud. And then she got on a plane.

She hadn’t resolved the issue. But she finally understood what staying silent was costing her. Her voice. Her seat at the table. Her ability to do the work she actually came there to do.

She showed up to the meeting completely herself. Direct, honest, and willing to name the disconnect. She asked for what she needed. There was nothing performative about it. It wasn’t political. She was just clear about what was at stake and had the courage to go after it.

That’s what visibility actually looks like when it’s done well. It has nothing to do with the version that made you cringe.

How to start

Begin by getting every name out of your head and onto a surface. Your manager. Your manager’s manager. Cross-functional peers. Key partners. Anyone whose support you need to do your best work. Don’t filter yet. Just see the full picture.

Then ask what each person actually needs from you. Some need real partnership and a proactive, ongoing conversation. Others need a regular but lighter touch. A few just need something intentional and occasional. Match the format to the person and the relationship. Would a structured conversation land better than a Slack message? You will know.

Make it a conversation, not a broadcast. The communication that builds real trust isn’t polished updates about wins. It’s an honest read on where things stand, what’s hard, and what you’re working through. That’s what turns stakeholders into partners. That’s what people remember when it counts.

Start before you’re ready

Most leaders don’t need a better strategy. They need two or three conversations they haven’t been willing to have yet.

The system is the easy part. The hard part is believing that your voice deserves an audience, and that the people around you need to hear from you.

Your leadership only works if it reaches the people who matter.

You’ve spent your career earning the right to be where you are. Now build the infrastructure to make sure people know what you’re doing once you’re there.

Leave a comment

~ Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

START A CONVERSATION

My son Grayson is eight years old and he knows exactly who he is.

He’s skilled on the soccer field — fast, technically sharp, reads the game well. But last weekend, after a match, he turned to me and said something I wasn’t expecting.

“Mom, I just don’t want to be in the mix. When everyone’s fighting for the ball, I just don’t want to be in it.”

I felt my reaction and caught it. The instinct was to say something about being more aggressive, about getting in there, about what it takes to be a real competitor.

I didn’t say any of it. But I felt it.

Grayson wasn’t confused. He wasn’t behind. He knew exactly what he wanted and he was telling me clearly. The only thing that would have made it “wrong” was the story I was about to apply to it.

I share that intimate moment with you because I see the same thing in my clients, and in myself.

Stories about what success looks like, what the right path feels like, and what “arrival” is supposed to mean. Those stories were handed to us — by parents, culture, early experiences, industries that reward relentless forward motion — so early and so consistently that we accepted them as our own truth.

But they aren’t. And because we can’t see the lens, we can’t see clearly through it.

Every time my dad said goodbye to me growing up, he spoke words of affirmation.

To me and my two sisters, he’d say:

“You are a strong, independent woman.”

That was such a gift.

Coming from humble beginnings, my parents worked so hard for all they achieved. They wanted the same for their daughters. They wanted us to believe we were capable of anything. And it worked. I carried that belief into everything I did. The drive to achieve became my primary operating system.

What I didn’t see for a long time was that more had become the measure of success. More titles. More revenue. Higher quotas. Greater percentage over goal. Always more proof that the strong, independent woman was still striving, still delivering.

The problem with more is that it never ends. There’s always… more.

So you keep going, and you never feel like it’s enough, or that you are enough.

For me, the cost wasn’t visible from the outside. It was the growing distance between the version of me the world saw and who I actually was. The more I achieved, the wider that gap became. And that dissonance created a kind of pressure and joylessness that no milestone could touch.

The shift came after becoming a mom and nearly dying from sepsis. Those experiences cracked something open, and slowly, I started to see how much the relentless pursuit was costing me. Not because the drive was wrong. But because it was pulling me away from my own truth of what was enough.

From there I didn’t just reach a new level of success. I had to define one.

And I’ll be honest, this is still work. Even recently, Q1 brought up that familiar anxiety of being behind and needing to do more. The difference now is that I can see it. And when I can see it, I can act — or not act — in a way that serves my definition of success, not just more.

One of my clients found herself with something most leaders would trade almost anything for.

A transition in her work had opened up an unexpected runway — time, space, and no immediate pressure to perform. But with that, she carried an expectation to figure out what was next.

She showed up to a session about a month into the transition and said: “I’ve made no progress. I’ve accomplished nothing.”

I asked her to walk me through the month.

It turned out she had started volunteering with a community organization, and described it as the most alive she’d felt in years. She’d been pursuing a creative project, following a thread purely for the joy of it. Learning, experimenting, discovering what lit her up when no one was watching and nothing was at stake.

She wasn’t stuck. She was in the middle of something real.

But her inherited construct of “progress” — a new role, measurable output, steps that looked like forward motion — made her completely blind to it.

That’s what these stories do. They don’t just distort how we feel. They actively hide our own growth from view.

And we don’t keep these stories to ourselves.

We place them upon our teams, holding people to a definition of success that was handed to us, not chosen by them. We cast them onto the people we love.

Grayson is out there reading the game, finding the space, making the pass — playing his version of the game with complete conviction. And I have to make a choice: do I place my story on top of his truth, or do I trust that he knows himself? What I’m learning to practice is how to support, allow, and embrace who he is, rather than who my story says he should be. It’s the work I’m doing for both of my kids.

The higher the stakes of the relationship, the more tightly we hold the story of what someone else’s path should look like.

But that’s not guidance. That’s just the pattern traveling forward.

So what do we do with this?

Start by getting curious about the measure itself. Whose expectation are you actually running against? Because most of the time, if you trace it back honestly, you didn’t choose it. It was handed to you with enough love or authority that it started to feel like your own.

The journey isn’t toward clarity. It is the clarity, accumulating in real time. My client’s month of volunteering and creating and discovering wasn’t time off from the path. It was the path. She just couldn’t see it through the lens she’d inherited.

That’s what happens when we’re measuring ourselves against someone else’s definition. We can’t see our own progress. We can’t feel our own aliveness. We keep looking for arrival at a destination that was never ours to begin with.

So the real work is this: not just seeing the story, but asking where it came from. Whose voice is that? Whose life did that definition fit? And once you can see it clearly enough to hold it at arm’s length, ask: what’s actually true for you now? What’s the measure you would choose?

That’s the homecoming.

— Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

Start a conversation

You probably don’t think of yourself as a people-pleaser. Most of the leaders I work with don’t. But that’s because it doesn’t look the way you think it does.

At the executive level, people-pleasing doesn’t appear as a weakness. It looks like the job.

You’re collaborative and steady. You don’t make things harder than they need to be. You’re sharp, capable, and well-liked. The accommodation isn’t obvious, but it can be found in how you frame feedback, when you choose to respond, and which moments you let go.

These are sophisticated moves, and the skills underneath them are real strengths. Which is exactly what makes this pattern so hard to catch.

From the outside, genuine care for people and fear-based accommodation look almost identical. The behaviors are the same. But the intention underneath is completely different. One comes from security. The other from threat.

And because they’re nearly impossible to tell apart — in yourself and in the people around you — this pattern rarely gets called out. Yet it shapes everything: what never gets said, the direction that keeps getting smoothed over, the silence where a clear perspective should have been.

The cost of that silence is what this piece is about.

What people-pleasing actually looks like at the executive level

It’s not soft or spineless. It’s the loss of your own voice in service of keeping things smooth. And it shows up in ways that are easy to rationalize.

You soften feedback until it’s useless. The other person walks away without understanding there’s a problem. You told yourself you were being kind. What you actually did was protect yourself from their reaction.

You absorb scope that isn’t yours. A peer drops the ball. Rather than having the conversation, you pick it up. It protects the relationship, and trains everyone around you that your boundaries are negotiable.

You perform confidence while privately deferring to whoever pushes back. Your position shifts not because they were right, but because their disapproval felt like a threat.

That is what losing your voice looks like.

Why it’s so hard to break at this level

This pattern didn’t come from nowhere. It was built carefully and intelligently, in response to real conditions.

Two of my clients — I’ll call them Greg and Clare — grew up in volatile home environments. What they developed early was a remarkable ability to read the emotional temperature of a room, track subtle cues, and adapt their behavior to keep things stable. I see different versions of this story constantly. Leaders shaped by cultures where deference to seniority is a deeply held value. Women and men who were responsible for stabilizing everything — keeping the peace, managing the emotional weather — because that’s what was needed and expected of them.

Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin spoke about this directly on my podcast last year. She grew up in the South with an explicit message: don’t speak unless spoken to, don’t say anything unless it’s nice. That shaping didn’t disappear when she became a CEO. It had to be consciously unlearned.

These were smart adaptations, built for the environments that shaped you. The problem is they don’t automatically update when you step into a leadership role. They just keep running.

What’s important to understand is that this pattern isn’t passive. People-pleasing is an active protection mechanism that got very good at its job. Over time, your nervous system learned that harmony equals safety and threat equals danger, and it wired that in deeply.

It’s near impossible to see in yourself because the longer you’ve practiced it, the more it feels like genuine care. The attentiveness, consideration, and instinct to read the room — these behaviors can come from real warmth and high regard for people, or they can come from fear of disapproval, disconnection, and conflict. From the outside, they look identical. From the inside, after years of practice, they can feel identical too.

Which is why, at the executive level, this pattern doesn’t loosen on its own.

The stakes feel higher. You’re managing up, across, and down simultaneously, dependent on a complex web of stakeholders. The perceived consequences of displacing the wrong person feels existential in a way they didn’t earlier in your career. And somewhere beneath conscious awareness, an ancient part of you is still running the script: one wrong move, one person you displease, and everything could unravel.

That response happens before you’ve chosen. The nervous system moves faster than intention, which is why willpower alone won’t shift this. You may want to speak up, hold your position, give honest feedback, and still find yourself doing none of those things. Not because you lack resolve, but because the pattern is faster than the resolve.

That’s what makes this work — and why it has to go deeper than just trying harder.

Subscribe now

What it actually costs

Most leaders carrying this pattern don’t realize what it’s costing them because the erosion is too gradual.

The greatest cost is to self-trust. It starts with overriding your instincts in the moment. But over time, something more fundamental shifts: you stop knowing what you actually think independent of what others seem to want. Your read and the expected response becomes so practiced, so automatic, that you can no longer tell them apart. You walk into a meeting with a perspective and walk out with someone else’s, and it felt like agreement. That’s more than the erosion of confidence. It’s a loss of self-referencing. And it’s the hardest thing to recover, because you can’t rebuild trust in a signal you’ve lost the ability to hear.

Then it reaches your team. They don’t need more of your warmth. They already have that. What they need is a real read on what you actually think.

And then it lands in the business. Harmony without direction is just managed standstill.

How to begin shifting it

The first step is noticing it in real time. People-pleasing has a physical tell before it has a verbal one. It’s the slight tension before you speak, the nod you give before you’ve actually decided, the exhale that happens when a hard conversation gets avoided. These subtle cues are your nervous system responding to perceived threat before your conscious mind has registered anything. Learning to catch this isn’t just about building awareness of habit. It’s about learning to work with your own biology.

The second step is separating the pattern from the person. The part of you that reads a room, attunes to people, holds relationships carefully — that’s not the problem. That’s actually one of your greatest strengths. The work isn’t to get rid of it. It’s to decide when to use it. Put it in the passenger seat. Let it inform you. Just don’t let it drive.

The third step is the simplest and the hardest: have the conversation you’ve been putting off. Not eventually, this week. Have one conversation where you say the thing you’ve been softening, hold the position you’ve been abandoning, or give the feedback you’ve been sitting on. That’s when the shift becomes real.

The reframe

The goal isn’t to become someone who stops caring what people think. It’s to lead from conviction alongside that care.

You can value harmony and tell the truth. You can be deeply collaborative and hold a position under pressure. You can care about how people feel and say the thing that needs to be said.

The leaders who figure out that combination, who stop treating conviction and consideration as opposites, become the ones people actually trust. Not because they’re always easy to be around. Because they’re always real.

And people feel the difference, even when they can’t name it.

That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.

— Amanda

Leave a comment

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

When leaders sit down with me right now, they almost always start the same way. It’s a little performance that’s practiced, almost involuntary. They look put together. They smile. And they share a few wins.

Then they exhale and settle in.

What comes next is some version of the same thing: succeeding on the outside, running on empty on the inside. The ground feels different. They are carrying more than they are saying out loud.

And when I dig deeper, we find the same thing every time: so much of who we are is tied to what we do.

And right now, ‘what we do’ is being dismantled.

An identity problem is brewing

Leaders rarely come to me to talk about AI directly. It’s present in every conversation, but it’s never what we’re actually talking about.

AI is external. It’s pushing on them from the outside, and it isn’t going away. What’s internal is the reaction it’s triggering, the thing that’s being threatened.

When I guide clients inward, that’s where we find it: AI is doing something no previous disruption has done at this scale or speed. It’s commoditizing the exact thing most senior leaders built their authority on — their expertise. They are known as the person in the room who knows what to do, who has seen chaos and uncertainty before, who can pattern-match faster than anyone else. That’s the foundation upon which their leadership identity is built. And AI is disrupting it in real time.

If the thing I built my authority on is being commoditized — if that goes — what’s left?

The threat response

When identity is threatened, the body responds before the mind does. For some it’s a pain in the neck or back that won’t resolve. For others it’s a persistent numbness or disconnection from what used to feel energizing. Others might wrestle with the 3am wake-up that no amount of sleep hygiene seems to fix.

And at some point, the pressure finds an outlet. Not a chosen one, but a familiar pattern.

Most leaders can’t see it, because it’s nearly impossible to see the pattern you’re inside of. And so it runs. It shapes decisions, it drives behavior, and it sets the ceiling on what becomes possible.

As it continues to run, these leaders manage around it, work harder against it, or simply accept it as the cost of operating at this level.

I’ve spent the last seven years coaching more than 200 senior leaders through moments of significant uncertainty and change. Right now I’m sitting with dozens of them in this exact moment. And it looks the same in every conversation, regardless of industry, title, or how the presenting problem first shows up.

The pattern is always there. And until it’s named, it’s in charge.

Three distinct patterns

The threat response shows up in one of three ways. They are not a ranking. The same leader can move between them depending on the day, the pressure, the stakes. But most leaders have a home base, a default the leader returns to when the pressure is high enough.

See if you recognize yours.

Archetype One — AI as Life Sentence

This leader is bracing. The threat feels total – not just to their role, but to their livelihood, their identity, and their sense of what comes next. Everything they’ve built feels like it’s on the line.

On the outside it looks like urgency. Articles get forwarded. Alarms get raised. The pressure lands on the team. But there is no point of view underneath it, because the fear is moving faster than the thinking. Ask them what they actually believe about AI and the answer shifts depending on how threatened they feel that day.

At the core, their sense of worth is built on being the person others turn to. Expertise isn’t just what they have. It’s who they are.

Archetype Two — AI as Fuel

This leader is running toward the future. More tools, more initiatives, more motion — always building, always onto the next thing. Their enthusiasm is genuine and their capability is real.

But look closely and you’ll see a trail of brilliant beginnings that never quite came together. You’ll see someone who cannot stop and sit in the present because stillness would require reckoning with what the motion has been protecting them from.

At the core, their sense of worth is built on momentum and output. Building and delivering isn’t just what they want to do, it’s who they are.

Archetype Three — AI as Puzzle

This leader is standing in place and thinking. They can see problems, solutions, and paths forward. But they aren’t moving. The analysis keeps going, the options stay open, the decision keeps getting deferred.

You get the sense that thinking has become a substitute for deciding. That they are protecting something. That the wrong move feels more costly than no move at all.

At the core, their sense of worth is built on precision and sound judgment. Being right, and being known for it, is the foundation everything else rests on.

The interruption

If you’ve recognized yourself in one of those patterns, you probably sense that it’s already costing you something.

The question isn’t how fast you figure out AI. It’s what you let the pressure make of you.

The pattern doesn’t have to stay in charge. Here’s where I’d invite you to start.

If you recognize yourself in Archetype One, the work isn’t managing the fear better. It’s naming what you’re actually afraid of. Not generally. Specifically. Not “I’m afraid of irrelevance” but the version with your name and your situation on it. That specificity is what stops the spiral. Once you’ve named it, you get to decide who you want to be in this chapter. The fear doesn’t get to decide that for you.

If you recognize yourself in Archetype Two, the practice isn’t slowing down. You already know you should slow down. It’s creating one container where motion isn’t allowed. Thirty minutes. A question you sit with instead of solve. What surfaces in that stillness is what all the motion has been organized around avoiding. That’s the thing worth knowing.

If you recognize yourself in Archetype Three, the move is one decision before you’re ready. Not the biggest one on your list. One that’s been waiting. The point isn’t the decision itself. It’s discovering that imperfect forward movement doesn’t cost you what you’ve been certain it will.

The way through

The leaders who are thriving in this moment aren’t free of AI’s pressure. They feel it too. But somewhere along the way they stopped letting it make decisions for them. They’ve separated who they are from what they do — enough that the disruption of one doesn’t destroy the other.

That’s what becomes possible when the pattern gets named. Not certainty. Not control. Just a return to yourself. And in a moment this uncertain, that turns out to be the most powerful thing you can do.

— Amanda

Leave a comment

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

The hardest conversations with a CEO aren’t the ones where trust is broken. They’re the ones where you respect the CEO, believe in the mission, and still find yourself quietly managing the fallout of how they operate under pressure.

A comment undercuts your team. A priority shift pulls you off strategic work. Expectations aren’t clear, followed by frustration when they aren’t met.

Each instance, on its own, feels manageable. You adjust and move on.

Because you’re capable, you make it work.

Until you realize you’re dealing with the same dynamic again.

That’s the moment to ask:

Am I managing incidents, or tolerating a pattern?

And if it’s a pattern, especially one involving the CEO, when does it become your responsibility to name it?

Recently, I worked with a senior leader who faced this exact dynamic.

Over nine months, he experienced multiple “small” situations that, taken individually, didn’t justify confrontation.

When we laid three of them side by side, the sequence was nearly identical each time: shifting expectations, frustration under pressure, work pulled back upward.

The breakthrough came from seeing the repetition.

Once the sequence was visible, the focus shifted from fairness to impact.

We stopped debating what had just happened and mapped what kept happening. We compared moments. We identified what repeated.

Then the questions changed.

What is this dynamic doing to execution?

What is it teaching my team?

How is it shaping how we operate under pressure?

What behaviors are being rewarded or punished?

The answers were uncomfortable but clear.

Strategic work was stalling because he kept getting pulled back into execution. High performers were becoming cautious. Autonomy was shrinking. Work was flowing upward instead of scaling outward.

And eventually, we named the final layer: the cost to his role. His scope was narrowing. His leadership was being redirected from building to buffering.

When you stay inside a single incident, you debate details. When you zoom out, you see consequences.

Patterns reveal impact. Incidents invite debate.

The shift happens when you move from incident thinking to pattern thinking. You trace the sequence. You compare across moments. You articulate the impact. You name the cost.

That’s how friction turns into data.

Subscribe now

Now that you see the pattern, here’s the hard part.

Name it to the person who holds power over you.

Clarity doesn’t automatically create courage. You may question whether the CEO will change. You may calculate the risk to your reputation or your trajectory. In a power-imbalanced relationship, even clear feedback can feel like exposure.

If you’re capable of absorbing the impact, staying quiet can seem efficient. You stabilize volatility. You protect your team. You keep things moving.

But absorption has a cost.

When your role narrows instead of expands, when your energy shifts from building to buffering, when you hear yourself say, “I can’t believe I’m dealing with this again,” those are signals.

Silence isn’t neutral. It builds pressure.

I’ve seen the alternative. Another client never named the pattern. Week after week, she absorbed it. Told herself it wasn’t big enough to confront. Until one day, she was done. No dramatic blowup. Just accumulated frustration. And then she quit.

At senior levels, there’s a point where avoiding the conversation stops being prudence and starts being participation.

Instead of asking, “Is this worth bringing up?” ask, “Is it responsible not to?”

Managing up is difficult because the person you need to speak to holds authority over you. Yes, the risk is real.

But so is the responsibility that comes with your role.

Even once you decide to act, another fear remains.

What if it goes badly?

We often define success as agreement or change. But you don’t control the outcome.

What you control is whether you speak clearly, grounded in business impact rather than frustration.

From there, the response tells you something.

If the response is reflective, growth is possible.

If the response is defensive, you’ve learned something about the limits of the environment.

Your job isn’t to engineer a “good” conversation. It’s to surface reality.

Clarity first. Outcome second.

From that place, you can decide what comes next.

So how do you know it’s no longer a small thing?

Repetition.

You’re having the same debate again. The same frustration. Your energy contracts. Your team adjusts to avoid volatility.

No single moment demands confrontation.

But together, they begin shaping how you lead and how the company operates.

That’s the threshold.

At that point, you’re not managing an incident. You’re responsible for the conditions under which your team and the company performs.

That responsibility requires clarity. It requires the willingness to name what you see, and the discipline to let the response inform you.

That is senior leadership.

– Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

There’s a predictable moment in leadership when things start to feel harder.

Your scope expands. The decisions in front of you matter more. More people are watching. The cost of ambiguity goes up.

With that pressure, you fall back on what you know.

You step in sooner.

You stay closer to execution.

You absorb more complexity.

You tighten control where you can.

In the moment, this feels responsible—like you’re doing your job well.

Over time, it stops producing the results you expect. You feel busier instead of more effective. Leadership starts to feel heavier, even though you’re capable and the people around you are strong.

This is where a misdiagnosis usually happens.

You assume the issue is capability. You tell yourself you need to be more strategic, better at delegating, stronger at leading through others.

What’s actually happening is subtler.

As leadership expands, pressure doesn’t just test your skills. It tests your identity.

It reveals whether how you see yourself has kept pace with how your role now creates value.

When it hasn’t, you compensate. You don’t consciously choose control, but your behavior organizes around protecting a version of yourself that once worked.

Without realizing it, you start leading the present from the past.

Four Leadership Ceilings That Appear Under Pressure

This misalignment shows up in a small number of recognizable ways.

Under pressure, you default to the strengths that have always succeeded. You bring forward the version of yourself that knows how to stabilize things, move work forward, and earn trust.

It feels like doing your best.

But inevitably, these patterns become leadership ceilings.

They cap how far you can scale as a leader, how much ownership your team can truly take, and eventually, how much the company can grow without you.

You may recognize yourself in one of these.

Leadership Ceiling 1: Value Through Personal Output

“I create value by getting high-quality work done fast.”

Earlier in your career, speed, decisiveness, and output were rewarded. Being in the work built momentum and credibility.

Under pressure now, you:

• stays close to execution

• rewrite the narrative, the plan, the deck

• confuse velocity with leadership

At this level, execution is no longer the value. Without a new way to define your contribution, distance from the work feels too risky, and your leadership stalls.

The cost is that you remain the engine driving everything forward instead of a multiplier—limiting your ability to scale.

Leadership Ceiling 2: Value Through Holding It All Together

“If I don’t carry this, it will fall apart.”

Being dependable, stepping in, catching what others missed, and making sure nothing dropped built trust and earned promotion. You became the person others could rely on.

Under pressure now, you:

• absorb responsibility instead of distributing it

• intervene to prevent failure

• become essential to execution

At this level, carrying everything is no longer the value. Without a new definition of accountability, handing off real ownership feels like too risky, and growth plateaus.

The cost is short-term stability at the expense of scale. Responsibility becomes confused with ownership, and the work never learns to move without you.

Leadership Ceiling 3: Value Through Survival in Hard Environments

“I can’t afford a visible miss.”

This identity often formed in hypergrowth, turnarounds, or high-stakes transitions where failure had real consequences and recovery wasn’t guaranteed. Staying sharp, cautious, and controlled kept you in the game.

Under pressure now, you:

• play not to lose

• over-index on options

• manage perception as carefully as performance

Now, survival is no longer the value. Without a new way to relate to risk, restraint feels safer than possibility—and that becomes your ceiling.

The organization optimizes for safety instead of learning. Risk tolerance narrows, decision-making slows, and what’s possible shrinks, limiting innovation, adaptability, and long-term growth.

Leadership Ceiling 4: Value Through Personal Rigor

“If I’m not involved, standards will slip.”

High standards built your reputation and earned trust. Precision mattered. Your ability to see what others missed and consistently raise the bar became part of how you created value.

Under pressure now, you:

• insert yourself to uphold quality

• recheck work that doesn’t need rechecking

• become the bar instead of building the bar

At this level, personal rigor is no longer the value. Without a new way to ensure excellence at scale, letting go of standards feels too risky. That’s your ceiling.

The cost is excellence that depends on your presence rather than being sustained without you—limiting both team capability and the organization’s ability to grow.

Once you see your pattern, the work changes.

The issue isn’t the pattern itself. These identities were built, reinforced, and rewarded for a reason.

The issue is that under pressure, you haven’t paused to reassess which version of you the role now requires. You operate automatically with the identity that has worked before.

That’s why awareness is the turning point.

How to See What’s Driving Your Behavior—and What To Do Next

When you feel compelled to step in, the most useful question is not:

“What should I do differently?”

It’s:

What would it mean about me if I didn’t do this?

That question surfaces the identity operating under pressure. Once it’s visible, behavior stops feeling compulsory.

You’re no longer just reacting.

You’re choosing how you want to show up.

This is where awareness loosens its grip.

1. Pressure reveals identity.

2. Identity creates ceilings.

3. Awareness is what makes those ceilings negotiable.

But awareness alone isn’t the work. The real shift happens when you begin replacing the old identity with one aligned to the role you’re actually in now.

That starts with a different set of questions:

What does the role need for me at this level?

• Not what I’m good at. Not what made me successful before. What the role genuinely requires now.

If I didn’t touch the work at all, where would my impact still be undeniable?

• Where does my presence change outcomes, even at a distance?

Can I recognize discomfort as a signal of growth, not risk?

• Because the unease that comes with doing less of what’s familiar is the sensation of identity recalibrating.

When Your Identity Catches Up

As this shift takes hold, leadership changes shape.

It gets lighter, clearer, and more intentional.

You stop providing value through activity and start creating value where the role actually needs it now.

Growth becomes an act of authorship rather than self-protection.

For the people you lead, space opens up. Teams take real ownership, make decisions, and build confidence when you stop compensating for identity risk. Capability becomes distributed rather than contained.

For the business, leadership capacity expands. The organization can scale when it no longer depends on control, urgency, or a single person’s sense of value to function.

What replaces the old identity is a leader whose sense of value is grounded in creating leverage, clarity, and the conditions for others to succeed.

That’s how ceilings lift.

– Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: Strengthen clarity and decisiveness in complex, high-stakes environments.

• Leadership: Evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: Address internal patterns that shape how you operate under pressure so you can lead with intention and sustainability.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

It had been raining for days. When we pulled in, there were signs everywhere about closures and conditions, and I could feel myself recalibrating what the day might look like.

We were considering our plan when we saw a ranger. He smiled and said, “Just go have fun. Be safe. But go have fun.”

Given his green light, we started walking.

Almost immediately, the trail wasn’t really a trail anymore. The stream that usually runs alongside it had turned into a fast-moving river. In places, the path itself was underwater.

I felt the hesitation in my body right away.

My mind went to wet socks, cold feet, complaints from my kids that would come if we pushed too far. Questions about safety. Questions about whether this was still a good idea.

So we did what felt responsible.

We hugged the edges. We stepped carefully from rock to rock. We tested where it might be passable. We tried to move forward while trying to stay as dry as possible.

But eventually, we stopped. We looked at each other and said, “F- it,” and walked straight through.

Water up to our knees. Shoes soaked. Cold. Laughing. Fully in it.

I share this story because I see leaders doing the same thing.

Hedging as responsible leadership

In leadership, hedging often looks responsible, mature, and thoughtful.

It shows up as careful timing. Staying close to your team’s work “just in case.” Choosing words that won’t spike anxiety. Keeping options open until you have more certainty.

It sounds like:

“I want to be sure before I say it out loud.”

“I don’t want to create fear unless I am certain.”

“I want to address it – I’m just working out how direct to be.”

From the outside, this reads as steadiness, competence, and control under pressure. And often, it works.

Hedging isn’t inherently a problem. It’s a leadership strategy – a way of managing risk, protecting momentum, and maintaining stability in environments where the cost of getting it wrong feels high.

And for a long time, it can look like exactly the right leadership move.

The cost of hedging

The problem with hedging is when responsibility gets confused with restraint – and at senior levels, that confusion isn’t neutral.

Hedging can keep you in careful management mode when the moment is actually calling for clear authority.

And because it works for a long time – nothing breaks, relationships stay intact, risk feels managed – it goes unquestioned.

But the cost shows up later, at inflection points, when decisions stay reversible, accountability diffuses, and direction remains ambiguous.

That’s when hedging stops being a stabilizing force and starts limiting your authority at the exact moments it’s most needed.

The risk doesn’t disappear; it just relocates.

You stay protected, but the organization pays the price.

Let me give you an example

In a recent coaching session, a senior leader said to me, “I get 85% of the way there, and then I don’t go the last mile.”

He was describing a conversation he hadn’t had with his CEO.

He told himself he was being responsible. He didn’t want to create fear prematurely. He didn’t want to overreact. He wanted to be sure before naming something that might destabilize the system.

What he was holding back wasn’t a small detail. It was the hardest and the most important truth – his read on a critical leader and the risk it created for the company’s trajectory.

So instead of naming the risk directly, he named something safer. He talked about his own potential exit.

All of it sounded reasonable. All of it was measured.

And all of it kept the hardest and most important truth from being said.

That’s the ultimate cost of hedging.

It preserves restraint in the moment, then transfers the consequences to the system.

What changes things is commitment

Commitment is the moment you stay with what you see and speak from it with full authority, without managing around it.

It is choosing clarity over containment, especially when clarity introduces discomfort, tension or risk. That is the most important moment to step in and commit.

When we walked through the water in Mendocino, nothing became safer or more predictable. We didn’t gain control. We committed – and the experience opened because we were fully in it.

Leadership works the same way.

There are moments when staying dry feels responsible. And there are moments when responsibility requires you to step directly into what you have been managing around.

Leaders who commit at these moments shape outcomes. Leaders who hedge inherit them.

To explore this further, ask yourself:

Where are you telling yourself you’re being thoughtful, when the moment is calling for clarity?

What does it cost others – your team, your peers, your business – when you don’t fully step in?

Where are you standing at the edge of something that requires your full authority, not partial truth?

I’m always here to support you.

— Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: I help you gain clarity, decisiveness, and new pathways of thinking to address the strategic challenges of the business.

• Leadership: I enable you to evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: I guide you through the inner work that allows you to truly thrive as a human being.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

Like me, you probably hear the same phrases come up again and again in leadership conversations: be more strategic, show more executive presence, drive more alignment.

They tend to surface at moments of transition, when someone’s responsibilities have expanded, but the expectations of the role haven’t been clearly named. The words sound clear until you try to act on them. That’s because this kind of feedback usually isn’t a diagnosis; it’s a signal that how you’re expected to lead has changed, even if no one has spelled out what that change looks like yet.

The fastest way to make this feedback useful is to translate it into something observable and testable with specific behaviors you can try, assess, and adjust.

A Simple Translation Framework

When feedback feels vague, resist the temptation to interpret it as a personality critique. Treat it like data and run it through these three questions:

1. What outcome is the organization trying to protect or create?
   Most feedback at senior levels is about risk, scale, and coordination.
   

2. What specific behavior would make that outcome more likely?
   If you can’t describe what someone would see you do differently, you don’t yet have an actionable translation.
   

3. What level is this aimed at: self, team, or organization?
   The same phrase can mean very different things depending on whether the system needs you to develop something within yourself, build capacity within your team, or drive impact across functions.

Once you answer those three questions, the feedback stops being unclear and starts becoming a set of choices. And once you see it this way, you can run almost any vague feedback through the same filter.

Three Common Phrases and the Moves They’re Asking For

Let me share some recent examples from my practice where clients have received feedback related to influence without authority, executive maturity, and visibility.

“Influence Without Authority”

My client Julie is in a role where “influence without authority” matters. Meaning, the need to get buy-in across teams and convince people who don’t report to you to care about your priorities as much as you do.

But when she came into a session after spending two nights reworking another team’s presentation, it was a useful moment to unpack it. “I just want it to land,” she said about the work she’d done. “If they miss the message, it affects my whole roadmap.”

If we use the three-question framework, what “influence without authority” is really trying to protect is coordination: moving cross-functional priorities forward without one person carrying all the execution. In Julie’s case, the presentation needed to land in a way that supported decisions tied to her roadmap, with everyone owning their part.

The behavior that would make that outcome more likely wasn’t more work from Julie. It was clearer context before execution began. Instead of rewriting the deck, she needed to explain why the work mattered, which priorities and decisions it needed to support, and what success looked like.

Influence without authority isn’t about personal productivity. It’s about how work moves across teams that don’t report to each other.

“Executive Maturity”

Melanie was told she needed to “demonstrate more executive maturity.”

Her reaction was honest and fair. “What does that even mean? I’m leading three teams through chaos. Does maturity mean pretending I’m fine?”

She’d built her career on intensity — fast problem-solving and visible urgency. But the feedback wasn’t about polishing her style. It was pointing to an outcome the organization needed during a period of rapid change: steadiness under pressure so better decisions could be made.

Reactivity doesn’t stay personal. It ripples. When a leader escalates urgency, the system tightens. People move faster, but they don’t think better.

The behavior that would make that outcome more likely wasn’t suppressing emotion or projecting calm. It was regulation, creating enough internal stability to slow the moment down so everyone could think clearly.

She had a chance to practice this during a high-stakes escalation. Instead of jumping to a decision, Melanie paused and said, “Let’s take two minutes before we decide.” Later she told me, “That was the first time I felt like I was leading instead of reacting.”

Executive maturity isn’t composure for show. It’s capacity. At senior levels, your nervous system sets the tone.

“Visibility”

Peers described Sarah as indispensable, yet she felt invisible. “I’m doing more than ever,” she said, “but people don’t see it because I don’t talk about it.” As a result of her 360, she was told she needed to “increase her visibility.”

What she heard was the familiar double bind: be more vocal about your impact, but not so much that it sounds self-promotional. She’d internalized the idea that humility meant silence, so the feedback landed uncomfortably.

As we unpacked it, it became clear that the ask wasn’t for her to talk about herself more. What the organization needed was a clear line of sight into impact, risks, and learning so decisions could be made and resources allocated appropriately.

Once we reframed visibility as stewardship rather than self-promotion, the shift felt natural. She began offering small, strategic updates framed around her team’s impact and lessons learned. Within weeks, her language started showing up in meetings she wasn’t even in.

Visibility isn’t about being louder. It’s about making your work easier to understand and act on.

From Vague Feedback to Deliberate Choice

At senior levels, leadership expectations shift faster than language does. Feedback becomes shorthand for changes in scale, risk, and coordination. When that shorthand goes untranslated, capable leaders default to over-effort, self-correction, or second-guessing.

But once you know how to decode the message, feedback stops feeling personal and starts becoming directional. You move from reacting to choosing and from guessing what’s expected to deciding how you want to lead.

I’d love to know any feedback you’ve received that left you curious about what needed to change.

– Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: I help you gain clarity, decisiveness, and new pathways of thinking to address the strategic challenges of the business.

• Leadership: I enable you to evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: I guide you through the inner work that allows you to truly thrive as a human being.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

One of the most potent issues right now is that annual planning is experienced as a one-time event. By February, the deck that once guided every decision is buried in folders no one opens.

While the planning process draws a lot of criticism, the real issue is that without a way to keep strategy present all year long, priorities will blur, tradeoffs will feel reactive, and teams will lose clarity about what actually matters.

The work ahead is to turn planning from a finite event into an ongoing leadership practice, one that keeps strategy alive and in motion.

This happens through strategic translation.

One of my clients experienced this shift firsthand

For years, planning showed up for her as a moment in time. Once that moment passed, her team’s work moved forward through launches, campaigns, and requests that inevitably lost contact with the original plan. Everyone stayed busy, yet the strategy itself became harder to see in the work.

That changed during a budget prep meeting for her boss. Finance had reorganized the entire marketing organization around a small number of company methods and a few critical investment categories. When she saw her organization mapped this way, the disconnect became visible. Nearly thirty percent of the work didn’t align to any method or strategic investment.

In one view, she could see which efforts were driving the business and which were simply absorbing time and attention. What became clear was that the issue wasn’t effort. It was how the work connected back to the strategy.

Subscribe now

The key to annual planning

Strategic translation is how you keep strategy at work between planning cycles. When you operate this way, three things consistently happen.

You create clarity around what drives results.

You build shared understanding.

You keep the strategic focus visible.

Together, these actions form a continuous loop.

How this looks as an ongoing practice

1. See patterns and connect the dots: Zoom out to clarify what really drives results

Step out of execution and look across the work to see what’s truly driving results. Identify where effort and outcomes no longer align, and make explicit trade-offs about what stays and what goes.

Run quarterly portfolio reviews to see your full slate of work against company bets. Spot the 20-30 percent of effort that’s no longer strategic and redirect it before budget season.

My client started every Monday by scanning one slide linking the company’s bets to live projects. Ten minutes created weeks of focus.

2. Translate strategy into shared understanding: Turn clarity into a shared language teams can act on

Revisit company bets with your team as conditions evolve. When work no longer fits, treat that as data, not failure. Adjust goals, shift resources, or stop projects that no longer serve the strategy.

Hold a monthly strategy sync with your directs. Use it to clarify what still holds, what’s shifting, and where your teams need to pivot. This keeps decisions aligned and messaging consistent across layers so everyone is steering from the same map.

When priorities changed, my client pulled together her team to ask, “What’s still true?” That question turned frustration into focus.

3. Make the work visible and meaningful: Keep strategy alive in daily decisions and rhythms

Use simple dashboards or one-page views that link each team’s top three priorities to the company’s bets. Review one or two of these in your staff meetings. The goal is learning and alignment.

Visibility is not about oversight, it’s about driving insight. When strategy is visible in the work, people can self-correct, celebrate progress, and adjust course without waiting for permission.

For my client, the dashboard was nothing fancy, but everyone could see progress and drift at a glance. It changed how the team talked about the work.

Over time, these rhythms build a quieter form of control. You spend less energy firefighting and more time making intelligent trade-offs in real-time.

Leave a comment

Win at annual planning through strategic translation

Annual planning sets direction, but your leadership is what keeps the plan alive as the work and conditions inevitably change.

Practice strategic translation — and lead your team through your best year yet.

Wishing you a happy holidays and healthy start to 2026!

— Amanda

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: I help you gain clarity, decisiveness, and new pathways of thinking to address the strategic challenges of the business.

• Leadership: I enable you to evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: I guide you through the inner work that allows you to truly thrive as a human being.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

In case you missed it

Many leaders hear this at some point. It’s delivered like a clear directive, yet rarely with a clear definition. What exactly is supposed to change?

Your tone? Your posture? How you contribute in meetings?

And why does every executive seem to mean something different when they say it?

For many of my clients, this lands in the same bucket as “be more strategic” — a catch-all phrase used when someone senses a gap but can’t name it. It’s vague, subjective, and often layered with bias.

“Executive presence” is treated like a universal standard, but it’s actually a moving target. Some leaders want more decisiveness. Others want more calm. Some prefer brevity. Others want detail and context. If you tried to satisfy everyone’s preferences, you’d spend your career shape-shifting.

And for women and people from marginalized groups, this feedback often carries an extra weight. Behaviors praised in others get reframed as “abrasive,” “emotional,” or “not confident enough.” What counts as “presence” is rarely neutral.

Because the feedback is so unclear, leaders often focus on optics — adjusting how they present — instead of addressing the real issue. And the further they drift from their natural way of leading, the less grounded and effective they become.

After coaching hundreds of leaders through this, I can tell you something that reliably makes a difference.

“Executive presence” is usually code for one thing:

Your leadership brand isn’t visible to the people who need to see it.

It’s about legibility.

Your colleagues don’t fully understand how you think, what you stand for, the impact you’re driving, or how your work advances the organization. And it’s not because those things aren’t true; it’s because they aren’t visible.

A few months ago, I worked with a senior leader who had stepped into a bigger role. She spent her first six months doing what great leaders do: she built a high-performing organization. The team was aligned, results were solid, and cross-functional partners trusted her work.

And yet, in her performance review, she was told she needed to “work on her executive presence.”

When we unpacked this, here’s what we uncovered: she had been leading with her head down, assuming her work would speak for itself. But people don’t automatically connect the dots between your work, your thinking, and your impact. And in her case, others simply didn’t have enough visibility into how she led.

She had a visibility problem.

Once she defined what she wanted to be known for, identified who needed to see her leadership, and put a simple rhythm in place to stay connected across the system, she had “executive presence.”

Presence = clarity + visibility + intention

Executive presence stops feeling mysterious when you stop treating it like a performance and start treating it like a system built on clarity, visibility, and intention.

Follow these five steps to put it into practice.

1. Define what you want to be known for

This is your leadership brand — the anchor for your presence.

Complete this prompt:

“When people think of me as a leader, I want them to think __________.”

Many seasoned leaders haven’t articulated this. When you name it clearly, everything else comes into focus.

2. Map who needs to see you clearly

Don’t confuse this for a list of people to impress. It’s about being visible to the right people.

Create a tiered stakeholder map:

• Tier 1: Mission-critical partners whose alignment directly affects your impact and the success of the business

• Tier 2: Cross-functional collaborators who need to understand your thinking

• Tier 3: People who benefit from general awareness of your work

This becomes the landscape where your presence actually matters.

3. Build a visibility rhythm that reinforces your brand

Intention and consistency are where presence is made. These are your opportunities to let people see you the way you want to be known.

You can do this through:

• Monthly 1:1s with your Tier 1 stakeholders

• Quarterly strategic updates or readouts for Tier 2

• Weekly alignment notes or touchpoints with key partners

• Showing up in meetings in a way that reflects your leadership brand

• Cross-functional conversations that demonstrate how you think and operate

When people experience you consistently, presence becomes predictable in the best possible way.

4. Connect your brand to your behavior

This is where executive presence becomes evident. Your intentional actions are the delivery system for your identity.

If your brand is “calm and decisive,” model composed decision-making when tension rises.

If your brand is “strategic and collaborative,” show how you integrate multiple perspectives into decisions.

If your brand is “people-centered and high-performing,” communicate expectations with clarity, warmth, and follow-through.

Every interaction becomes a reinforcement loop.

5. Audit your visibility

Periodically, step back and ask:

• Do the right people actually see my work?

• Do they understand my impact?

• Do they understand my thinking and approach?

If the answer to any of these is “not consistently,” where can you close the gap?

When you define who you are as a leader and make that identity legible to the right people, your presence takes care of itself. Your colleagues start to interpret you correctly. Your work lands the way you intend it to. Decision-makers understand your thinking, not just your output.

Nothing about that requires you to pretend or posture. It simply requires intention.

You already have a leadership brand. Now the work is letting it be seen.

– Amanda

Leave a comment

I work with Founders & C-Suite Executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: I help you gain clarity, decisiveness, and new pathways of thinking to address the strategic challenges of the business.

• Leadership: I enable you to evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: I guide you through the inner work that allows you to truly thrive as a human being.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

In case you missed it

Have you ever joined an executive team and noticed how your fellow leaders are sharp, capable, and composed, yet distant? They talk easily enough. Updates are shared, decisions are made. But the conversation never drops below the surface.

No one interrupts. No one laughs. No one disagrees.

It doesn’t feel dysfunctional. It just feels… disconnected.

What I want you to be aware of is that over time, that distance erodes trust, creativity, and performance, even among the most capable teams.

I once facilitated a team offsite that started this way. The group had been through a reorg; new leaders had joined. Everyone said they wanted alignment, but the predominant feeling in the room was cautious.

Every comment was carefully weighed.

It’s easy for high-performing teams to overlook this because it’s not chaos. It feels okay enough. But caution can be just as detrimental.

The nervous system stays on alert; every comment runs through filters like Am I being judged? or Is it safe to say this?

And when people don’t feel safe, they play small, often without realizing it.

Do you want your team to play small?

I don’t! So when this happens, I have two exercises up my sleeve designed to change the dynamic – to get people leaning in, laughing, even tearing up.

Why do I believe your executive team needs to do these exercises?

Because even the best teams lose connection. In a remote-first world, connection is even harder.

Because teams rarely fail for lack of intelligence. They fail for lack of relationship.

And because I know that if you do these exercises with your team, every conversation after will be faster, more open, and more honest.

A Simple Model for Connection

First, I want you to think about connection in three levels of depth, each with a distinct impact on performance.

1. Surface – Roles and Results

Most teams live here. People know what each other does but not much more. Communication is transactional: What needs to get done? It works, until the system gets stressed.

2. Shared – Purpose and Goals

Here, people align around shared outcomes. There’s respect and collaboration, but still professional distance: How does this impact the business? These teams perform well under normal conditions, but pressure exposes the cracks. They’re aligned, but not attached. Most executive teams plateau here.

3. Personal – Stories and Values

This is the deepest, and most often dismissed, level. Here, people understand who their teammates are, not just what they do. They know what shaped them: Why does this matter to you?

That understanding drives measurable results:

• Faster decisions, because intent is trusted.

• Better problem-solving, because diverse perspectives are heard.

• Higher retention, because people feel seen and valued.

One of the biggest reasons executive teams never reach this level is because the CEO views personal connection as sentimental.

But I’m making the case that it’s strategic. It’s exactly what keeps teams aligned and resilient when everything else changes.

Two Simple Ways to Build It

So how do you create this kind of connection? I recommend starting with these two practices.

1. Story of Self

Every leader has a story about what shaped the way they lead: a handful of moments that formed their values, influenced their decisions, and defined how they show up.

This exercise builds trust, belonging, and alignment around shared values. It helps teams see the human patterns beneath their professional personas, and understand the “why” behind each other’s leadership.

Invite each leader to choose three key moments that have most shaped how they lead:

• An early influence or experience that left an imprint,

• A moment of challenge, failure, or growth,

• And a defining turning point that revealed what matters most.

Give each person three to five minutes to share. Emphasize that the goal isn’t a perfectly polished story. Encourage vulnerability, humor, and imperfection over performance.

When everyone has shared, close the loop by reflecting on how these stories connect to their leadership today:

• What values do you carry forward from these moments?

• How do they influence the commitments you make as a leader?

This is where the impact happens. As people share, assumptions soften. Empathy rises. And alignment deepens, not just around goals, but around the shared humanity that drives them.

2. If You Really Knew Me

This exercise builds trust through honest, uninterrupted sharing.

Set it up by saying:

“Each person will take two minutes. You’ll start by completing the sentence, ‘If you really knew me, you’d know…’ and continue from there. Keep sharing whatever comes up. Go deeper as you go.”

Set a timer. Everyone else simply listens. No responses, no feedback. Just presence.

The senior leader should always go first to model the tone.

Groups of four work best; small enough for safety, big enough for perspective.

At first, people tend to stay light. Something like, “If you really knew me, you’d know I love quiet mornings.”

But as the minutes pass, the sharing goes deeper. Something like, “If you really knew me, you’d know I sometimes feel isolated leading this team.”

When people speak truthfully and are met with silence and respect, something shifts. You can feel the energy change: the nervous systems settle into safety. Laughter, recognition, and relief start to mix.

As leaders listen, they begin to hear shared narratives, experiences, and beliefs that quietly shape how each of them leads.

Don’t dismiss what emerges as oversharing, as it’s actually understanding. And that shared understanding becomes the ground for better work.

When to Use These Conversations

Don’t wait for an offsite to cultivate connection. You can integrate it right now.

Use it when:

• A new team forms.

• The organization restructures.

• Planning season begins.

• You’re closing out a long year.

You can also create connection in micro-moments by starting a meeting with a quick check-in. Ask, What’s happening for you right now?

Small, consistent practices like these will keep your team emotionally aligned even as priorities shift.

You move from controlling outcomes to shaping the conditions for great work.

Connection changes leadership from a role you play to a relationship you build.

And that relationship is what makes performance sustainable.

When Was the Last Time You Made Space for Connection?

If you have to think about it, I’d encourage you to prioritize it.

Sometimes, the fastest way to leading forward is through deeper conversation.

– Amanda

This is the work we do inside First Team Experience

If you’re ready to strengthen trust, alignment and shared focus, this program helps executive teams:

• See themselves clearly: Gain candid insight into how others experience their leadership and the patterns shaping influence, trust, and results.

• Lead with intention: Turn insight into action, make smarter choices under pressure, and lead in ways that strengthen team clarity, and performance.

• Strengthen the collective: Build the trust, alignment, and shared focus needed to operate as a true first team by leading together, not just alongside one another.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit for your organization.

LET'S CONNECT

In Case You Missed It

A leader I work with recently shared that her boss said:

“You need to be more strategic.”

That was it. No further context. No examples. No direction.

The message left her frustrated, as she replayed it in our coaching session.

“What does that even mean? Am I not doing enough? Do they think I’m not capable?”

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that feedback, you know the feeling.

And if you’ve ever given that feedback, you’ve probably meant something useful — but said something vague.

I see this a lot.

“Be more strategic” is one of the most common pieces of feedback leaders give, and one of the least actionable.

So, let’s unpack what that feedback is really trying to get at — and how to translate it into clear action.

Whether you’re the leader giving that feedback or the one receiving it, let’s create a shared language for what “strategic” actually looks like in practice.

What “Be More Strategic” Is Trying to Say

When someone is told to be “more strategic,” it’s rarely about intelligence, capability, or effort.

It’s usually about altitude.

Most leaders are rewarded early in their careers for getting things done. They’re known for execution — for being the person who delivers.

But what makes you successful at one level can hold you back at the next.

The higher you rise, the more your value shifts from doing to seeing — from managing the work to understanding how all the work fits together.

Strategic thinking is less about having big ideas, and more about perspective. It’s the ability to zoom out far enough to see how today’s actions connect to tomorrow’s outcomes.

The Two Dimensions of Strategic Leadership

Let’s imagine there are two dimensions to leading strategically:

1. Time Horizon: How far ahead you’re looking.

Are you thinking in days and weeks — or quarters and years?

2. Systems Awareness: How wide your perspective is.

Are you focused on your function — or on how the entire organization works together?

Try picturing these as two axes on a grid.

Leaders who operate in the top right corner — long-term and cross-functional — are seen as truly strategic.

Most “be more strategic” feedback is really an invitation to move up and to the right.

Subscribe now

Why the Feedback Feels Vague (and Frustrating)

The irony is when a leader tells someone to “be more strategic,” they’re often noticing something real — they just don’t have the language to describe it.

What they’re sensing might be:

• The person is too deep in the weeds.

• Their focus is too narrow or short-term.

• They’re not connecting their team’s work to broader business goals.

But without specificity, the feedback lands as criticism rather than coaching.

As a result, the receiver doesn’t know what to do differently.

And the giver misses the opportunity to develop a stronger leader.

If You’re the Receiver: How to Translate the Feedback

If you’ve been told to “be more strategic,” start by assuming good intent — then get curious.

Ask clarifying questions like:

• “Can you share what you’re seeing that feels tactical?”

• “What would being more strategic look like in this context?”

• “At what altitude do you need me to be thinking?”

Once you have that clarity, here are a few practical ways to build strategic capacity:

1. Create thinking time, not just reaction time.

Block time each week to step out of the daily swirl and look ahead.

Ask yourself: Where are we headed? What’s changing in the system around us?

2. Connect the dots across functions.

Strategy lives in the seams between departments.

Before you make a decision, pause to ask: How will this affect the teams around us?

3. Link execution to outcomes.

Don’t just report what’s been done — explain why it matters.

How does this week’s work move the business toward its longer-term goals?

4. Communicate up and out.

Strategic leaders don’t just think broadly — they help others see broadly.

Narrate your reasoning. Connect the dots out loud.

If You’re the Giver: How to Make the Feedback Useful

When you tell someone they need to “be more strategic,” you’re usually pointing to one of three things:

1. Time horizon – They’re thinking too short-term.

2. Systems thinking – They’re too focused on their function, not the enterprise.

3. Translation – They’re not connecting the dots between their work and company outcomes.

The next time you’re tempted to use the phrase, get specific.

Try something like:

• “I’d like to see you think more at the 6-month horizon rather than the 6-week one.”

• “You’re doing great work in your area; now I want you to think about how it impacts other functions.”

• “Your priorities are strong — let’s make sure they connect clearly to company goals.”

This kind of feedback creates clarity and direction instead of confusion and defensiveness.

It shifts the conversation from judgment to development.

The Takeaway

If you’ve been told to “be more strategic,” it’s not a criticism.

It’s an invitation to move from:

• Doing the work → Defining the work

• Managing tasks → Leading systems

• Solving problems → Shaping direction

And if you’re the one giving that feedback, remember:

Specificity is a gift. It’s what turns feedback into growth.

The higher you climb, the less your value comes from what you do — and the more it comes from how you see.

I’d love to know:

When was the last time you were told (or told someone) to “be more strategic”?

What did it actually mean in that moment?

Leave a comment

I work with Founders & C-Suite executives on three key levels:

• Strategic: I help you gain clarity, decisiveness, and new pathways of thinking to address the strategic challenges of the business.

• Leadership: I enable you to evolve and scale your leadership capabilities in line with what the business needs.

• Inner Work: I guide you through the inner work that allows you to truly thrive as a human being.

I offer a complimentary discovery session to assess fit. I’d love to hear from you.

LET'S CONNECT

In case you missed it