Resource Like a Leader: Optimize Your Energy and Time

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Resource like a leader optimize your energy and timeAs a leader, managing your time and energy expenditure is essential. But when it comes to the capacity equation, not all time holds equal value—particularly, your ability to discern how to allocate energy in a way that is impactful and fulfilling matters.

Sometimes, a workplace drains you because you’re simply in the wrong job for your personality and skills. If you thrive in varied, interactive, and fast-paced environments, then a role based on autonomy and structured routine work will not stimulate you. Likewise, if you need order, clear rules, and practical goals, you are going to be stressed in a context of spontaneity, frequent change, and vague directives.

But inside of any current leadership role, there’s also the subtler calibration of motivation and impact within how you spend your days. Being a leader involves making increasingly discerning choices on where you pour your own energy and where you draw upon delegation and support.

Your Time Is a Non-Renewable Asset

In the book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Time, and Build Your Empire, Dan Martell advises entrepreneurs on applying mindset shifts and systems that enable them to move from a do-it-all-yourself approach toward focusing primarily in high-value work that brings them energy and fulfillment.

Because no matter whether you’re an entrepreneur or a leader, trying to do everything yourself inhibits your ability to lead and cultivate growth. According to Martell, time is the only non-renewable asset, and you can’t afford to spend yours unwisely.

As an entrepreneur, this means that you reach a certain point where you are wise to “buy back your time” by hiring others to do routine and repetitive work so you can reclaim more freedom and energy for the high-value work you excel in and enjoy. When you free your time, the energy you have to pour back into the work increases.

As a leader within an organization, buying back your time may look different than to an entrepreneur, but the same principles apply. The question is how do you know what high-value work you both enjoy and excel at?

What Are Your Areas of Working Genius?

Assessment tools are priceless when it comes to gaining insight and self-awareness around your working style, such as The 6 Types of Working Genius from Patrick Lencioni, which is one tool we use for executive and organizational coaching.

While every work area is essential for any endeavor in the office, some will come more naturally to you and be more enjoyable. The six types of working genius are:

  • Wonder: identifies the need for improvement or change
  • Invention: generates new ideas or solutions
  • Discernment: assesses the merit and workability of the idea
  • Galvanizing: generates enthusiasm and action around the idea
  • Enablement: initiates support and assists in the implementation of the idea
  • Tenacity: commits to ensuring that the idea or solution gets completed and that desired results are achieved

For each of these working areas, you have a certain level of natural proficiency and extent to which these tasks give you energy or drain you, relative to others.

  • Working Geniuses – The two areas in which you are most naturally gifted and from which you derive energy and joy.
  • Working Competencies – The two areas in which you are capable and don’t mind doing for a limited time, as they neither give you energy nor drain you.
  • Working Frustrations – The two areas that do not come as naturally to you, and tend to drain your energy and steal your joy.

If you spend all your time on working competencies, you’ll eventually grow bored and restless to apply your more energizing capacities.

If you spend a good deal of time on working frustrations, you’ll be highly dissatisfied and weary with your job.

Ultimately, you want to play to your working geniuses as much as possible, so that both your impact in the work, and your energy behind it, will be expansive.

Discerning What to Prioritize and What to Delegate

Knowledge is power, and when you know what areas light up for you, it’s instructive for guiding what roles and environments you choose, how you lead yourself, and how you develop and organize within teams.

There are many reasons why we don’t delegate, such as a fear of losing control or fear of losing quality. But, stop to consider the opportunity cost of spending a lot of time on working frustrations and working competencies—it’s more costly than you realize.

Martell suggests the DRIP matrix for evaluating how to re-organize your energy and time to prioritize the enjoyable work where your impact (or income) is increased.

  • Delegate (D): Delegate what tends to drain you and has low-value impact. These are often administrative tasks which can effectively be handled by another.
  • Replace (R): Some tasks are high-value impact but personally drain your energy. While you may have to do these to begin with, you’ll eventually want to find others, who are energized by these tasks, to support you. If you can overcome the hesitation to let go, replacing will serve your ability to hone your impact.
  • Invest (I): For those areas which are low-value in immediate impact but still nurture and energize you—such as fun work tasks, time with family, or exercise—you will want to invest time. It will motivate you, help with burnout, and one day, it will pay off.
  • Produce (P): When it comes to high-value tasks that energize you and that you also enjoy, this is your impact zone—which you protect by delegating and replacing other tasks. You want to expand the time you spend in this realm.

For every entrepreneur or leader, the DRIP process can be difficult and requires trust. But slowly and iteratively loosening your grip on the work you could be doing less of may be one of the most powerful professional decisions you make.

Crossing DRIP With Areas of Working Genius

Knowing your working geniuses (take the assessment here) can really inform how you apply the actions of the DRIP matrix approach at work.

Your working frustrations are where delegating (D) and replacing (R) may make all the difference. You’ll want to delegate chasing invoices (Tenacity) and perhaps you can seek out an ally to bring the entire department on board (Galvanizing) if these skills are working frustrations for you.

With freed up time, your working geniuses are going to be your high-value production (P) zone, where you focus on owning and expanding. So if your working geniuses are Wonder (sensing what’s missing or could be better) and Invention (generating new ideas), you’ll want to focus on and expand opportunities to explore new visions and evaluate big strategic ideas.

Working competencies may increasingly fall into the delegate territory, or replace territory, as you step higher in leadership. Just because you can do them well enough doesn’t mean you should still be doing these tasks in your current position.

The more you advance, the more it matters to invest (I) in what sustains you, as it will help build energy for your geniuses/production zone.

You’ll want to elevate the application of your working geniuses as you rise—if one is Enablement, can you focus on enablement in strategic partnerships while others manage some of the team-level enablement of individual members?

Beyond self-awareness, the key is also knowing other’s working genius areas in your teams. Believe it or not, someone actually enjoys and is energized doing the work that drains you. The most effective team dynamics play collaboratively on everyone’s complementary geniuses.

Leading With Your Time and Energy

As a leader, one of the marks that you’re on a path of growth is your willingness to divest your energies from where they no longer are as valuable or effective.

It’s another step to know what you’re truly gifted at as a leader and to put the weight of your leadership behind it. But it’s this very career move that may reward you the most, both professionally and personally.

By: Aimee Hansen is a writer, facilitator, and co-author of This Book Is a Retreat. She has contributed to The Glass Hammer for over a decade. 

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Executive Presence: Four Communication Hacks To Improve Your Leadership Impact

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executive presence and communicationLet’s argue you are already well-versed in effective communication skills as a leader. You’ve cultivated self-awareness and emotional intelligence. You listen actively. You are mindful of body language and nonverbal cues. You consider different perspectives. You ask open-ended questions to encourage dialogue and paraphrase to ensure understanding.

You begin with clear communication objectives. You know your audience and your context and hone your communications strategy. You lead with the point rather than bury it. You are clear and concise, as well as conscientious of tone. You substantiate your argument. You bring in storytelling. You anticipate questions, challenges, and counter-arguments.

You cultivate psychological safety. You set clear objectives, priorities, agendas, and roles. You steward the conversation and invite and encourage feedback through different avenues. You ensure all team members are clear on decisions, actions, responsibilities, and timing.

So far so good, right? Undoubtedly, you can witness areas where you could improve your command of these skills. And let’s go further. Because powerful communication also involves how effectively you convey leadership, including how you shape the quality of conversations happening around you.

1. Leverage the Pause

One of the quickest ways you can diminish the power of your voice or your stance is to steal the space immediately after you made a point. Because truth needs room to land.

There is leadership gravitas in the pause that can happen before, between, or after your words, but too often we are the first to steal it out of discomfort with silence. Let your words land. Holding your presence through the pause conveys being grounded in your leadership without seeking immediate validation, slipping in caveats, or rushing to move on.

If you’re opening the room for questions, a ten second pause (far longer than may feel comfortable) can even activate engagement. It shows executive composure and provides processing time for others to formulate better thoughts.

Equally, practice letting the words of others land for you. That pause before response conveys emotional intelligence and has the potential to improve decisions.

2. Cultivate the Language of Candor Around You

“As you arrive to a real senior level, you will start to understand that people are going to have a hard time disagreeing with you. They tend to give you filtered information,” advised Geline Midouin. “If you know that, you can be much more deliberate and intentional in terms of how you ask questions, to make sure that you’re getting the real story and understanding different perspectives.”

Not everyone has the guts to speak truth to power, so as you rise as a leader, try to become aware of how others edit themselves around you. Who used to challenge you and no longer does? Who no longer shares their half-baked ideas? What assumptions are not scrutinized?

Recognize that people may contort in subtle ways to stay in your favor. At this juncture in your journey, you have an opportunity to elevate communication to improve the quality of ideas, thoughts, and opinions that circulate in your presence.

In HBR’s “How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations,” authors Alison Wood Brooks and Andy Atkins iterate the importance of building an environment that invites candor: “Leaders play a critical role in creating the conditions for candid conversation. They model intellectual humility, invite disagreement, acknowledge uncertainty, and respond thoughtfully when others raise difficult issues.”

As a leader, you set the norm for asking questions that draw out unvoiced perspectives, dissenting points of view, and concerns brewing beneath the surface. Equally, how you respond to difficult and challenging perspectives matters.

Responding with curiosity sets a tone that invites people to raise and share diverse or controversial viewpoints: shutting them down or responding with defensiveness discourages the sharing that leads to fertile friction.

“The most consequential leadership failures are often not caused by bad ideas—they’re caused by important truths that never get voiced,” writes Brooks and Atkins.

Example phrases to encourage disagreement or candor may include:

  • “What viewpoints are we missing?”
  • “What would be a contrary point of view?”
  • “What evidence would change our current approach?”
  • “The risk I would see with that approach is…”
  • “Can anyone make a counter-argument against my recommendation?”
3. Become Aware of Your “Sender” and “Receiver” Tendencies

No matter how good of a speaker or listener you may perceive yourself to be, and listening skills are one place where we often overestimate ourselves, here’s a newsflash: nobody (yes, nobody) comes to communication from a neutral place.

At the very least, you are oriented to the tendencies and biases of your particular behavioral DISC profile, which may alter by context. You may be prone to decisiveness and impatient for the punchline. You may be socially expressive and driven by relationship influence. You may be inclined to avoid confrontation and seek harmony. You may be oriented to prioritizing details and analysis.

You are most likely a mix of qualities, but your prevalent tendencies have both strengths and pitfalls, both as a speaker and equally—if not more crucially as you rise up the ranks—as a recipient of incoming information. For example, perhaps you are inclined to dismiss a good idea for the way its packaged, and that’s a blindspot.

Becoming self-aware of your behavioral profile and communication style, and knowing how your inclinations intensify under stress, is critical for leaders who oversee team dynamics.

Try out these receiver challenges:

  • When someone says something you disagree with, don’t formulate your response until you can state their argument in a way they’d say is fair.
  • Next time you hear what you perceive to be a bad idea, ask what value could be harvested from the thinking.
  • When you receive criticism you don’t like, ask whether there’s anything useful to glean
4. Demonstrate the Difference Between Influence And “Airtime”

The most powerful contribution in the room is not always the one that dominated the conversation or occupied the most airtime. In fact, as you rise in leadership, your success depends more on your ability to listen, to distill, to discern, to diffuse, and to direct. Steering the dialogue and drawing out necessary viewpoints from the team is an art.

While it should arguably always be so, the value of your voice in the room is not measured by how much you contributed to a discussion, but what changed as a result of your contribution. Communicative effectiveness is not about performance but impact.

How well did you set the objectives and parameters to stay on topic? How did you provoke thought? How did you elevate the quality of the conversation? How did you steer through conflict and complexity to innovative thinking and solutions?

Questions are helpful to gather information and insight, but they can also be leveraged as a leadership instrument. The ability to formulate a powerful question is invaluable to steering teams, and indeed can even become part of your leadership brand.

Examples of questions that may open and redirect:

  • What would have to be true for this idea to work?
  • What assumptions are we making here?
  • What potential outcomes are we not considering?

As you rise in leadership, your communication sets a cultural tone and model for others, not only in how they approach you, but in catalyzing how conversations unfold all around you.

By: Aimee Hansen is a writer, facilitator, and co-author of This Book Is a Retreat. She has contributed to The Glass Hammer for over a decade. 

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More Than One Way Forward: Career Lessons from Latina Leaders

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Career Lessons from Latina leadersLast year during Hispanic Heritage Month, The Glass Hammer looked at the steep ascent Latina women continue to face in corporate leadership, including the systemic and cultural barriers that can make advancement more difficult. This year, we are asking a different question: What can we learn from Latina leaders who have navigated that terrain?

Across our profiles, these women have taken very different paths. Some moved laterally before moving forward. Others created opportunities that did not yet have a name. Many learned to speak up before they felt completely ready. And several discovered that the career they built looked nothing like the one they initially imagined.

Taken together, their stories suggest a different way to think about career advancement: not simply climbing the next rung, but creating more options for where you can go next.

In a last week’s Glass Hammer profile, Karelis Barrios, Global Head of Wholesale Lending Operations at Citi, put a name to that idea:

“The truest measure of success is how much optionality you have.”

Create, Don’t Wait

Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo, Partner and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Multi-Asset Solutions at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, puts career ownership plainly:

“Build things, do not wait for people to assign things to you. Continue to constantly learn about what you’re interested in; being an expert is always a good thing, and it will help your career.”

Monica Marquez, workforce reinvention strategist and co-founder of Flipwork, takes that idea a step further, arguing that waiting until you feel completely prepared can itself become a career constraint.

“Women have a tendency to be very certainty driven, and they end up not taking as many risks and opportunities. Women need to be much more open to taking the opportunity and embracing just-in-time learning, so they don’t rob themselves before they try.”

Cassandra Cuellar, now a Partner at DLA Piper, similarly describes taking ownership as central to her career.

“I have a willingness to take ownership over things without necessarily having to be so dependent on a hierarchical structure.”

And when she encounters something unfamiliar?

“Whatever you can throw at me, I’m going to figure it out.”

For both women, taking ownership is less about knowing exactly where a decision will lead than about being willing to act. Each new experience adds another skill, relationship or piece of knowledge to draw on later.

Let the Path Change

If creating options is the goal, a career cannot be treated as a fixed route.

Yasmine Coupal, a Partner at Goldman Sachs, expected a very different career trajectory before an unexpected opportunity led her into finance.

“Careers are not linear, and there isn’t a one size fits all approach.”

Vanessa Rodriguez, Head of Community Lending & Investment, Commercial Real Estate at Wells Fargo, offers an equally useful reminder that moving forward does not always mean moving up.

“Sometimes, you must take a step back, or move laterally, to go forward.”

Angela Cruz, Sales Effectiveness Leader for Sales Excellence at Accenture, has reinvented herself several times, moving from electrical engineering and technical roles into marketing and sales leadership. Looking back, she identifies one quality that helped her make those transitions:

“Continuous learning has been a key driver. I have reinvented myself quite a few times because I’ve always been open, flexible, and curious to learn.”

Lola Ninonuevo, International Chief Operating Officer at Wells Fargo, takes the long view:

“Your career is over decades. It’s not the be-all and end-all. There are periods where you can really lean in and put 100% into it, and there are periods where you can’t, and that’s okay as long as you stay connected.”

A lateral move can build a skill. An unexpected role can reveal an interest you did not know you had. A pause can create room for something else.

Build What Gives You Options

Being open to change is one part of creating options, but again and again, the women we have profiled point to relationships as an important part of the infrastructure of a career.

Ninonuevo describes relationships as central to her leadership approach:

“I really focus on building relationships. I’m honest and candid in my approach.”

Indhira Arrington, Global Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at Ares Management, has a more specific observation about what it takes to turn strong performance into sponsorship:

“There are thousands of people that are good at their job and that want to ascend the corporate ladder, but doing it alone likely won’t get you there. You also need to have strong executive presence and act like a leader, and then hopefully that combination gains you the sponsors who have the power to open those doors, propel you and pull you up.”

Graciella Dominguez, VP of Investment Operations, Operations and Innovations at PGIM, began her career with a different expectation of what her work would require:

“When I started as an accountant, I didn’t realize that interacting with people and building relationships was going to be more central to my experience. I have been able to grow my relationships, and they are so important – and rewarding – in accomplishing greater things.”

Know Your Value

For some of the women we have profiled, creating options has also meant recognizing the value in the different perspectives and identities they bring to the workplace.

Claudia Vázquez, Founder of Elevnik, describes how her perspective changed over time:

“What I saw as a disadvantage at the beginning, I turned it around to make my secret weapon, because I realized this is what makes me unique and able to see things from a different perspective.”

Alma Rosa Montañez, Chief Corporate Counsel at S&P Global, describes reaching a point where she stopped feeling she had to choose between parts of her identity:

“I learned to become comfortable with the fact that I’m really not either Mexican or American – I’m both.”

For Vanessa Nazario, now Chief Impact Officer at Episcopal Health Services, the shift has implications beyond how you see yourself:

“Once you claim your value, it opens a lot of opportunities.”

The message is not to ignore the barriers that can shape a career. It is to recognize that the perspective, experience and identity you bring with you can also be part of what creates opportunities.

Think Beyond the Next Promotion

Karelis Barrios’ idea of optionality brings these lessons together. Career advancement is not only about moving up. It can also mean building enough experience, relationships and confidence that you have choices when circumstances change.

As Barrios puts it:

“A step back in leadership does not have to be the end of the story. Sometimes it creates the space to grow, and strong leaders recognize when someone is ready to be given another opportunity.”

And ultimately:

“The truest measure of success is how much optionality you have. You work hard for the options that success provides you.”

Taken together, the advice from these Latina leaders suggests that career advancement is not only about reaching the next level. It is about steadily increasing what you are capable of doing, who knows your work, where you can contribute and what opportunities you are prepared to pursue.

You may not know exactly where those choices will lead.

But you can make sure that, when the next opportunity appears, you have more than one way to move forward.

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Op-Ed: When You’ve Had Your Fill of Corporate – Entrepreneur Like a Mother

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entrepreneur like a motherWe sat in the boardroom with an idea we knew was good. We had the numbers. We had the plan. We walked the room through every line of it. Heads nodded. People agreed it had legs. And then came the sentence that decides a career if you let it.

“Maybe next year.”

Not no. Not yet. Maybe next year. The corporate way of telling an ambitious woman to wait her turn while someone else decides whether her idea is convenient for them.

We did not wait. We left and built two consulting firms. Then we sold them. Both in less than 20 years. Financial freedom for our families including the nine kids between us, raised through all of it.

If you are a VP or above and you have started reading articles like this one, you already know the “maybe next year” feeling. Here is what nobody tells you on your way out the door. You are not starting from zero. You already have most of what it takes. You just have to add a few things you were never allowed to use inside the building.

What You Already Have

You already have a Kitchen Cabinet

Twenty years in financial services means you know people. The banker who tells you the truth. The lawyer who does not flinch. The operator who has already done the thing you are about to attempt. We call that handpicked group your Kitchen Cabinet, and yours is already built. You assembled it one good working relationship at a time, and most of those people would take your call tomorrow.

You already know the financials

This is the part most first-time founders fake, and you do not have to. You can read a P&L in your sleep. You know the difference between revenue and margin, between a number that looks good and a number that is good. The most common way new businesses die is running out of cash, and you are already fluent in the thing that kills them. That is not a small edge. That is most of the game.

You already know how to fail

You have lost the pitch. Missed the number. Survived the reorg that was not your fault. Corporate trained you to take a hit in front of people and show up the next morning anyway. Entrepreneurship is that, on repeat. The skill was never avoiding the fall. It is getting up, brushing yourself off, and going again. You have done that more times than you can count.

What You Need to Adopt

Now the harder part. Three things the corporate building actively trained out of you.

Make peace with uncertainty

A salary is certainty. A title is certainty. A roadmap someone hands you is certainty. You are about to trade all of it for a question mark, and the discomfort is real. Sit in it. The founders who make it are not the ones who feel certain. They are the ones who can act while feeling uncertain. That tolerance is a muscle, and you can start building it now, before you give notice.

Ship the MVP, not the finished product

Corporate taught you to polish. Nothing leaves the building until it is perfect, vetted, and signed off by six people. That instinct will sink you as a founder. Your first version is supposed to be rough. Get the minimum viable version into the market, let real customers tell you what is wrong, and fix it in the open. Done and learning beats perfect and theoretical every time.

Actually use your Kitchen Cabinet

Here is the twist. Having the cabinet is the asset. Using it is the skill, and it is the one senior women resist most. You spent two decades being the person with the answers. Now you have to be the person who asks. Call them to troubleshoot the problem you cannot crack alone. Call them to connect you to the client you cannot reach. Call them on the bad day, just to be reminded you are not crazy for trying. The people are already there. Your only job is to be willing to pick up the phone.

So Here is the Math

The corporate ceiling is real. The Fortune 500 only reached 11 percent women CEOs in 2025, the first time the number crossed 10 percent in the list’s 71-year history. You can wait another 71 years for someone to tell you it is finally your turn. Or you can stop waiting for the room to approve the idea you already know is good.

That boardroom told us “maybe next year.” We decided next year was ours, not theirs.

What is the idea you have been waiting for permission to build?

By: Beth Mazza and Victoria Sivrais are the co-authors of Entrepreneur Like a Mother (Wiley, September 2026). They previously built and sold two consulting firms, Ashton Partners and Clermont Partners, while raising nine children between them.

(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)

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How to Coach Your Team Using DiSC and Color Language and Why It Works Even Better Paired With the Five Behaviors

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DiSC and Five Behaviors of a Cohesive TeamIf you’ve ever left a meeting thinking “that went great,” only to find out later that half the room walked away confused or quietly annoyed, you already know the core problem. Teams don’t fail because people don’t care. They stall because people process, communicate, and handle conflict differently, and most managers were never taught how to coach around that.

Two frameworks make this much easier to manage in practice: color-based behavioral models like DiSC and the Red, Blue, Green, Yellow framework popularized by Thomas Erikson in Surrounded by Idiots, and Patrick Lencioni’s Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team. Used separately, both are useful. Used together, they give you something better: a common language for how people work, plus a model for what a healthy team actually needs from each other.

Here’s how to put them to work as a leader using a coaching mindset.

Step 1: Get fluent in the colors yourself first

Before you coach anyone else, know your own default. DiSC describes four behavioral dimensions: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Erikson translates those broad behavioral tendencies into four memorable colors:

  • Red / D — fast, decisive, results-first. Coaching challenge: slow down enough to bring others along.
  • Yellow / I — expressive, relationship-driven, big-picture. Coaching challenge: follow through on the details.
  • Green / S — steady, supportive, harmony-seeking. Coaching challenge: speak up before resentment builds.
  • Blue / C — analytical, precise, quality-focused. Coaching challenge: decide before every fact is in.

Tell your team your own blend openly. “I run Red-Blue, so I move fast and want the data — tell me when I’m steamrolling” models the behavior you’re asking of everyone else: naming your tendencies without treating them as flaws.

Step 2: Use DiSC and color language to build Trust

Lencioni’s model starts with vulnerability-based trust, which is difficult to coach directly. You can’t instruct people to trust each other. You can, however, give them a low-risk way to be a little vulnerable.

“I’m a Green, so I’ll probably agree with you in the room and disagree with myself later” is an easier thing to admit than “I struggle with conflict.” It’s specific, a little funny, and useful.

Coaching move: Have everyone share their DiSC style or color, their under-pressure tendency, and one thing they wish teammates understood about working with them. Keep it light. The goal isn’t a personality reveal. It’s practice at being a little exposed safely.

Step 3: Use it to Make Productive Conflict Happen

Most teams don’t lack conflict. They lack productive conflict, where disagreement is about the idea, not the person, and everyone’s actual opinion makes it into the room.

DiSC helps explain why that breaks down. Reds may say the hard thing immediately, sometimes too bluntly. Greens may go quiet rather than push back. Blues may want more information before weighing in, while Yellows may process their thinking out loud.

Coaching move: In meetings, explicitly invite people who haven’t spoken: “I want to hear from the folks who haven’t jumped in yet.” Coach Reds and Yellows on pacing, not less honesty, just more room for others to get there too.

Naming the dynamic out loud turns an invisible pattern into something the team can manage together.

Step 4: Use it to Strengthen Commitment

Teams commit faster when people believe they were heard, even when they weren’t agreed with. Understanding your team’s styles helps you close meetings well.

A Blue might need the decision and rationale in writing. A Yellow might want to voice enthusiasm. A Green may be more likely to flag hesitation privately than in the group.

Coaching move: Before ending a decision-making meeting, ask: “Is there anyone who needs something else before they’re fully on board?” Then tailor the follow-up to the person.

Step 5: Use it to Sharpen Accountability

Accountability lands differently depending on style. A direct “you missed the deadline” might roll right off a Red and land very differently on a Green.

Coaching accountability means adjusting delivery without softening the standard.

Coaching move: Teach a simple format: state the fact, state the impact, ask a question. “The deck wasn’t ready for the 9am, which pushed the client call. What got in the way?”

DiSC and color language don’t change the standard you hold people to. They change how you deliver the message so it gets heard.

Step 6: Use it to Protect Focus on Results

The top of Lencioni’s pyramid is collective results, the point of the first four behaviors. DiSC awareness helps you spot who may get pulled off course under pressure.

Yellows may chase the next exciting thing instead of finishing the current one. Blues may over-invest in perfection. Reds may push so hard for speed that they create rework. Greens may prioritize harmony over raising a concern.

Coaching move: Ask targeted questions. To a Yellow: “What’s the one thing you’re going to finish before starting something new?” To a Blue: “What’s ‘good enough’ given the deadline?” To a Red: “What do we need to slow down and make sure we haven’t missed?” To a Green: “What concern haven’t you raised yet?”

Small, targeted nudges beat a generic “stay focused, everyone.”

How to Start this Month

You don’t need an offsite or formal assessment to begin:

  1. Share your own DiSC style or color tendencies in your next 1:1s or team meeting. If you want to explore the color framework further, read Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots.
  2. Ask each direct report how they prefer to receive feedback, get assigned work, and flag disagreement.
  3. Pick one Five Behaviors layer — trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, or results — where your team is weakest, and work on that one for a month. A Five Behaviors assessment can provide a more structured starting point.
  4. Revisit quarterly. People shift under stress and in new roles, so a quick “how is our team communicating?” check keeps the language alive.
Put the Insight to Work

DiSC profiles and color frameworks describe behavioral preferences and tendencies, not fixed identities. Their value comes from using them to understand yourself, recognize your impact on others, and flex your style when the situation calls for it.

The goal isn’t to put people into boxes. It’s to give teams a shared vocabulary for recognizing the patterns that help them work well together or get in the way.

If you’d like to bring this work to your team, Evolved People Coaching uses DiSC and The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team in team development workshops and coaching. Book an exploratory conversation to discuss what could work for your team.

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Closing the Literal Visibility Gap: Four Strategies for Career Advancement in a Remote or Hybrid Role

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visibility in remote and hybrid workIn our last article, we looked at the gap between doing great work and ensuring that work is recognized. Visibility, we argued, isn’t about becoming louder or more self-promotional. It’s about making sure your contributions are understood by the people making decisions about your career.

Remote and hybrid work introduce another layer of complexity: even when your work is visible, you may not be.

The distinction matters because career advancement depends on more than measurable output. Trust, familiarity, sponsorship, mentorship, and influence are built gradually, often through interactions that seem insignificant in the moment but prove important over time. A conversation before a meeting begins, a quick question in the hallway, or an impromptu lunch with colleagues may appear inconsequential, but those moments accumulate.

The challenge, then, is not simply making your work visible. It’s learning how to close the literal visibility gap when some of those interactions are no longer possible.

Proximity Bias

The idea that physical proximity influences career outcomes is supported by a growing body of research.

An analysis of two million white-collar workers in the United States, reported by The Wall Street Journal, found that employees who worked entirely in person or on hybrid schedules were promoted at a rate of 5.6 percent in 2023. Fully remote workers were promoted at a rate of 3.9 percent, a difference of roughly 31 percent. Fully remote employees were also more likely to be laid off.

This does not necessarily mean managers consciously favor people they see in person, but rather that they can have an unconscious tendency to associate physical presence with commitment and reliability, resulting in what researchers call proximity bias.

It is important to note that the research also suggests that hybrid work does not carry the same penalty as fully remote work. Even limited in-person interaction appears to help close the gap, likely because it creates more opportunities for relationship-building, informal feedback, and visibility.

Research from Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais highlights another part of the challenge. Studying software engineers at a Fortune 500 company, they found that employees who worked near one another received significantly more feedback than those who did not. Women, in particular, both gave and received more mentoring when they were physically closer to colleagues.

For leaders, this matters because many career-shaping experiences happen through relationships: receiving feedback, building sponsorship, mentoring others, and being included in important conversations. When those interactions no longer happen naturally, they need to be created intentionally.

Four ways to close the literal visibility gap

Understanding the role that proximity plays is the first step. The next is being intentional about replacing informal interactions with new ways to build relationships, trust, and visibility.

1. Know who needs to know you

Think beyond your manager. Sponsors, mentors, peers, former colleagues, and cross-functional partners all influence how opportunities are created and how reputations are built.

Make a list of the people who are most important to your career development. Ask yourself:

  • Who understands the scope of my work?
  • Who would advocate for me if an opportunity arose?
  • Who has influence over promotions, compensation, or high-profile assignments?
  • Whose perspective do I value?
  • Who should I know better than I do today?

Then create a plan. That might mean scheduling a quarterly check-in, reconnecting after a major project, inviting someone for coffee when you’re in the office, or finding opportunities to collaborate across teams.

2. Create visibility moments, not more meetings

If you have a hybrid schedule, be strategic about when you are in the office. Reserve those days for the interactions that benefit most from being face-to-face: performance conversations, mentoring discussions, project kickoffs, difficult conversations, and meetings with key stakeholders.

A day in the office spent answering emails is unlikely to change how people experience your leadership. A day spent strengthening important relationships might.

If you work remotely, create opportunities for interaction that might otherwise happen naturally. Small actions matter. Turning your camera on when appropriate, following up after meetings, sharing useful information, congratulating colleagues on accomplishments, or introducing people who could benefit from knowing one another can reinforce a sense of connection and continuity.

3. Make mentorship, given and received, visible and scheduled, not incidental

Research suggests that women are especially likely to lose access to the informal feedback, mentoring, and sponsorship that physical proximity often creates.

If you mentor others, remember that talent development is leadership work. Make time for it, be deliberate about it, and ensure that senior leaders understand the role you are playing in developing others.

If you are looking for mentorship, decide whose perspective you need and ask for time directly. Rather than asking for general advice, ask specific questions about challenges you are facing, experiences you should seek, or skills you want to develop.

4. Design visibility for your team before they need it

Leaders have an opportunity to address the same challenges for others that they may be navigating themselves.

Rotate presentation responsibilities, encourage different team members to lead discussions, and intentionally recognize contributions in meetings rather than relying on the most visible people to receive the most recognition.

Pay attention to who receives stretch assignments, who gains access to influential projects, and who benefits from mentoring and sponsorship.

The strongest leaders don’t just manage their own visibility. They create environments in which others can thrive as well.

Visibility is a shared responsibility

The burden of overcoming proximity bias should not sit entirely on the person experiencing it. Organizations have a responsibility to create equitable access to information, feedback, mentorship, and advancement opportunities.

But while those systems continue to evolve, leaders can still be intentional about the relationships and interactions that shape how their work and leadership are understood.

Closing the visibility gap is not about being everywhere or constantly proving your value. It is about understanding how trust, influence, and opportunity are built and then creating those conditions deliberately, regardless of where you work.

At Evolved People Coaching, we work with leaders who are navigating exactly these questions. Together, we help clients strengthen executive presence, build strategic relationships, increase their influence, and develop a plan for the next stage of their careers.

If you’re wondering whether your work, your leadership, and your potential are as visible as they should be, it may be time for a more intentional strategy.

Book a consultation HERE

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Why Hard Work Isn’t Enough: How to Make Your Work More Visible

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hard work not enough how to make work more visible“I used to have the mindset that if I kept my head down and worked hard, I’d be recognized for that and promoted in time.”

That is how Heather Garland, Vice President and Global Chief Marketing Officer at PGIM Investments, describes an assumption a lot of high performers carry, one she eventually learned is not enough. It wasn’t until she became more intentional and vocal about her career goals that those opportunities began to materialize.

Melanie Priddy, now Chief People Officer at Covington & Burling, reached a similar conclusion. “As women, often there’s a tendency to downplay your success, your role or leadership skills, whether with a boss or with a group,” she says. “But someone else can’t speak up for you on your behalf, if you don’t do it for yourself first.”

Their experiences aren’t outliers. Research helps explain why this assumption so often falls short.

The Confidence Myth

For years, the common explanation for why women under-promote their own work was framed as a confidence problem: just speak up more, ask for more, claim your wins more loudly. Looking at the research, however, a different story emerges.

Studies on what’s known as the backlash avoidance model found that when women self-promote, they’re generally seen as more competent, but they also risk being seen as less likable, a social penalty that men engaging in identical behavior don’t face to the same degree. The fear of that backlash doesn’t just make women choose to self-promote less, it can also interfere with their ability to do it well when they try. This is not a confidence gap, but rather a rational response to a real social cost, one that then makes self-promotion itself more difficult.

Another finding comes from economists studying self-promotion in blind settings, where women’s gender was never revealed to anyone judging their performance. Even then, women under-reported their own work relative to men. Again, this suggests the issue isn’t simply confidence in the moment, but a learned pattern that requires a more thoughtful solution than “just speak up.”

The Goal Isn’t to Brag More

If the standard advice to “be more confident” or “toot your own horn” has never felt like the right fit, that doesn’t mean you need to change your personality to advance your career. The goal isn’t to become someone who brags or is pushy. It’s to close the well-documented gap between doing great work and ensuring that work is seen and understood. Ultimately, it’s about strategic visibility and communication.

The Dual-Promotion Approach

One of the more useful findings in this space is an approach known as dual-promotion: pairing a statement about your own contribution with genuine credit to the people you worked with. Something like: “The team and I landed the renewal, and I led the negotiation strategy that got us there.”

Research suggests this approach reduces the likability penalty associated with self-promotion for both men and women. For women in particular, it can be especially effective because it communicates both competence and collaboration in the same sentence, rather than forcing a choice between the two.

What makes this approach work is that it doesn’t come across as performative or self-congratulatory. Instead, it’s clear, specific, and complete. It explains what was accomplished, who contributed, and what your particular role was. Rather than taking credit away from others, it helps ensure your own contribution is visible alongside theirs.

Four More Practical Ways to Make Your Work More Visible

 

1. Document impact as it happens, not months later.

Reconstructing your wins at review time means relying on memory, which can favor whoever was most recently visible, not whoever made the biggest impact. Keeping a running record of key achievements, updated as projects wrap up, makes it much easier to communicate your contributions throughout the year instead of scrambling during performance review season.

2. Let your work be visible at many levels.

When talking about making her work visible, Charlotte Weir, Head of Corporate Coverage, EMEA at Wells Fargo, described intentionally building relationships with senior leaders one or two levels above her direct manager so they understood the work she was driving. The takeaway isn’t to bypass your manager; it’s to look for natural opportunities to share your work with a broader group of stakeholders, whether that’s through project updates, cross-functional meetings, leadership presentations, or informal conversations.

3. Use outcomes language.

Describe your impact in terms of what happened and what changed as a result: “this increased sales by 30%,” or “this strengthened a client relationship that had been at risk.” Framing your contributions around measurable outcomes reads as straightforward reporting rather than self-congratulation, even though it accomplishes the same goal of making your impact visible.

4. Be clear about your career goals.

Strong performance alone doesn’t tell your manager or senior leaders what you want next. If you’re interested in leading people, taking on larger projects, or moving into a different area of the business, say so. Anar Patel, Director, Portfolio Construction at PGIM Investments, credits much of her career progression to pairing strong performance with clear communication about her aspirations. “In every role, I continued to stay focused, do great work, think about what my next move was and communicate the career trajectory that I wanted. You have to advocate for yourself.” As Patel puts it, “You’re the marketing team behind your own personal brand, and sometimes, that means creating opportunities for yourself that didn’t exist before.”

Make Your Work Visible in Way that is Authentic to You

This visibility gap exists because of a real, well-researched social dynamic, not because you are not good at talking about yourself or simply need to try harder. Understanding that distinction matters because it changes where you put your energy: not into becoming louder, but into becoming more intentional, more consistent, and more strategic about ensuring your work is recognized by the people who need to see it.

That also doesn’t mean talking about yourself constantly, claiming credit that isn’t yours, or acting in a way that feels in inauthentic. It’s about making sure the value you’re already creating is visible, understood, and accurately recognized.

Finding your own approach to visibility, one that highlights your impact without requiring you to become someone you’re not, is exactly the kind of work coaching is designed to support. Evolved People Coaching, the executive coaching arm of theglasshammer.com helps leaders build the confidence, communication skills, and strategies to make their contributions visible in an authentic way. Book an exploratory coaching conversation HERE.

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Stop Letting Your Career Happen to You

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Stop Letting Your Career Happen to YouBy Jessica Darmoni

“Make sure to manage your career,” says Patricia Lunkes. “And that your career is not managing you.”

After more than four decades in human resources and as founder of Parkway Consulting Group, Lunkes has spent her career watching people at pivotal moments, whether being hired, promoted or laid off. From that vantage point she notices patterns, the biggest one being that people wait too long to take control.

“It’s very easy to have a career manage you,” she says. “You have to be conscious that it’s going in the right direction.”

While that sounds obvious, it isn’t. In reality, careers drift, promotions come with tradeoffs no one fully evaluates and roles evolve faster than people adapt. Dissatisfaction builds gradually, then suddenly feels overwhelming. By the time many professionals stop to ask whether they’re in the right place, they’re already far from it.

Watching for the Warning Signs

Lunkes offers a simple but powerful framework which she calls “the 80/20 rule” of job satisfaction. If roughly 80% of your work aligns with what you enjoy and do well, you’re in a sustainable place.

“If that ratio slips toward 60/40, it’s not just a bad week, it’s a warning sign,” she says. “And most people ignore the warning sign by rationalizing.”

It is common for employees to look toward that next project, the next boss, or the next year as a solution. Sometimes it gets better, but often it doesn’t, and the cost of waiting compounds not just professionally, but psychologically.

Lunkes knows this firsthand. Twice in her career, she stepped into roles that looked right on paper but were not good cultural fits. In both cases, she says she believed she could change the environment.

“The common denominator was me,” she admits. “That realization is uncomfortable but necessary. We tend to blame circumstances, leadership, or culture. Those factors matter but they don’t replace self-awareness. If you don’t understand what actually fits you, you will keep choosing environments that don’t.”

Reflection Creates Better Decisions

What Lunkes did next is what separates intentional careers from accidental ones: she paused. She stepped back, reassessed, and rebuilt her work around what she genuinely enjoyed, which was meeting people, solving problems, and helping others move forward. Instead of forcing herself into a predefined role, she designed one. That decision became Parkway Consulting Group.

Her path underscores a broader shift that many professionals still resist: careers are no longer linear.

“The most resilient professionals aren’t the ones who follow a plan perfectly,” she notes. “They’re the ones who adjust quickly when the plan stops making sense.”

That requires two things people often undervalue: reflection and honesty.

Lunkes encourages something simple, a “career buddy.” Someone who can listen, challenge your assumptions, and help you distinguish between temporary frustration and a deeper mismatch. In fast-moving industries especially, where roles evolve constantly, that outside perspective can be the difference between a smart pivot and a costly mistake.

The Skills that Matter Most

While reflection is important, it must be coupled with thoughtful execution. Here, Lunkes is blunt about the skills that actually move careers forward today.

Communication sits at the top of the list, meaning not just speaking, but listening, reading a room, and knowing when to stop talking. In hybrid and remote environments, where nuance is easily lost, this skill has become a differentiator.

Adaptability is also important. The professionals who thrive aren’t necessarily the most experienced; they’re the ones most willing to evolve.

Finally, there’s the piece many still struggle with which is boundaries.

Learning to say no sounds simple but it requires confidence, clarity, and practice. For many, especially women, Lunkes notes, it’s a skill developed late, if at all. She emphasizes that without it, careers become shaped by external demands rather than internal priorities.

The same applies to negotiation. Too many professionals treat it as optional or adversarial but, if done well, it signals that you understand value, including your own.

Your Career is Something You Build

Underlying all of this is a mindset shift: your career is not something you endure or inherit. It’s something you actively construct. That doesn’t mean every move will be perfect. Lunkes’ career certainly wasn’t. However, it does mean paying attention regularly, honestly, and without waiting for a crisis to force “the 80/20 rule” question.

The reality is that the market will keep changing. Industries will speed up. Roles will blur. Stability, as previous generations understood it, is not coming back. What remains constant is the need for self-awareness. The professionals who succeed in this environment won’t be the ones with the most predictable paths. They’ll be the ones willing to ask, again and again: Is this still right for me?

And if the answer is no, they’ll do something about it.

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When Your Career Hits a Plateau, What is Next?

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career plateau what's nextAre you in a place in your career where everything appears to be working and yet something no longer feels quite right? You are still delivering, meeting expectations, and seen as successful. But underneath the surface, is there a quieter, nagging sense that the role you are in was built for a version of you that no longer quite exists?

The challenge is that, at senior levels, acting on that instinct is rarely straightforward. Along with the emotional considerations of how much the work is part of your identity, the financial rewards of deferred compensation, unvested equity, or a bonus, makes leaving feel economically irrational. Add the real question of whether the next place will offer the same flexibility, hard-won political capital, or connections with colleagues, and staying starts to look less like a choice and more like the only sensible option.

But there is a difference between a deliberate decision to stay and a slow drift into stasis. Recognizing which one is happening is the key to shaping your next chapter with intention.

What Is Your Relationship With Your Work?

Before asking whether you should make a change, it is worth asking something more fundamental: what is your relationship with your work?

Organizational psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski’s research is the most prolific on this topic and suggests that most professionals relate to their work in one of three ways, regardless of role or seniority:

  • As a job: the focus is on the financial reward and what it enables outside of work.
  • As a career: the focus is on advancement, achievement, and status.
  • As a calling: the work feels tied to identity and purpose, something you would do even without external rewards.

The important insight is that these orientations are not fixed, they shift. A role that once felt like a calling can slide into becoming a career, and then, over time, a job. The external circumstances may remain unchanged with the same title and responsibilities, but your internal relationship to the work evolves. Recognizing which of those dynamics is at play is what allows you to move from drift back into intention.

A calling perhaps cannot be applied to everything, but a career that allows some elements of calling along with autonomy can often lead to job crafting, a term that captures the active changes employees make to their own job and task design. This can bring about numerous positive outcomes, including engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving.

Where Are You Right Now?

Once you have a sense that something has shifted, it is worth getting more specific.

Herminia Ibarra’s book “Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader” offers a self-assessment that remains relevant today. By taking the ten-question long quiz, you can quickly assess if you are still experiencing growth, if you are ready to make a change, or even if you are already in transition in your career.

The Outsight Problem

At the heart of Ibarra’s work is a shift in how we think about change: clarity about what comes next rarely comes from thinking alone. It comes from action.

You do not think your way into a new chapter. You act your way into it and in doing so, begin to see yourself differently.

For senior professionals, there is a structural challenge. The longer you have been in one place, the more fixed both your reputation and your internal narrative can become. Others have a clear idea of who you are and what you are capable of and over time, that can begin to shape your own sense of what is possible.

Outsight requires deliberate disruption of that pattern:

  • A board role in an adjacent sector
  • A speaking opportunity in an unfamiliar room
  • A mentoring relationship that goes both ways
  • A project outside your formal scope

While strategic networking can be another part of the picture, these are best understood as experiments, ways of stepping outside your current context to see what else might fit.

This is also where the current wave of AI disruption becomes relevant. The professionals navigating it best are not those defending their existing expertise most aggressively. They are the ones who got curious early and who used the moment to explore adjacent capabilities and reposition before it became necessary.

A Note on the Financial Aspect of Staying

While it is important to consider the emotional calculus of whether it makes sense, from a fulfillment and meaning perspective, to stay or leave a role, it is equally important to directly assess the financial impact.

The “golden handcuffs” of deferred compensation, unvested equity, and year-end bonuses can create a powerful incentive to stay. But there is no way to make a fair assessment without running the actual numbers. Look at the net, not the headline figure. Consider the real timeline. Then weigh that against what you may be trading in terms of energy, momentum, and optionality.

Sometimes the math supports staying. But there is no way to know without a rigorous evaluation.

This is not a critique of how compensation is structured. It is simply the reality of incentive design. Managing a career well requires understanding those incentives clearly and deciding consciously whether they are worth the trade-offs.

Starting Before You Are Ready

Waiting until you know exactly what you want is one of the most reliable ways to ensure you stay exactly where you are.

The leaders who navigate transitions well tend to begin earlier than they think they need to. They start conversations, explore adjacent work, and build visibility outside their immediate context before they are formally “in the market.” Not because they are being overly strategic, but because they took the initial discomfort seriously.

These are not questions that tend to resolve neatly in the everyday pace of work. They require space to step back from delivery and look more clearly at what is shifting underneath it.

For those who are navigating this kind of inflection point, Evolved People Coaching, the executive coaching arm of The Glasshammer, offers a space to work through these questions in a more structured way. Coaching creates the opportunity to step back from day-to-day demands, clarify what is shifting in your relationship to work, and test assumptions about what comes next.

If you are ready to explore what a more intentional next chapter could look like, BOOK HERE for a complimentary exploratory conversation.

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Why Women Need to Learn AI — Not Fear It

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why women need to learn ai

By Jessica Darmoni

“Imagine you start a new job and your boss gives you a Mac, but you are used to a PC,” said Michelle Ann Gitliz, Founder & CEO of Change Agents Technologies, Inc. a SaaS company that leverages its proprietary AI and automation platforms to transform how businesses manage compliance. “It’s a condition of your job to work with it and at first it feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable but eventually you adapt because it is part of the workplace. AI will likely follow a similar path. Many future jobs will require workers to collaborate with AI systems whether they feel ready or not.”

Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept reserved for tech companies and science fiction movies. It is rapidly becoming part of everyday life, shaping how we work, communicate, create, and make decisions. Yet for many women, AI can still feel intimidating, overly technical, or disconnected from reality. The truth is that understanding AI is not just about career advancement; it is about empowerment, safety, and maintaining agency in a world increasingly driven by technology.

Leveraging AI for Efficiency and Modernization

“Engaging with the technology allows people to understand both it’s strengths and it’s pitfalls,” says Gitlitz. “One of the most important things to understand is that AI is a tool and like every major technological shift before it, the people who benefit the most will be those who learn how to use it wisely. “

Nancy Li is a Los-Angeles based consultant helping firms leverage AI and Machine learning to scale and scope their organizations.

“Many organizations genuinely want to improve efficiency and modernize legacy systems,” she says. “The reality is that implementation is difficult. Most businesses are still trying to figure out how AI can truly augment workflows.”

She estimates that we are still several years away from full-scale adoption across industries and that AI must solve real-world problems.

In the meantime, there is an important opportunity for women to learn, experiment, and position themselves ahead of the curve instead of being left behind by it.

A Successful Use Case

According to Li, there is one major area where AI has already demonstrated measurable success: programming and coding. AI systems can now assist with software engineering, data analysis, automation, and workflow optimization. However even in those fields, humans are still essential. Someone has to guide the system, verify the output, and determine whether the result is useful, ethical, and accurate.

Li believes the future workforce may evolve into teams of “quality control managers” overseeing AI-powered systems and digital agents. That future raises a fascinating question: what does work look like when technology can perform many of the repetitive tasks people once did for a living?

The answer may depend less on technical expertise and more on judgment, creativity, discretion, and taste. AI can generate endless amounts of information, but it cannot fully replace human intuition or emotional intelligence. Knowing what you want, understanding your goals, and evaluating whether an AI-generated solution actually makes sense will become critical skills.

Understanding AI as a Matter of Safety

Women do not need to become engineers to participate in the AI economy. However, they do need enough familiarity to ask informed questions, challenge assumptions, and protect themselves.

Gitliz reminds people not to click “agree” on terms of service without reading them, or hand over personal information without considering the consequences.

“Your data is valuable. Your birthday, browsing habits, preferences, and online behavior can all be used to build detailed profiles for advertising and targeting.,” she says. “What matters is knowing the options exist, understanding the terms of use, and recognizing the impact these tools can have on your life.”

Women especially should understand how their data is collected, stored, and used. Learning the basics of AI and digital systems helps people recognize risks, identify manipulation, and make informed decisions online. You cannot safeguard yourself from technology if you do not understand how it works.

Cathy Yoon, General Counsel at Harmonic, emphasizes that the human element is still essential when leveraging AI systems. She believes that AI is good to fill in workflow gaps but that humans still need to verify outputs.

“Verification is essential because AI systems can still produce inaccurate, biased, or misleading information,” she said. “Learning how to question outputs and confirm facts will become just as important as learning how to generate them.”

Meritocracy Matters

There is also a larger cultural shift happening around merit and opportunity. Increasingly, employers and industries care less about where someone went to school and more about what they can actually do. In some emerging industries, especially digital assets and technology, AI literacy will become the new college degree and a baseline expectation rather than a specialized skill.

“This creates a unique opportunity for women from diverse backgrounds. AI has the potential to level certain playing fields because access to knowledge is more open than ever before,” says Li.

People can learn independently, build portfolios, launch businesses, automate workflows, and develop expertise outside traditional institutions.

The goal when women approach AI should be informed participation. The women who thrive in the AI era will not necessarily be the most technical. They will be the ones who stay curious, ask questions, protect their data, verify information, and learn how to use technology to supplement their strengths rather than replace them.

AI is coming whether we embrace it or not. The safest and most empowering choice is to understand it well enough to shape how it shapes us.

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