Insights

The conventional advice isn't wrong. It's just incomplete in ways that disproportionately cost women. There's a body of conventional wisdom around negotiation that gets handed to women at various points in their careers. Anchor high. Know your number. Don't accept the first offer. Be confident. Use silence. This advice is real and useful. It's also missing a significant portion of what's actually happening in executive-level negotiation and the missing portion tends to matt

Everyone has advice for the first 90 days. Here's what the advice usually gets wrong. There is no shortage of frameworks for the first 90 days of a new executive role. Listen first. Build relationships. Don't make big moves too fast. Understand the landscape before you try to change it. This advice is largely correct. It's also, in practice, much harder to follow than it sounds — and the reasons it's hard are worth naming directly. Why the standard advice breaks down: The "li

Long tenure is an asset. Until the day it becomes the thing that's holding you back. A long tenure is something to be proud of. It means you built something. You survived cycles. You grew through multiple versions of an organization and multiple versions of yourself. That's not a small thing. But there is a particular kind of transition difficulty that comes specifically from long tenure, and it's almost never discussed directly. Because the people in the middle of it are us

You just got promoted. You're good at your job. So why does everything suddenly feel harder? Something happens in the first several months of a new executive role that almost no one prepares you for. You were exceptional at your last level. Probably exceptional for a while. You got the role. And then, somewhere around week six or week ten or month four, you find yourself thinking: I don't actually know what I'm doing. You're slower than you expected. Decisions that should fee

The skill that built your career is now working against you, and no one is going to tell you that. There's a particular kind of executive I often work with. They built their career on being the smartest person in the room. They solved problems faster than anyone else. They got promoted because of it. Then they got promoted again. And again. And now they're running a division of several hundred people, and they're exhausted in a way they've never experienced before, not from