For more than 30 years, as a physician, a healthcare executive, and now an executive advisor, I’ve watched accomplished women lead by two sets of rules: the ones they were raised on, and the ones others use to judge their leadership. I help them see both clearly so they stop over-explaining decisions they’re qualified to make, hold their position under pushback, and lead with an ease they didn’t have before.
You've been looking in the wrong place
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Ten years mentoring, sponsoring, and coaching women leaders has taught me a few things that don't show up in typical leadership advice. Over the next ten weeks, I'm sharing the lessons that have shaped how I work with women leaders. This is lesson one: Leadership always begins within. I've spent thirty years watching brilliant women search for the right way to lead. The right style. The right book. The right framework, course, or leadership guru who finally has the answer they've been missing. Most of them never find it. Not because the answer doesn't exist (it does!), but because they're looking for it in the wrong place. You cannot lead others somewhere you haven't been yourself. Most women I work with are trying to lead a team, a department, an entire function, while still waiting for someone to teach them how to lead their own mind under pressure. They're hunting for a model to apply to others before they've ever applied one to themselves. So they keep collecting more input. More frameworks. More proof that someone else has already mastered the thing they haven't yet practiced on their own life. Here's what I ask instead: where have you already learned to lead yourself well? Not where are you disciplined. Not where do you hustle the hardest. Where have you built real trust with your own judgment, your own instincts, your own way of working through hard things? Most women can't answer that quickly. They've spent so long managing how leadership looks from the outside that they've never trusted what they already know about themselves. The self-leadership that's already happening gets dismissed as just how I handle things. The performance that drains them gets mistaken for what leadership is supposed to feel like. But you can only take others as far as you've gone yourself. Because the influence you have over anyone else is built entirely on the ground you've already covered alone. When you stop searching for the 'right' leadership style, and start finding your own instead, something changes. You start leading from solid ground. Leaders go first. Next week: the thing you've been calling a weakness that's actually your edge. Here's to leading yourself first, Denée PS: What's the leadership 'right way' you've been chasing? Hit reply and let me know. Denée Choice, MD, MMM |
Choice Leadership Consulting
For more than 30 years, as a physician, a healthcare executive, and now an executive advisor, I’ve watched accomplished women lead by two sets of rules: the ones they were raised on, and the ones others use to judge their leadership. I help them see both clearly so they stop over-explaining decisions they’re qualified to make, hold their position under pushback, and lead with an ease they didn’t have before.
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...