When you understand what strategy actually means, every initiative, proposal, priority, and decision (whether made by you or driven from the top) becomes clearer, more powerful and - if it’s yours - more credible

Ask most anyone what strategy means, and they’ll say something about mission, vision, and values. It’s a reasonable answer. It’s also wrong -- at least from where the CEO and board are standing.

And “what you see depends on where you stand” matters enormously here.

For decades, leadership development programs (developed by those who do not stand in the shoes of C-suite executives) have framed strategy as the work of articulating mission, vision, and values. These are meaningful, but not what highly successful executives and boards mean when they talk about strategy.

If we want to develop genuine strategic acumen, we have to let go of this definition entirely.

So What IS Strategy?

The clearest explanation I’ve found comes from Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. A properly crafted strategy achieves three goals:

1. Wins the customer’s preference (CUSTOMER/CONSUMER)

2. Creates a sustainable competitive advantage (RETURN and GROWTH)

3. Leaves enough money on the table for shareholders - or, in nonprofit organizations, enough to reinvest and sustain the mission (CASH)

(If those parenthetical labels look unfamiliar, they’re part of the Charan Virtuous Business Cycle - the foundational framework we use throughout the Be Business Savvy course. It’s worth knowing.)

In other words, strategy is a promise. A promise to shareholders, owners (or for nonprofits, the community) that the organization will continue to create and deliver value. Mission, vision, and values may support that promise. They are not the promise itself.

What goes into setting strategy?

Richard Rumelt, in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, puts it this way:

The core of strategy work is always the same - discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

Discovering the critical factors

What are those critical factors? In Confronting Reality, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan identify three fundamental factors that determine a business’s strategy.

• The external environment it operates in

• The financial targets it needs to meet

• The internal capabilities it depends on to meet those targets in that environment

They make the point that these elements work together in an iterative, interdependent, and dynamic process. Not a linear one:

In other words, strategy isn’t set once and left alone - especially in today’s turbulent business settings. It’s continuously recalibrated as the environment shifts, financials change, and required internal capabilities evolve.

Coordinating and focusing actions

You’ll also notice “The Crux” at the center of the model. In his book, The Crux, Rumelt tells us that real strategic work requires getting to the “crux of the matter” - choosing from all possible options the “make or break” strategic choices. Determining which have the greatest chance of success given the constraints. Not every opportunity is worth pursuing. Not every threat requires a response. Discernment is the skill. (I save our deeper dive into this for the Be Business Savvy course.)

The crucial hidden message for us

The thing about the concept of strategic acumen is that it has a seductive glamour to it that financial acumen doesn’t. This model tells us: to develop and demonstrate strategic acumen you must have financial acumen. They are interdependent. And frankly, you need financial acumen before you can successfully work on strategic acumen. Otherwise you’re dealing with yet a different Missing 33%.

Why this Matters to You

You may not be setting enterprise-wide strategy today, but understanding what strategy actually is - and what it is not - changes how you engage with it at every level. It changes the questions you ask. It changes what you pay attention to. It changes how you frame proposals, prioritize initiatives, and present ideas to senior leaders.

And it signals something important: that you understand the game that’s actually being played.

That’s a core part of what I call Business Savvy and it’s exactly what separates “she’s great at her job” from “she’s ready for more.”

What’s a Woman to Do?

1. Find your organization’s strategic goals. Look at the annual report, investor presentations, and earnings call transcripts. Strategic goals generally show up most clearly as financial targets, with commentary about how internal capabilities will change to hit them. Sometimes there’s commentary about what’s happening externally - watch for talk of headwinds and tailwinds. Can you identify: how the organization wins customer preference, how it creates competitive advantage, and how it leaves money on the table? If one seems to be missing from your picture, dig deeper into why.

2. Scan the external environment. What’s happening with your competitors, in your industry, in financial markets, global forces, workforce trends, customer and consumer behavior, and the actual physical environment? Which forces are having the greatest impact on your organization’s ability to hit its financial targets? Positive forces = tailwinds. Constraining forces = headwinds.

3. Understand the financial targets. How do they compare with competitors’ financials? How do they compare with predicted industry growth? How do they relate to predicted GDP growth -- they should be higher! What demands do those targets put on your function, BU, or department?

4. Audit your internal capabilities. How does the organization overall - and your function, BU, or department specifically - need to change to hit the numbers? If major changes are being implemented in the organization, whether or not they directly involve you, use the model to ask why. As I’ve written before, “People who know what will always work for people who know why.”

5. Evaluate ideas through the three-goal test and the full strategy model. Before presenting your next idea or initiative - or evaluating someone else’s - ask: How does this help win customer preference? How does it strengthen competitive advantage? How does it support leaving cash on the table? Is it reasonable given the external environment? What internal capabilities would need to change? This is how strategic acumen shows up in everyday decisions - and how it becomes visible to those above you.

These are exactly the kinds of analyses the Be Business Savvy course prepares you for.

Strategic acumen starts with a clear definition. Now you have one. In the next article in this series, we’ll look at what strategic acumen actually looks like in action -- and why so many of us are told we lack it without ever being told what “it” actually means.

In the meantime…

Enter the Financial Acumen series here:

Quick Start Business Acumen starts here for paid subscribers.

This is the second article in my Strategic Acumen series. It began here:

Lead ON!

Susan

If you’re looking for content that directly addresses the business, financial and strategic acumen you want more of - the kind of development that complements the presence and relational work you’re already doing - the Be Business Savvy Course is built for exactly this purpose. Self-paced, with coaching support, designed to be accessible even if you didn’t come up through operations, finance or strategy.

I welcome your next step:

❤️ Like, share or restack this post - it’s the best way to help other women find it

📘 Explore the Be Business Savvy Course

Susan

You can excel at two-thirds of what leadership requires and still be consistently overlooked because no one told you how advancement decisions are actually made.

There’s a question I’ve heard from women throughout my career - in coaching sessions, in workshops, in the hallway after a keynote:

“If women are so good at interpersonal and team skills, why aren’t more of us in senior positions?”

It’s a fair question. The answer is one of the most important things I can share with you.

Start With What’s True

The definition of leadership we’ve been working with in this series is gender neutral.

Leadership is using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others.

Nothing in that definition belongs to men. Nothing in it is beyond women. We see proof everywhere: Mary Barra at General Motors, Jane Fraser at Citigroup -- the first woman to head a major U.S. bank -- Carol Tomé at UPS. The practice of leadership transcends gender, race, nationality, physical ability. It always has.

But here’s what doesn’t transcend gender: the perception of who is leadership material.

Where We’re Seen to Excel

Study after study confirms that women are viewed by managers as outperforming men on:

• Engaging the greatness in others: interpersonal and team skills. We are seen as: , listening, working across difference, developing people, building relationships, giving feedback, creating team cohesion.

• Using our personal greatness: attributes, values, world view, etc. We are seen as diligent, achievement-oriented, high-expectation leaders who follow through.

Put that against our definition and it maps squarely to only 66% of what it takes to be a true leader in organizational settings (as differentiated from political movements for example.)

We own those areas of strength. Convincingly.

What Gets Us Seen as Candidates for Opportunity

Here’s where the story gets uncomfortable.

When executives and boards assess leadership potential, the weight they place on each element of leadership tells a very different story than our training calendars do.

Business Savvy (business, financial and strategic acumen) - key elements of the outcomes element - accounts for roughly 50% of skills and experiences sought in candidates for advancement. Engaging others accounts for about 26%. Personal greatness, the remaining 24%.

The one element where men are perceived as stronger - and where women are consistently underestimated? Worth 50%.

The elements where women are most strongly perceived as capable? Worth only 50% of what is factored into the decision. As a matter of fact, based on conversations I’ve had with executives, actual achievements and demonstrated Business Savvy open the door for advancement, the other two elements differentiate candidates when decisions are made.

This is The Missing 33% of the career success equation in action. And here’s what makes it most worrisome: I’ve been tracking this perception gap since 2000. By 2023, the outcomes/Business Savvy perception gap had barely moved.

More than two decades. Nearly unchanged.

Leadership Programs Haven’t Solved the Problem

Most leadership development programs aimed at women - and there have been many since the 1970s - were built on research about male executives who successfully navigated that era’s turmoil. They transformed their organizations to deal with competition from Japan, the rising use of computer technology and the changing workforce. What made those men stand out was their ability to engage the greatness in others to accelerate the transformations.

So the programs taught what the research highlighted. Team and interpersonal skills, the ability to capture the hearts and minds of their workforces. But researchers ignored that they had to:

• see the external threat,

• determine how to respond,

• motivate the workforce with a clear vision,

• restructure the business to address the external threats,

• determine appropriate financial targets to remain viable

• and take many more actions that drew on their business, financial and strategic acumen.

NONE of these became part of the programs because they were assumed to be part of leadership. As a matter of fact, even today so-called top leadership programs for women are lacking.

As a consequence, we who are already strong in the team and interpersonal skills those programs emphasize, walk out with our existing strengths affirmed - and no closer to the corner office.

Companies say they want collaborative leaders. But they still hold deep-seated beliefs about what a viable top candidate looks like - and those beliefs run on the outcomes channel, not the engagement channel.

What Actually Works

Organizations that have made real progress toward gender equity share one characteristic: they moved away from subjective, perception-based assessments of potential and toward quantitative measures of outcomes achieved.

When the question becomes what has she delivered rather than does she seem like a leader, the perception bias loses its grip. Women excel in the neutral practice of leadership. We just need the playing field that surfaces it.

Until that playing field is universal - and we’re not there yet - you have a choice.

Armed with the knowledge that perceptions are not neutral, you can be deliberate about which skills you develop, which experiences you seek, and what you make visible about your work.

Leading for outcomes isn’t just good leadership. On the path to the corner office, it’s the highest-leverage move available to you.

And now we’re back to that question: if women are so good at interpersonal skills, why aren’t more of us in senior positions?

You now know the answer. The question is never about our engagement skills. It is always about what we’ve not been told to develop - and what we can choose to do about it today.

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As I often hear from women at every level:

“I wish someone had told me this years ago.”

Consider this your telling.

Lessons in Leadership

• The practice of leadership is absolutely gender neutral. The perception of women and men as leaders is not.

• The interpersonal and team skills women are credited with - as real and as valuable as they are - account for roughly 26% of advancement decisions. Business, financial and strategic acumen accounts for 50%.

• Leading for outcomes trumps interpersonal skills on the path to opportunity. Seek the experiences that let you develop and demonstrate your skills there.

• Perceptions shift when organizations measure what’s actually been delivered -- and when we make our business results visible and undeniable.

  For more Lessons in Leadership and all full scoop on Business Savvy, jump in and join us.

Lead ON!

Susan

Next in the series: Anyone at Any Level Can Wear the Mantle of Leadership.

The Lessons in Leadership series starts here:

You now know what’s been missing. The Be Business Savvy course is built to develop exactly that -- the business, financial and strategic acumen that accounts for 50% of advancement decisions. Founding member pricing is the best you’ll ever see, and it won’t be available much longer.

I welcome your next step:

❤️ Like, share or restack this post - it’s the best way to help other women find it

📘 Explore the Be Business Savvy Course

Lead ON!

Susan

Here’s a question nobody in the beauty industry wants you to ask:

What if everything you spent this morning getting ready - on specific products, specific brands, specific level of polish - were invisible to the people whose good opinion you seek?

Not invisible as in unimportant. Invisible as in: they’re responding to an overall impression of polish — not the specific choices that cost us thousands to achieve.

Because the research suggests that’s exactly what’s happening.

What Decision-Makers Actually Notice

Studies on appearance and workplace advancement consistently show that grooming matters. Particularly for women, being perceived as “polished” does correlate with higher salaries and better opportunities. That part of the glam tax argument holds.

But here’s what the research also shows: career decision-makers (many of whom are still men) notice the overall impression of grooming. Not the specifics.

They notice polished versus not polished.

It’s safe to assume that most male decision-makers do not notice:

• Designer versus non-designer

• Gel nails versus plain

• The $170 blowout versus the $40 haircut

• Whether it’s the same outfit as last Tuesday

• Whether the moisturizer cost $12 or $120

Through their eyes the threshold for “professional appearance” is far lower and far less detailed than the standard most of us run ourselves ragged to meet.

We are paying a luxury tax to clear a bar that only requires showing up.

Who Do We Actually Dress For?

To be clear: men do sometimes police women’s appearance at work — as Tina Yerkes, PhD discovered when her male supervisor pulled her out of a meeting to critique her clothing. But notice what he was responding to: a perceived deviation from an unspoken standard, not the specific details of what she’d spent to get dressed that morning. The male gaze in the workplace is blunt. It notices compliance or non-compliance. The exquisitely detailed scrutiny — the chipped nail, the wrong heel height, the slightly-too-casual Friday — that’s coming from somewhere else entirely.

There is one exception worth naming. Men do notice - with remarkable precision - whether a woman deploys her body in ways that serve their comfort or desire. As multiple women in Tina’s comments attested, a managing partner will suggest you show more cleavage to win clients, a female project manager will tell you that covering up makes you seem “defensive.” The standard men enforce isn’t about polish or professionalism. It’s about availability. Which tells you everything about what the standard was always actually for.

If the men making career decisions about us can’t perceive the difference between a $33,000 facelift and a good night’s sleep — and the research strongly suggests they can’t — then the question becomes:

Who can?

And the answers are:

• Other women.

• And ourselves.

The glam tax isn’t primarily enforced by male gatekeepers scrutinizing our nail polish. It’s enforced by the women around us, who have internalized the same standards we have and apply them - consciously or not - to each other. A raised eyebrow at chipped polish. A comparison that happens in a glance. The subtle social cost of visibly opting out.

And the burden isn’t equally distributed. For women of color, the glam tax carries an additional layer - the pressure to code-switch in appearance as well as language, to navigate standards that were built around whiteness, and to manage bias that has nothing to do with polish and everything to do with race. The tax is real for all of us. For some of us, it’s compounded.

Capitalists in the patriarchal beauty and beauty adjacent industries build the standard. Women help maintain it.

Which is, of course, exactly how the most elegant traps work.

And if we’re honest, the subtler enforcer is the one who lives inside us.

Long before a colleague notices our chipped polish, we’ve already noticed it ourselves. Long before anyone compares our outfit to a competitor’s, we’ve made the comparison internally. The external scrutiny is real. The internal standard can sit deeper, activate faster and never turn off.

That voice — the one that says not enough, not polished enough, not thin enough, not young enough — didn’t arise from our beings. It was embedded by the same industries that defines the standards through decades of advertising, media, and subtle messaging that began before most of us were old enough to push back.

The most effective enforcers are the ones we can’t see. And our inner enforcer is both the hardest to name and the most important to name.

The Invisible Cost We Don’t Count

There’s a dimension of the glam tax that doesn’t show up in any spending total.

It’s the mental load - what my brilliant colleague memorably calls “the internal administration of looking like I’ve got it all together.” The constant low-level hum of: Do I look right? Is this enough? Am I measuring up?

It runs in the background of meetings, presentations and networking events. It costs nothing we can itemize and everything we can’t. It never appears on a leadership development agenda. It rarely comes up in a performance review.

And it is exhausting in a way that quietly accumulates. It drains our mental and emotional resources leaving fewer that could be directed toward work that actually advances careers.

We’re not just paying in dollars and hours. We’re paying in bandwidth.

The Time Cost Made Visible

In Western professional culture, women spend an average of 55 minutes more per day than men on grooming and appearance preparation. That’s two weeks of calendar time — or the equivalent of eight weeks of working hours — every single year.

Two weeks of working hours spent not on developing business savvy, not on building strategic relationships, not on deepening organizational savvy. We’re spending them on meeting a standard that the people with promotion authority largely cannot distinguish from a much simpler, cheaper, faster, version of itself.

Two weeks that men spend on other things - man of which fuel their career success. Time spent reading about the industry, making strategic contacts, developing skills, advocating on their own behalf, spending time with mentors, cultivating achievements that earn sponsorship, and on and on.

So What?

If the previous 2 articles in my “glam tax” series made you angry at the system, I hope that this one make you something more useful: skeptical of the standard.

The next time you reach for the more expensive option, the more elaborate routine, the more demanding standard ask not just “Is this for me?” but three harder questions:

• Who told me this was necessary?

• In my heart of hearts, do I believe them? and

• Can the people I’m trying to impress actually tell the difference?

More often than not, the honest answers are:

• The beauty industry told you — and it profits from your anxiety.

• In your heart of hearts, you may not be sure.

• And no, they probably can’t tell the difference.

The standard is less visible to decision-makers than we’ve been led to believe. The enforcement is coming from inside the house — from each other, and from the internalized voice of an industry that needs us to keep spending.

Seeing that clearly doesn’t mean abandoning every ritual that brings you genuine pleasure. It means the ones that don’t deserve a second look.

That’s not revolt. That’s just arithmetic.

The revolt comes next.

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This is part 3 of my It Needs to Be Said series on the Glam Tax.

Here’s part 1:

Here’s part 2:

Before signing off, I want to give you something more useful than simply reading about this.

I built a Glam Tax Calculator - dollars, hours and the emotional load that never shows up on any spending report. It takes about 10 minutes. It produces insights that are truly meaningful.

It’s a resource for paid subscribers (link below the paywall).

If you’ve been reading this series, I think you’ll find it revealing.

Subscribe now

Lead ON!

Susan

Read more

You’ve been reading my Glam Tax articles. You’ve tried the math in your head. You’ve felt that flicker of recognition — wait, how much DO I actually spend?

I built you a calculator to find out.

It’s called the Glam Tax Calculator — and it will show you, in real numbers, exactly what the glam tax is costing you in dollars, in hours, and in something harder…

Read more

Image borrowed with best intentions. Original by Better Workplace Cultures here.

I’m writing this because LinkedIn isn’t optional for most professional women. It’s where opportunities circulate, expertise becomes visible, and careers advance or stall. Understanding how the platform actually works, not how it claims to work, is business-critical knowledge.

LinkedIn’s own ads promise:

“LinkedIn is the network that works for you.”

It does. Just not equally.

If you’ve suspected the platform is working against you, two controlled experiments suggest you’re not imagining it..

The experiments

In September 2025, Dorothy Dalton and Robert Baker posted identical content on LinkedIn on the same day. Dorothy had 21,873 followers. Robert had 19,094.

Robert received 3.5 times more reach and gained four new followers. Dorothy gained zero.

This wasn’t a one-off. Jane Evans and Cindy Gallop ran a similar controlled test: two men with a combined 9,400 followers versus two women with 154,000. Same content. Same day. The men reached significantly more people.

Two experiments. Two research teams. One consistent finding.

What makes this particularly hard to dismiss

LinkedIn’s 2026 algorithm, by its own stated values, should be working in your favor.

The platform rewards substantive comments, dwell time, saves, and genuine discussion. It prioritizes specific expertise over generic content. It wants human voices starting real conversations. Women’s posts consistently generate higher engagement rates, more saves, and richer discussion than men’s on the same platform.

By LinkedIn’s own criteria, women’s content should be winning. The experiments show it isn’t.

Which means the problem isn’t communication style. Women can do everything the algorithm claims to reward. Write with expertise. Invite genuine discussion. Earn saves and substantive comments. And still receive a fraction of the reach their male counterparts get with the same content.

Where the bias actually lives

Both experiments used identical content. The only variable was the gender of the poster.

Which means the bias isn’t operating at the content evaluation level, where the algorithm assesses quality and relevance. It’s operating somewhere upstream. Initial distribution. Network clustering. The gate that opens before any engagement signal has a chance to register.

You can write better, post smarter, invite more discussion. The initial reach may still be throttled before your audience gets a chance to respond.

That’s not a content problem. That’s a structural one. And it has no fix on the posting side.

What LinkedIn’s own research reveals

A 110-page technical analysis published in December 2025 by researcher Martyn Redstone1, derived exclusively from LinkedIn’s own peer-reviewed engineering papers, now explains exactly why.

LinkedIn’s recommendation system filters billions of posts down to roughly 1,000 candidates per user through a retrieval engine. LinkedIn uses past engagement as an entry requirement. Posts from creators who have historically received more likes and comments are more likely to make that initial cut. Because men dominate LinkedIn’s follower leaderboard and have historically accumulated more engagement, they start with a structural advantage at this gate — one the algorithm compounds rather than corrects. And as the experiments show, even when women have significantly more followers, the gap persists.

The system also misreads safety as irrelevance. LinkedIn’s identity model weights 70% on positive interactions only. Women who post less due to harassment or safety concerns produce sparse interaction histories. The algorithm reads that caution as low relevance, not as a reasonable response to a hostile environment.

If your feed looks like it’s mostly your connections, that’s by design.

LinkedIn distributes content within network clusters first. For women, whose professional networks tend to be smaller and more homogeneous, content circulates locally but rarely breaks out to the broader audiences where reach actually compounds. That matters because LinkedIn isn’t a hobby. We’re there to showcase thought leadership, demonstrate expertise, and build the professional visibility that advances careers. When the algorithm keeps women’s voices inside smaller clusters, the cost isn’t just fewer impressions — it’s diminished professional presence at exactly the moments it should be growing.

As Redstone writes:

“LinkedIn does not contain a rule that suppresses women. No engineer wrote code that says: show fewer posts from these groups. The system is not designed to discriminate. But discrimination still occurs. The core issue is not intent - it is design.”

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What some women are doing

A growing number of women have quietly changed their LinkedIn profile gender to male. Not as a statement. As a strategy. Because they discovered that one simple switch improved their reach dramatically.

LinkedIn’s official position: “Our algorithms do not use gender as a ranking signal.”

The data from two controlled experiments and a 110-page technical analysis of LinkedIn’s own research disagrees. LinkedIn has opened at least one formal investigation.

Understanding the problem is being savvy. Knowing what to do about it is the next step. Below are six specific practices that give your posts the best chance within a biased system — and the strategy that bypasses it entirely.

Read more

The fluency gap doesn't just slow your advancement — it makes your expertise invisible at the moments that matter most.

Read more

A company just paused retirement contributions for 16,000 employees to fund AI. Nobody called it a women’s story. Here’s why it is.

The company is TTEC, a customer experience technology firm whose business runs on contact center workers. TTEC itself has publicly celebrated that 65% of its new hires have been women. Industrywide, 66 to 72% of customer service representatives are female.

When a majority-female workforce loses its 401(k) match, the majority of the people losing retirement contributions are women. That isn’t an opinion. It’s arithmetic.

Now layer in what women in this sector already carry into that moment. Customer service representatives earn around $37,500 a year, well below the national median wage. A 401(k) match on a below-median salary is already a smaller match in absolute dollars than the same percentage applied to a higher salary. Pause the match entirely, and you eliminate the one employer mechanism doing any real work on a retirement gap that already runs deep.

Women retire with 39% less saved than men. They contribute 30% less annually to retirement accounts, not because they’re less disciplined savers, but because lower wages mean lower contributions, and lower contributions mean lower matches, and lower matches compound into a smaller pile when it matters most. The National Women’s Law Center estimates that the gender pay gap costs women $406,280 over a 40-year career, and women of color approximately $1 million. Every dollar of that gap follows women straight into retirement.

The Unnamed Tradeoff

TTEC’s announcement was crystal clear about where the paused match money is going: AI certifications, AI-enabled tools, automation, workforce training. The company called it protecting the long-term strength of the business.

Here’s what the announcement didn’t say.

Seventy-nine percent of employed women in the U.S. already work in jobs at high risk of automation. Customer service tops that list, facing an estimated 80% automation rate. The AI investment TTEC is funding with retained retirement matches is the same technology most likely to eliminate the jobs of the women who just lost their match.

Women's retirement savings are being cut to fund the technology that will replace their jobs.

…That sentence deserves a moment…

And the “AI upskilling” framed as the benefit employees are receiving in return? Women are currently 20% less likely than men to use generative AI tools. Only 22% of global AI professionals are women. The workers most likely to benefit from AI certification programs are not the workers who just lost their retirement match.

This Isn’t a TTEC Story

TTEC is not uniquely villainous here. Deloitte cut pensions. Zoom cut parental leave while growing revenue. Bolt replaced unlimited PTO with a fixed structure. A pattern is forming: as companies tighten budgets and reposition for an AI-first future, the benefits in the crosshairs are the ones that matter most to long-term financial security, and the workforces absorbing those cuts are skewing female.

None of these companies announced a policy targeting women. None of them had to. The policy didn’t need a name on it to land where it landed.

This is What Gender-Scrubbing Looks Like

In an earlier article, I introduced the concept of gender-scrubbing: policies that have a gender-adverse impact on women written without naming women at all. The language is neutral. The facts and impacts are not.

A 401(k) match pause is gender-neutral on paper. When applied to a 66% female workforce in a below-median-wage sector, when women already retire with at least 39% less than men and while redirecting those savings toward technology that disproportionately threatens women’s jobs, it is not gender-neutral in effect.

As Jack Tuckner wrote on LinkedIn, “Companies believe neutral language is a litigation shield. It isn’t.”

This is gender-scrubbing at scale. And it will keep happening, quietly, under the label of workforce transformation, at company after company, until someone starts naming it.

What to Watch For

You may not work for TTEC. But your company is making calculations right now about where to find financial flexibility in an AI-first world. A Business Savvy reading of benefits announcements means asking:

• Who makes up the majority of the affected workforce? A “gender-neutral” cut in a female-majority role is not gender-neutral in effect.

• What’s the stated reason for the cut? “Investing in the future” and “workforce transformation” are phrases worth interrogating. Whose future? Which workforce?

• What’s being traded for what? Retirement security for AI certifications. Parental leave for operational flexibility. Map the trade explicitly.

• Who actually benefits from the investment being funded by the cut? If the AI upskilling pipeline doesn’t reach the workers who lost the benefit, the trade is not what it was presented as.

• Is this a one-time adjustment or a new floor? “We plan to reassess next year” has a way of becoming the new normal.

Business Savvy isn’t just knowing how your company makes money. It’s knowing how your company makes decisions, and developing the analytical eye to see what those decisions don’t say.

Lead ON!

Susan

And she said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

“Technical work is my comfort zone. I know my business, but I don’t have the business language or mindset. They see me as a technical person. We’re going through strategy work and my manager — who is very business savvy — keeps telling me he wants me to speak up more. But I’m not seeing the world the way they’re speaking about it.”

She isn’t struggling. She isn’t in crisis. She isn’t being passed over.

She’s in the room. She has the seniority. She has a manager who is actively pulling for her.

And she is watching the strategy conversation happen in a language she doesn’t yet have.

This is the Fluency Gap

Not the glass ceiling — the one we all know about. This is something different, and it’s specific to women who rise on the strength of deep technical expertise.

If you are among them (looking at you women in STEM), you get there because you are excellent at your craft. You solved hard problems. You delivered results. You earned your seat at the table by being the best in the room at what you do.

And somewhere along the way, that mastery became your identity — in your own eyes and in everyone else’s.

“She’s technical.”

It’s meant as a compliment. It reflects real achievement. And it is also, if you’re not careful, a ceiling.

Because the higher you go, the less the room needs your technical answer. They need your business judgment. Your strategic read. Your ability to speak the language of the organization — not the language of your discipline.

The language of return, cash, growth, customers and consumers.

The language of trade-offs and market position and what the numbers are actually saying about where this company is headed.

That’s not the language of engineering or chemistry or IT. It’s the language of business. And knowing your field deeply does not make you fluent in it.

I Call this “Getting Lost in Your Letters”

Your degrees. Your certifications. Your technical credentials. It’s the tendency to rest on the identity that got you where you are. But, as she realizes, your identity must change.

Here’s what that identity shift actually looks like across a career:

• At career start, your identity is close to 100% tied to your technical expertise. You earned those credentials. They opened the door. Your primary role: do the work.

• At supervisory and team lead levels, the ratio begins to shift — roughly 80% technical, 20% leadership. And leadership here means all three dimensions: personal greatness, engaging others, and Business Savvy. Your primary role shifts too: from doing the work to developing your team members to do it.

• At senior and executive levels, it flips: 80% leadership, 20% technical. Your role shifts again: from developing team members to developing the managers who build that capability in others.

• At the C-suite, as much as 95% of your impact comes from Business Savvy — strategic vision, business judgment, and the ability to position the organization in its external environment.

(These percentages are illustrative. The exact ratio depends on your industry and organization. The direction, however, is consistent.)

The trap isn’t that technical skills stop mattering — they don’t. But when your technical identity becomes the whole story, it can drag on your advancement like an anchor. Two things happen:

• Others stop imagining you in the business conversation

• You stop pushing yourself to enter it

Graciela named this perfectly: “They see me as a technical person.” She didn’t say it with bitterness. She said it as a fact she’s ready to change.

That self-awareness is the beginning of everything.

The Missing 33% of the Career Success Equation

I’ve spent my career studying the career success equation for women. It has 3 parts based on what’s expected of leaders in organizations.

• Personal Greatness - who you are as a person and a professional. ✅ Technical women have this in abundance.

• Engaging Others - your ability to lead, communicate, influence. ✅ Most senior technical women have developed this considerably.

• Business Savvy - business acumen, financial acumen, and strategic acumen. The ability to understand your organization as a business, speak the language of its performance, and think strategically about where it’s going.

This is the part that’s missing. Not because technical women aren’t capable — they are exceptionally capable. But because no one in their development path ever made it non-optional.

In our conversation, Graciela said she wants Business Savvy “not just for this role, but for my future.”

That’s exactly right. This isn’t about surviving the current strategy cycle. It’s about who you intend to become.

If any part of this resonated — if you recognized yourself in that strategy room, watching the conversation happen in a language you’re still learning — you’re in the right place.

Business Savvy isn’t optional. And the fluency gap is entirely closeable.

Paid subscribers: Part 2 of this series is coming. It breaks down exactly what “business language and mindset” means in practice — and the three moments where the fluency gap shows up most painfully. Plus your “What’s a Woman to Do?” actions.

❤️ Know a woman in STEM who’s ready to stop watching the conversation and start speaking up? Send this her way.

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Lead ON!

Susan

If you’re looking for content that directly addresses the business, financial and strategic acumen you want more of - the kind of development that complements the presence and relational work you’re doing - the Be Business Savvy Course is built for exactly this purpose. Self-paced, with coaching support, designed to be accessible even if you didn’t come up through finance or strategy.

I welcome your next step:

❤️ Like, share or restack this post - it’s the best way to help other women find it

📘 Explore the Be Business Savvy Course

Susan

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Contact is the relationship between your hand and the horse’s mouth—fingers to bit. It’s light, steady, just enough weight to communicate. It gives you a line of communication and lets you guide the horse where you want to go.

Connection is different. It’s not just about the mouth—it’s about the whole body. When you have connection, the horse is round through the topline, swinging in the back, stepping forward with engaged hindquarters into your hands. The energy flows from within—from the horse’s core and powerhouse, up through the back, into the neck, and softly into your hand. You’re not just steering. You and the horse are moving as one.

The difference between contact and connection in riding is exactly the difference between compliance and engagement in leadership. And many leaders stop at contact.

What Contact Gets You

Contact is necessary. Without it, you can’t communicate. Slack reins mean the horse has no idea what you want. In leadership terms, that’s the absent manager who gives no direction and wonders why nothing gets done.

But too much contact is just as problematic. Heavy hands that pull and force create tension and resistance (below image on the left). The horse goes where you point, but it’s braced against you the whole way. In leadership, that’s micromanagement—constant oversight, detailed instructions, checking every deliverable. You get results, but you’re working too hard and your people are working mechanically…and resentfully.

Good contact—light, steady, just enough—is better. The horse responds to your aids. You can steer him around the arena. In leadership, this looks like clear expectations, appropriate oversight, consistent follow-up. People do what you tell them to do. Projects get completed. Numbers get hit.

That’s compliance. And compliance is not nothing. Sometimes it’s exactly what you need.

When Bill Cioffi, Surgeon-in-Chief and Jane Metzger, Chief Nursing Officer were managing the emergency department the night of the horrific Station nightclub fire—100 burn victims arriving simultaneously, 97 people dead—they weren’t building engagement. Bill was saying, “Everybody listen up. I want a nurse, respiratory therapist, and a doc at every stretcher. You will take direction from two people: Jane and me.” Jane was directing the patient flow: “Dawn, I want you down here. Tell Karen to move the 33 patients off the surgical side to make beds ICU-capable.”

Pure command and control. Absolute contact, zero connection. And completely appropriate for the situation—high stakes, no time, lives on the line.

But if command & control is your default leadership approach, if you’re managing by contact all the time, you’re only getting effort, but you’re not getting hearts and minds. People comply, but they don’t commit.

The Problem with Only Contact

I worked with a director who had excellent contact with her team. She was clear about expectations. She followed up consistently. She gave good feedback. Her people knew exactly what was expected and they delivered it.

But when I asked them about their work, they described doing what she asked because she asked. If she didn’t specify something, they didn’t do it. If she was out of the office, productivity dropped. When she delegated a project, she would check in constantly.

She had contact. She could steer. But she didn’t have connection. The energy wasn’t coming from within—from their internal motivation and commitment. It was all coming from her. As a result, she was working much harder than she needed to because she was pulling the whole operation forward instead of channeling energy that was already there.

That’s what happens. When you stop at compliance, you get mechanical effort, not engagement. People show up and do the job, but they don’t bring their creativity, their initiative, their greatness. They wait to be told what to do instead of seeing what needs doing and stepping up to handle it.

What Connection Actually Means

In dressage, connection means the energy comes from within. Your leg activates the horse’s core and hindquarters - its powerhouse. That energy flows forward through its body - lifting the back, rounding the neck, arriving softly at the bit. Your hand doesn’t create the energy. It receives and shapes it. (above image on the right)

When you have connection, you can feel it. The horse is truly with you. Transitions are smooth. The horse stays balanced and round even when you lighten your contact. You’re not fighting to hold it together. It'’s carrying itself, and you’re just guiding where that energy goes.

In leadership, connection looks like what Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai created with the women of the Green Belt Movement. She described these women as “persuaded to believe that because they were poor, they lacked not only capital, but also knowledge and skills to address their challenges.” Through her leadership, they planted 35 million trees, stood up to a dictator, and eventually helped usher in democracy.

She didn’t do that through command and control. She did it by engaging the greatness of the women - by helping them recognize their hidden potential, by empowering them to overcome inertia and take action, by connecting them to something larger than themselves. The energy came from within them. She just shaped where it went.

That’s connection. Hearts, minds, and efforts all engaged in service of something they care about.

How You Build Connection

In riding, you build connection by activating the horse’s core and powerhouse. You don’t pull the horse into a frame with your hands. You use your seat and leg to engage the hindquarters, create energy from within, and channel it forward into your hands. The power comes from the horse’s own body - you just shape where it goes.

The same principle applies in leadership. You don’t force engagement by tightening control. You create conditions where people’s internal motivation can flow toward organizational outcomes.

Anne Mulcahy did this as CEO at Xerox during its massive turnaround. She and the executive team could have just issued directives: do this, cut that, comply or else. Instead, they engaged people: “Here’s the problem. Here’s the strategy. Here’s what you can do to help. You have a choice—you can leave and we’ll help you do that, or you can roll up your sleeves and help.” (Notice that Anne was explicit about the strategy - something larger than themselves.)

That message engaged hearts, minds, and efforts. People who stayed weren’t just complying with orders. They were choosing to commit their energy to solving the problem. As Anne described, “Defections slowed to a trickle, energy returned, and our people turned around the company.”

She activated the core - internal motivation, personal choice, ownership of the problem, commitment to the strategy. That energy flowed forward into the specific work that needed doing. She shaped where it went, but she didn’t have to create it.

When Everything Changes

When you have both clear communication and genuine engagement, everything shifts.

Change management becomes smoother because people aren’t just complying with new directions, they’re committed to making the change work. Teams stay resilient under pressure because the energy is coming from within them, not just from you pushing them forward. You can lead more from vision and purpose than from constant direction and oversight.

You feel it, just like a rider feels it when a horse truly connects. Things get lighter. People are more responsive. You’re not working so hard because you’re channeling energy rather than creating it.

That’s when leadership starts to feel less like effort and more like partnership. That’s the magic Meg Whitman was describing when she said one plus one equals four if you have the right people in the room. That’s what it looks like when you’re not just managing effort but capturing hearts and minds.

Why This Makes Your Work Life Easier

Here’s the insight that matters:

Engagement skills create the energy. Business Savvy provides the alignment—the strategic direction that energy needs to flow toward.

Without Business Savvy, you might build great connection with your team. People are engaged, committed, bringing their full selves to work. But if they don’t understand the business strategy, the financial constraints, or what actually drives value for the organization, all that energy scatters. You end up with happy sailors on a sinking ship.

Without engagement, you might have brilliant strategic clarity. You understand exactly what the organization needs to accomplish. But if people are only complying, you’re pulling everything forward yourself. You’re working too hard because you’re the only source of energy.

When you have both—genuine connection AND strategic alignment—work gets easier. The energy is there, it’s flowing in the right direction, and you’re guiding it rather than generating it. That’s when you can lead more from your seat than your hands. That’s when one plus one equals four.

This series focuses on engagement because that’s where women already have strength to build on. But don’t mistake refining this skill for the whole equation. Engagement channeled toward the wrong outcomes, or engagement without strategic direction, won’t advance your career or your organization. The goal is always outcomes. Engagement is how we achieve them through others.

Contact is necessary. You can’t have connection without it - you need that line of communication, those clear expectations, that steady guidance. But if you stop at contact, if all you ever build is compliance, you’ll spend your entire career working too hard. You’ll be pulling everything forward with your hands instead of channeling energy that’s already there.

Connection is what separates adequate leadership from the kind that changes organizations. It’s the difference between controlling effort and capturing hearts, minds, and efforts. It’s what makes the work feel less like force and more like partnership. And once you feel it—once you experience what it’s like to lead a truly engaged team that brings their greatness forward even when you lighten your hands—you won’t want to go back to just contact.

In this series I’m using the principles of dressage to illustrate an essential truth: The purpose of engaging others is to advance the organization. As much as our engagement skills reward us, feeling good about team cohesion or our communication effectiveness is not the point. It’s the process.

Coming next: Once you understand contact vs. connection, the next question is: how do you actually build it? We'll explore The Control Paradox: Why Holding Tight Makes You Lose Your Grip.

ICYMI, the series started here:

Engagement skills matter because they’re the process for achieving outcomes, not the point in themselves. Here’s how to practice this principle this week:

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“This team sucks.”

“That team isn’t going anywhere.”

“This player is a ball hog.”

Not a single question. Not one “why do you think that?” No engagement, just proclamation after proclamation delivered with the certainty of experts defending dissertations - despite knowing virtually nothing about what they were saying.

They were learning early: assert, don’t ask. Tell, don’t listen. Dominate the conversation, don’t build it. This is how they were being trained for the command and control style of management, not the collaborative style. The result of command and control is compliance. The result of collaboration is engagement.

Women Are Already Good at Engagement

Here’s what research tells us: Women significantly outperform men on nearly every skill related to engaging others. Communication. Listening. Developing people. Building talent. Empathy. Inspiring confidence. Getting people enthusiastic.

In study after study, managers rate women as stronger than men at engaging the greatness in others. Out of dozens of engagement-related competencies, men are seen as outperforming women in exactly two: using networks to advance the business and negotiation skills.

So what’s the problem?

The Disconnect

In my research I’ve explored what skills, experience and attributes boards and executives actually seek in executive and high-potential candidates. Let’s take a look at the blue bars:

• Outcomes dominates - with 50% of the sought skills, experiences and attributes

• Engaging Others - with only 26 %

• Personal Greatness - with 24%

Now let’s take a look at what my 2 decades of research shows about managers’ perceptions of women and men (watermelon and magenta respectively).

• Managers rate women as outperforming men on Engaging Others (47 competencies vs 3).

• Managers rate men as outperforming women on Achieving and Sustaining Extraordinary Outcomes (including business, financial and strategic acumen) - 38 competencies vs 0.

We’re excelling at a skill set that gets a LOT of lip service, but in the final analysis is valued less for advancement. We’re underperforming on what’s valued most. This is The Missing 33% problem in visual form and why enhancing and demonstrating Business Savvy is so important.

Why This Series Exists

So, given the importance of Business Savvy and women’s perceived excellence at Engaging Others, why am I writing a series on Engaging the greatness in others? Two reasons:

First, strength doesn’t mean excellence. We can always refine our skills. I certainly can. Even though I’ve spent decades teaching leadership including engagement skills, I still catch myself abdicating when I delegate. I hand off work without enough context or follow-up because I trust everyone even when they need more structure and guidance and/or because it just takes too long to engage. I can also be overly direct when a lighter touch would work better. Dressage has taught me what I should have already known from leadership: you use as little pressure as it takes to get the response, but all that it takes. Not more, not less. I’m still learning to modulate my approach with horses and people, you might have room to grow, too.

Second, and more importantly: the purpose of engaging others is to advance the organization. As much as our engagement skills reward us, feeling good about team cohesion or our communication effectiveness is not the point, it’s the process. Engaging others without maintaining focus on organizational outcomes creates happy sailors on sinking ship. So, don’t let this become your only focus. (I certainly won’t. You’ll still receive many new articles on Business Savvy.) If you over-invest here while neglecting Business Savvy (the actual Missing 33%), you’ll be excellent at something that won’t get you promoted. I call this “polishing the diamond” rather than “strengthening its setting.”

Consider this series a refinement of existing strengths and a call to focus your engagement skills on the right things.

Why Dressage?

Dressage is teaching me powerful lessons about the difference between compliance and true engagement. These are lessons that apply directly to leadership and deepen capabilities we already have.

You cannot proclaim at a horse. You cannot command and control your way to partnership. A horse that’s being told what to do without genuine engagement will comply mechanically at best, resist at worst. True partnership—the kind where horse and rider move as one—requires something deeper than command and control.

In dressage, I’m learning the difference between contact (akin to capturing the effort of a person’s hands) and connection (whole-body engagement where the horse willingly brings his power forward - akin to capturing the person’s heart and mind). I’m learning that force creates resistance, while “feel” creates responsiveness. I’m discovering how to support the energy coming from the horse’s own motivation and engagement—not from pulling with my hands.

I’m not using dressage as a cute metaphor. The lessons have direct parallels to leadership. The principles that create willing partnership with a 1,200-pound animal who could easily overpower you are the same principles that create genuine engagement in organizations.

If you don’t understand exactly what I’m saying, here you can see these principles in action. Invasor ridden by my trainer in Spain, Rafael Soto. Notice how joyfully they both perform.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll share what dressage has taught me about engagement—from understanding contact vs. connection, to developing multiple ways of asking for what you need, to building straightness so energy flows where you point it. Each article will draw on a dressage concept in real riding experience and connect it to concrete leadership applications you can use immediately.

This is about sharpening skills you already have while staying clear-eyed about where else you might want to focus. Because engaged teams matter. But engaged teams pursuing the wrong outcomes, or teams where you’re the only one who understands the business strategy, won’t get you where you want to go.

Next up: "Contact vs. Connection: Why Compliance Isn't Enough." We'll explore the difference between contact (command and control) and connection (capturing hearts, minds, and efforts) - and why most leaders stop at contact.

All subscribers receive the full leadership lessons from each article. Paid subscribers also get the 'What's a Woman to Do?' section with specific action steps you can implement this week.

Remember those 9-year-old boys proclaiming at soccer practice? They're learning a broken pattern—command without collaboration. But there's another trap just as limiting: collaboration without full focus on the business. The question isn't whether you can engage others—the data shows you probably already excel at it. The question is whether you're using that capability to advance outcomes that matter, or just to keep everyone comfortable. This series is about avoiding both traps—using your engagement strengths strategically, not just reflexively, to advance what actually matters.

Lead ON!

Susan

PS Let me be a little cheeky and mention that what those 9 year old boys were learning also serves as the basis of mansplaining. UGH!

If you’re looking for content that directly addresses the business, financial and strategic acumen you want more of — the kind of development that complements the presence and relational work you’re already doing — Be Business Savvy (specifically the Be Business Savvy course) is built for exactly this purpose. The content is designed to be accessible even if you didn’t come up through finance or strategy, and rigorous enough to make a real difference in how you show up as a viable candidate for opportunity.

I welcome your next step:

• ❤️ Like, or restack this post — it’s the best way to help other women find it

• 📘 Go deeper:

  • No Ceiling, No Walls (ebook)

  • No Ceiling, No Walls (softcover)

  • Make the Most of Mentoring (softcover)

  • Make the Most of Mentoring (ebook)

  • Be Business Savvy Course — self-paced, with coaching support

  • Coaching Executive Women (occasional) (newsletter)

Susan

Coinbase cutting 14% of its workforce. Block eliminating 40% of its staff. Law firm Baker McKenzie laying off up to 10% of its global workforce - all as a direct response to AI.

This isn’t a tech story. It’s a business story. And it’s coming to your office, if it hasn’t already.

Let’s take a careful look at the language in these announcements. They’re not just cutting costs. They’re describing a new kind of worker -- one who can direct AI toward outcomes that matter. Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, called for “strong and active individual contributors.” Block’s Jack Dorsey wants “player-coaches.”

What they’re describing, whether it’s intentional or not, is the need for Business Savvy.

For years I’ve been making the case that business, financial, and strategic acumen -what I call Business Savvy - are key missing components in the career success equation for women. I’ve said, develop, enhance and demonstrate Business Savvy and it will set you apart. It’s what moves you from competent to promotable. From high-performer to high-potential.

And that’s still true.

But the landscape has shifted. Business Savvy is no longer just what moves you up. In an AI-accelerated world, it’s what keeps you in the room.

An Example IRL

I spoke recently with an executive at a large manufacturing company - one that sells specialized equipment to major commercial customers and measures success by units placed in the field.

She was troubled. Market conditions were shifting. The equipment was there, but how consumers were using it was changing. She started asking: shouldn’t we be measuring profit per unit, not just units placed? Are we measuring the right things for where this business is actually heading?

No one handed her that question. She arrived at it herself, by paying attention to what the business actually needed -- not just what it had always measured.

That’s Business Savvy. Specifically, it’s financial acumen meeting strategic acumen -- the ability to look at how your organization measures its own success and ask whether those measures still serve the strategy.

She doesn’t have “finance” or “strategy” in her title. She’s an executive who was paying attention. That’s the whole point. And her very Business Savvy manager took notice!

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Who’s Most at Risk?

The women most at risk right now are not the ones who lack talent, work ethic, or ambition.

They’re the ones who believed what they were told - explicitly and implicitly, by their organizations and their leadership development programs - that excelling at relationships, communication, and presence was enough.

It was never enough. I’ve been saying that for twenty years.

Now the cost of the Business Savvy gap is no longer just a missed opportunity. It’s a pink slip.

The four actions below won’t just protect your seat. They’ll position you for what comes next.

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Because the women who need this content most are often the ones who don’t know it exists.

Every referral you make puts my Missing 33%, leadership, and Business Savvy frameworks in front of someone who may have been wondering for years why she’s plateaued despite doing everything right - or realized she needs something more at her new height.

And Substack has made it easy to reward you for spreading the word.

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Thank you for being part of this community, for helping it grow and for supporting the career success of other women.

Lead ON!

Susan

With “gender-scrubbing” we’re seeing a masterclass in the abuse of words - gender-neutral language deployed to obscure what policy shifts actually mean for women. As if changing the language changes reality. It doesn’t.

But here’s what does shift reality: the words we use every day -- in talking to ourselves, in describing our own work and ambitions, in how we frame leadership. The words we choose quietly build or diminish our confidence and our careers. The words you use create the ceiling you hit.

Words Do Matter

In my Part 1, I shared a definition of leadership that women haven’t been told — and the discovery that’s driven my work for decades: that business skills are The Missing 33% in the career success equation for women.

But here’s something I’ve learned from working with leaders at every level: even when women have access to the right definition, the words they use around leadership can still hold us back. Not because language is trivial, but because it isn’t.

Words shape thinking. And imprecise thinking about leadership leads to imprecise — and costly — career decisions.

So before we go further into what leadership actually requires of you, let’s get precise about three ways the word leader gets misused. Because once you’ve cleared these up, everything else clicks into place.

“Leader” is not a synonym for “executive”

This one is everywhere. We talk about “the leadership team” when we mean the executive team. We say someone “has a seat at the leadership table” when we mean they’ve reached a certain organizational level.

The problem? It suggests that leadership is about rank rather than actions. And that is simply not true.

Responsibility for people does not a leader make. Authority over a budget does not a leader make. A title does not a leader make.

Using the definition we established in Part 1 — leadership is using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others — not every executive qualifies. And many individual contributors already do.

When you conflate leader with executive, you inadvertently tell yourself (and others) that leadership is something you earn through promotion rather than something you practice from wherever you stand today.

It isn’t. Start using the words accordingly.

“Leader” is not a synonym for “entrepreneur” or “inventor”

Someone who builds a business is an entrepreneur. Someone who conceives something new is an inventor. Someone who meets our definition is a leader.

These can overlap — but they don’t automatically. A brilliant inventor may have no interest in engaging others toward shared outcomes. An entrepreneur may build a thriving company without ever inspiring anyone. And a leader may be neither an inventor nor an entrepreneur.

Mixing these up matters because it creates a false picture of what leadership actually requires — and can make people who aren’t building companies or launching products feel like leadership doesn’t quite belong to them.

It does.

The myth that will not die: “leaders” versus “managers”

This is the big one. And it has done more damage to women’s leadership development than perhaps any other idea in the last 40 years.

You’ve seen the framing:

Leaders do the right things. Managers do things right. Leaders inspire hearts and minds. Managers manage results.Leaders are transformational. Managers are transactional.

It sounds compelling. It’s also a myth — and understanding how it became a myth matters.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, American business was under enormous pressure. Global competition, rapid technological change, deregulation, demographic shifts. Some executives were rising to meet these challenges — reading the environment, setting direction, engaging their people in transformation. Others weren’t. They were maintaining business as usual while the world changed around them.

Researchers and the business press of that era did something understandable but ultimately unhelpful: instead of calling the effective executives highly competent and the ineffective ones less competent, they called the good ones leaders and the struggling ones managers. Two words that carry enormous freight, applied to what was really just a performance difference.

The concept took off. Leadership development programs, succession planning models, CEO selection criteria — all built on the premise that leader and manager sit at opposite ends of a spectrum, with a powerful cultural thumb on the leader side.

And so was born a myth that entire careers have been built on — and derailed by.

Here’s what I know to be true instead

The Xerox turnaround under Anne Mulcahy and then Ursula Burns is one of the most studied examples of successful business leadership in recent decades. What did their leadership actually look like?

They focused on cash and growth and disciplined management of inventory. They engaged employees’ passion and their willingness to do whatever it took. They articulated a vision and drove operational cash flow. They drew on who they were and what they did.

In other words: both/and. Not either/or.

At every level — not just the executive suite — leadership means doing the right thing and doing it right. Leading hearts and minds and managing for results. Transforming and executing. The most effective people I’ve observed throughout my career didn’t choose between these. They did it all. That’s what the definition demands.

When I hear a woman say “I want to be a leader, not a manager,” I understand the impulse. But I want her to understand the cost of that framing. It creates a false hierarchy in her mind and often, a blind spot. Because the corner-office skills that women are most often perceived as lacking? Execution. Financial acumen. Strategic discipline. The very things that get coded as “management” in the old paradigm.

You can’t afford to dismiss those as someone else’s job.

No matter how well put together you are (i.e. how much you pay in “glam tax”), you’ll never be seen as a leader if you don’t fulfill all three parts of the definition.

Leadership is using the greatness in you

to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes

by engaging the greatness in others.

Here’s how I use these words and invite you to as well.

Leader: someone who uses personal greatness to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others.

Executive: someone with responsibility for positioning the organization for success and authority over senior teams. An executive may or may not be a leader.

Manager: someone with responsibility and authority over multiple teams or supervisors. A manager may or may not be a leader.

Supervisor: someone with responsibility and authority over a team of individual contributors. May or may not be a leader.

Individual contributor: someone without direct authority over others’ work. May absolutely be a leader.

Precision here isn’t pedantic. It’s protective. It keeps you from waiting for a title to claim leadership - and from dismissing the operational rigor that effective leadership actually requires.

Lessons in Leadership

• Reserve the word leader for those who use personal greatness to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others - regardless of level or title.

• The idea that you’re either a leader or a manager is a dated myth, born of a specific moment in American business history. It’s a shaky foundation for your development.

• Precision in language shapes precision in thinking. The clearer you are about what leadership actually is - and isn’t - the more deliberately you can develop it.

• Own your identity as a leader through your self-talk, how you see yourself and how you describe your role. If you think of yourself as “just a manager” or “not quite a leader yet,” you may be creating a ceiling that isn’t even there.

Next in the series: Leadership is Gender Neutral...Perceptions Are Not.

If you’re looking for content that directly addresses leadership and the business, financial and strategic acumen you want more of (the kind of development that complements the presence and relational work you’re probably already doing) Be Business Savvy (specifically the Be Business Savvy course) is built for exactly this purpose. The content is designed to be accessible even if you didn’t come up through finance or strategy, and rigorous enough to make a real difference in how you show up as a viable candidate for opportunity.

I welcome your next step:

• ❤️ Like, share or restack this post — it’s the best way to help other women find it

• 📘 Go deeper:

  • No Ceiling, No Walls (ebook)

  • No Ceiling, No Walls (softcover)

  • Make the Most of Mentoring (softcover)

  • Make the Most of Mentoring (ebook)

  • Be Business Savvy Course — self-paced, with coaching support

  • Coaching Executive Women (occasional) (newsletter)

Susan

Tuesday 5 May

8:00 AM Eastern US.

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Our spirit speaks to us in the quiet.

Please use time this weekend to contemplate your leadership journey and the rewards you’ve gained from it.

Thank you!

During these weeks, it’s been an honor to walk with you on your leadership journey.

Let me know how else I can support your continued great success.

Lead ON!

Susan

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Wearing our mantle of leadership brings meaning to work in many ways. Through the goods and/or services that make customers lives better, by lifting up the lives of those with whom we interact as colleagues, managers and/or direct reports, by creating an organization that does good in the world.

Sometimes the meaning is inherent in the work. Sometimes w…

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What big picture are you keeping (or need to be keeping) your eyes on?

How are you keeping your team(s) focused on the big picture?

I hope that you’ve noticed that so far (aside from 2 quotes from Ram Charan whose work is amazing) all of our inspiratio…

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We often her the advice to NETWORK! and all too often we think that means we have to engage with everyone. But that’s not at all the point. The point is to be sure we’re networking/engaging with the “right” people, about the “right” topics at the “right” time.

In this case we’re going to focus on engaging people who are co-creators of business value.

• What…

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There’s no expectation of perfection during your Leadership Boost or with your Leadership Daily Challenge.

This is a lesson I’ve learned the hard way. I hope you haven’t had to.

A manager who is a perfectionist is annoying as heck. I hope for your sake (and for that of direct reports if you have them) you’ve found the difference between excellence and per…

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