A few days ago, I had a conversation with an accomplished woman physician who was negotiating a new leadership opportunity. She was being recruited to build a program from the ground up. She had the expertise, the experience, and a clear understanding of what it would take to succeed. She also knew what could go wrong. She'd been in a similar situation before, where the promised resources never materialized. This time, she was determined to do things differently. So she did what many highly...

I’ve noticed a pattern in how the women I work with develop over time. It usually doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. They’re still accomplished, thoughtful, and deeply committed to doing excellent work. But they stop leading like they have something left to prove. They start leading from a different place. They trust their judgment more. They spend less time wondering whether they’re ready and more time deciding what they think. They become more discerning about where their time,...

There’s a part of leadership that no one can see. It won’t show up on your résumé. It’s difficult to capture in a performance review. And you probably won’t find it listed among the competencies in your organization’s leadership model. But it shapes nearly everything people experience when they work with you. I think of it as the invisible architecture of leadership. We tend to think about leadership in terms of what we can observe. How you communicate. How you make decisions. How you...