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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Shattering Two Ceilings: What Top Asian Women in Financial Services Have Learned on the Way Up

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Top Asian Women in FinanceThere is a phrase that Ida Liu now CEO of HSBC Private Bank returns to when she talks about her career. “I have a double ceiling,” she has said, “the glass ceiling on one side and the bamboo ceiling on the other.”

Ida Liu built her career at Citi around this insight. After years in investment banking in New York and Hong Kong, she detoured through the fashion industry — serving as Global Head of Sales and Marketing at designer Vivienne Tam before returning to finance with an idea: a Fashion, Retail and Entertainment practice at Citi Private Bank, followed by the creation of the firm’s North America Asian Clients Group. Her cultural fluency, her language skills in Mandarin and Spanish, and her understanding of Asian ultra-high-net-worth families became a competitive differentiator that propelled her from managing director to Global Head of one of the world’s most prestigious private banks. Today, as CEO of HSBC Private Bank — which she has described as the one institution she would have considered joining — she oversees $566 billion in invested assets and customer deposits, with her background as a central part of her value proposition.

It is a formulation that captures the particular challenge facing Asian women who have risen to the top of financial services and the Fortune 1000. They have had to break through not one barrier, but two: the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior finance roles, and the equally stubborn phenomenon that leaves Asian professionals clustered in technical and mid-level positions while remaining conspicuously absent from boardrooms and C-suites.

Yet a remarkable cohort of Asian women has done exactly that, ascending to roles that were unimaginable a generation ago. Their paths differ, from investment banking to asset management, from private wealth to regulatory fintech but their hard-won lessons form a coherent body of wisdom for women navigating the same terrain today.

A new book, Walk Away: Step Out to Step Up by Singapore-based author and executive Sally J. Clarke and US based co-author Deborah Overdeput, adds a compelling dimension to that wisdom. They gather the stories of high-achieving women across Asia who discovered that sometimes the most powerful career move is not pushing harder, but instead stepping back with clarity and intention to then reach their goals more effectively.

The Landscape: Progress, But Not Parity

The headline numbers tell an optimistic story. Yie-Hsin Hung, president and CEO of State Street Investment Management, leads one of the world’s four largest asset managers with more than $5 trillion in assets under management. Lisa Su runs AMD. Susan Li is CFO of Meta. These names have become shorthand for a generation of Asian women who have reached the commanding heights of corporate America and global finance.

But the structural picture is more complicated. According to a 2023 study by KPMG and Ascend, a global network for Asian professionals, directors of Asian ancestry hold just 6.4% of Fortune 1,000 board seats, far below their share of the educated workforce. Research by MIT Sloan’s Professor Jackson Lu has found that East Asian Americans in particular advance to senior roles at lower rates than both white and South Asian peers, a disparity that persists even after controlling for qualifications. The bamboo ceiling, a term popularized by Jane Hyun in her 2005 book Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling, is not a relic — it is a present-day reality, shaped by cultural stereotypes, implicit biases, and leadership frameworks that were never designed with Asian women in mind.

“We’re chipping away at the glass ceiling,” Liu observed recently. “But when it comes to the bamboo ceiling, there’s still a lot of work to do.”

A Cultural Nuance: Visibility Is Not Vanity: It is Strategy

One of the most consistent themes among Asian women who have reached the top of financial services is the deliberate decision to make themselves seen and heard, even when cultural upbringing inclined them toward restraint.

Ida Liu has spoken openly about conducting “elevator pitch sessions” through Citi’s Asian heritage network, coaching Asian women in the art of self-advocacy. The inherited norms of humility that serve as virtues in many Asian families such as being modest, not boasting, and deferring to the group can quietly derail careers in an industry where visibility and sponsorship are currency.

“Communication is key, and networking is everything,” she has said, describing the advice she wishes she could give her younger self.

Yie-Hsin Hung’s trajectory illustrates what deliberate visibility can achieve. A mechanical engineering graduate of Northwestern and MBA from Harvard, she spent years at Morgan Stanley and Bridgewater before becoming CEO of New York Life Investment Management in 2015 — where she became the highest-ranking Asian American and female executive at the parent company. She was the first woman and first Asian American to chair the Investment Company Institute’s Board of Governors in its eight-decade history. These firsts were not accidents. They were the product of sustained engagement with the networks, associations, and platforms that allow leaders to be recognized beyond their immediate organizations.

The lesson is practical and simply put, attend the conference, join the board, take the speaking engagement, even when the instinct is to let the work speak for itself. In financial services, work rarely speaks loudly enough on its own.

Build Relationships Across, Not Just Up

Traditional career advice emphasizes the importance of senior sponsors and sponsorship remains genuinely critical, particularly in an industry where promotion decisions are often made in rooms that exclude the candidates being discussed. But the Asian women who have reached the top of financial services have often distinguished themselves by investing equally in lateral relationships: peers, direct reports, colleagues in adjacent functions.

Yie-Hsin Hung has described her leadership philosophy in terms that go beyond conventional hierarchy. She has spoken of the importance of “engaging people’s hearts” alongside their intellects, of leading organizations that live and breathe their values, not merely execute their strategies. At State Street Investment Management, she introduced performance management processes centered on career conversations and real-time feedback, and launched leadership development programs that explicitly teach communication skills and emotional intelligence. She has made building a diverse leadership team a stated priority, noting that the senior leadership of her organization is now more than half women.

The Walk Away contributors echo this orientation toward community and reciprocity. As Clarke writes in the book’s framing, recurring refrains heard from high-achieving women across continents include the necessity of mentorship, the importance of building networks, and the value of lifelong learning. These are not soft supplements to technical excellence; they are the architecture through which Asian and Asian American women in finance have most reliably built the sponsorship, the visibility, and the trust that formal credentials alone rarely confer.

The implication for women building careers today: the relationships you cultivate with people at every level and the reputation you earn as someone who develops others, not merely outperforms them will matter as much as any individual achievement when senior roles are being filled.

By Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching.

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Five Ways Your DiSC Profile Can Make You a More Effective Leader

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5 Ways Your DiSC Profile Makes You a More Effective leaderAt a certain point in your career, honest feedback becomes surprisingly hard to come by. Not because people around you lack opinions (they may have plenty) but because hierarchy has a way of softening, managing, and redirecting those opinions before they reach you. The higher you rise, the more curated your information environment tends to become.

That means you may be making daily decisions about how to communicate, how to lead your team, and how to show up in the room with less real data about your impact than you think. Waiting for candid feedback that the culture is unlikely to deliver isn’t a strategy. Actively seeking structured ways to see yourself clearly is.

Psychometric assessments, used well and debriefed with a skilled coach, are one of the most effective tools for doing exactly that. In a recent piece Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders we introduced four tools our coaches at Evolved People Coaching use most often. Here, we take a closer look at one: the DiSC assessment, and what it specifically opens up for leadership effectiveness and team development.

What DiSC Actually Measures

Unlike assessments that focus on aptitude or potential, DiSC is behavioral; it describes how you tend to act, not what you are capable of. It maps four dimensions: how you respond to challenge and control (Dominance); how you engage and energize people (Influence); how you handle pace, change, and stability (Steadiness); and how you approach accuracy, detail, and process (Conscientiousness).

If you’ve read Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots, you’ll recognise these as the Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue profiles. Erikson’s core premise is worth holding: communication happens on the listener’s terms, not the sender’s. DiSC makes that dynamic visible.

Here are five ways that translates into more effective leadership.

1. It Shows You the Gap Between How You See Yourself and How Others Experience You

Most senior leaders have a clear sense of their strengths. Fewer have an accurate read on how those strengths land when overused, in the wrong context, or with someone whose style differs sharply from their own.

Consider a leader who scores high on Steadiness — Erikson’s Green. She may pride herself on being calm and consistent. But Greens tend to internalize conflict, and under pressure can become passive and hard to read. In a moment of organizational turbulence, that composure can register not as steadiness but as disconnection and without awareness of how her style is landing, she has no way to address it.

DiSC gives you a framework for asking not just what am I doing? but what is that creating for the people around me? — which is a different, and more useful, question entirely.

2. It Helps You Communicate With People Instead of At Them

Communication failures at senior levels are rarely about clarity or intent. They’re almost always about style mismatch, delivering messages in the way that makes sense to us, without accounting for what the person across from us actually needs.

A high-Dominance leader (Erikson’s Red) who values directness and speed will experience a detailed, context-heavy briefing as burying the lead. Reds want information that is succinct and results-focused. Meanwhile, a high-Conscientiousness colleague  (Erikson’s Blue) who needs the full reasoning before committing may experience a bottom-line-first approach as dismissive. Neither is wrong. They are operating from different defaults with no shared language for naming the difference.

DiSC provides that vocabulary. Once you can identify someone’s style, even approximately, you can make targeted adjustments: leading with data for the person who needs it, creating space for dialogue with someone who processes out loud, getting to the point with someone already three steps ahead. Small shifts, but they compound significantly over time.

3. It Shows You How Your Style Plays Out Across the Real Work of Leadership

One of the most useful sections of the DiSC report we offer at Evolved People Coaching covers management: how you direct and delegate, motivate, develop talent, manage up and how your tendencies shift under stress.

That last piece matters more than most leaders realize. Erikson is instructive here: under pressure, default behavior doesn’t soften, it amplifies. Reds become more demanding. Yellows become more chaotic. Greens become passive-aggressive. Blues become hypercritical. Knowing which version of yourself shows up when the stakes are high and how that lands on your team is some of the most valuable self-knowledge a leader can have. The report makes these tendencies specific and situated, which is what makes them actionable.

4. It Turns Team Friction Into Useful Data

Style differences shape team dynamics in ways that slow progress, create tension and impact team effectiveness, especially when there’s no shared framework for naming what’s actually happening.

Erikson is direct about which combinations create the most friction: Red and Green are opposites: one fast, task-focused, and blunt while the other is slower, relationship-oriented, and conflict-averse. Yellow and Blue create a different kind of tension: one shoots from the hip, the other wants precision and finds the energy exhausting. These aren’t personality flaws. They’re predictable collisions between people operating from different defaults.

When DiSC is used at a team level, those dynamics get named. The team member who seems resistant to change may simply be a high-Steadiness profile that needs more context and transition time. The colleague who dominates every meeting may have a high-Influence style that generates real energy but needs structure to channel it. Both become navigable the moment they’re visible. Our team development workshops use DiSC as a starting point for exactly this, helping to move teams from recurring frustration toward a common framework for understanding where the friction is coming from.

5. It Expands Your Range Without Requiring You to Perform Inauthenticity

DiSC is not asking you to become someone you’re not. Erikson makes this point firmly: you cannot and should not try to change someone’s fundamental behavioral profile. A Red will not become a Green. Attempting to force that creates frustration on both sides.

What DiSC offers is awareness of the difference between your core behavior, how you act when nothing external is shaping you, and the adapted version you bring to professional contexts. Most leaders have more range than they use, particularly under pressure, when the instinct is to narrow and fall back on what has always worked.

A leader who defaults to independence can learn to build in deliberate moments of consultation. One who defaults to collaboration can practice holding a position when the room pushes back. Over time, that adaptation stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like genuine range.

A Closer Look Is Worth It

DiSC is not a clinical instrument and its advocates wouldn’t claim otherwise. What it is, particularly when debriefed well, is a practical window into the behavioral patterns that shape how you lead, communicate, and show up under pressure. For leaders who want concrete insight into their impact, it is consistently one of the most actionable starting points available.

If you’re ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we’d welcome a conversation. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or reach out directly to discuss whether DiSC is the right place for you to begin.

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Beyond the Performance Review: The Assessments That Build Self-Aware Leaders

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assessments build self-aware leadersMost senior women we speak to have done the work. The MBA, the stretch assignments, the careful navigation of rooms where they were the only woman at the table. They have developed sharp strategic instincts, learned to read organizational dynamics, and built reputations on delivering results.

But even with all that experience, there can be a moment where a promotion goes sideways, a team isn’t performing, or a stakeholder relationship never quite clicks. Where the question stops being what do I need to know and becomes what do I need to understand about myself?

That is where coaches who are skilled and qualified in psychometric assessments can be particularly useful as there is value in triangulating this data as a third piece to add to “you, according to you” and formal or informal feedback from others.

Why Self-Awareness Is a Strategic Necessity, Not a Soft Skill

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, whose research involved studies with nearly 5,000 participants, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10 to 15% actually meet the criteria when objectively assessed. In leadership, that gap has direct consequences for the people you lead and the outcomes you are responsible for.

For women in senior roles, the stakes are compounded. Catalyst’s well-documented research on the double bind describes a dynamic many readers will recognize: behaviors that read as confident and decisive in a male colleague are routinely perceived as aggressive or abrasive in a woman, while collaborative and approachable behaviors can be coded as lacking authority. The margin for misreading your own impact and for having your intentions misread by others is narrower.

Self-awareness, in this context, is political and strategic intelligence and creates an opening for situational awareness. Understanding how your behavioral tendencies are landing, and to learn to watch if there is a gap between “your intent and your impact” is the growth work in coaching. What you default to under pressure is integral to separating leaders who plateau from those who keep growing.

The good news is that this is not guesswork. At Evolved People Coaching, the four tools we use most often each answer a different question and we work with you to identify which one is the right fit for where you are right now.

Four Questions Every Leader Needs to Answer:

1. How do I naturally behave — and how is that landing in different situations with different people?

Tool: DISC Assessment

DISC maps your behavioral tendencies across four dimensions: Dominance (how you respond to challenges), Influence (how you engage with people), Steadiness (how you respond to pace and change), and Conscientiousness (how you approach detail and process). It is not a measure of intelligence or potential; it is a map of your default operating style.

What makes DISC particularly powerful is what it reveals about the distance between how you experience yourself and how others experience you. Consider a senior leader who describes herself as direct, efficient, and results-focused. Her DISC profile confirms a high Dominance pattern. Her feedback tells a different story: her team finds her unapproachable, and two high performers have quietly started looking elsewhere because they feel that their leader cannot hear their ideas and it is not worth it to bring up risks. She isn’t doing anything wrong by her own logic, but without understanding how her style lands with others and adjusting accordingly, she creates an impact she never intended.

This is the gap DISC is designed to close. Not by changing who you are, but by making your behavioral defaults visible so you can choose when to lean in and when to flex.

2. Is my team actually working — or just coexisting?

Tool: Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team

Individual self-awareness will only take you so far if the team around you isn’t functioning. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, based on Patrick Lencioni’s widely used model, assesses team health across five dimensions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results orientation.

The tool operates at two levels. For intact teams, every member completes and debriefs the assessment together. What typically surfaces is a shared picture of where the team is genuinely cohesive and where it is performing a version of cohesion that is actually conflict avoidance or surface-level commitment masking real misalignment. For leaders who have inherited a team, are navigating a restructure, or aren’t getting the performance they expect from talented people, this version provides data where there was previously only intuition.

For individuals, a separate assessment helps you understand how you personally show up as a teammate regardless of whether your whole team is participating. This is valuable for leaders stepping into a new environment, those who have received feedback about their collaborative style, or anyone who wants to be more intentional about their contribution to team dynamics. Rather than waiting for the whole team to be ready, this version puts the insight in your hands immediately.

3. How am I actually landing with the people around me?

Tool: Qualitative 360 Assessment

A qualitative 360 goes directly to the source: the colleagues, direct reports, peers, and senior leaders are all stakeholders who experience your leadership every day. Conducted through structured confidential interviews rather than numerical ratings, it surfaces the specific behaviors that are building your reputation and the ones quietly working against you — patterns that no behavioral profile can predict, because they are grounded in the specific context of your organization and your relationships. There is huge psychological safety for the feedback givers because the data collected is anonymized and themed by topic so no comments can be attributed to anyone.

Used well, a qualitative 360 is not an appraisal. It is a rare opportunity to hear, in a safe environment, what people genuinely think and what they wish they could tell you directly. Given the depth of work involved, this is an assessment we typically offer as part of organizational engagements, but for the right leader at the right moment, it is one of the most powerful development investments available.

4. How can I change the behaviors that are hindering my highest potential?

Tool: Immunity to Change Mapping

The Immunity to Change Map process is a tool to uncover any hidden constructs in your subconscious mind that might be covert to you and therefore stopping you from doing the things you need to do to achieve your goals (that are overtly set in a goal setting exercise).

Nicki Gilmour, Founder of Evolved People coaching and theglasshammer.com states,

“Truly, this map is so useful early on in any work with our clients because it skillfully surfaces any or sometimes many implicit constructs that form a type of operating system or deep structure that left untouched, would result in most people wondering why they cannot do the day to day behaviors that would easily enable them to achieve their goal. This applies to any area of change, from working out to delegating work, to speaking up at meetings and even changing careers.”

Finding the Right Starting Point

These four tools address different levels of leadership insight: your default style, your team dynamics, your hidden limiting beliefs, and your real-world impact on the people around you. For most leaders, one will be the clear priority based on where you are in your career, what feedback you have received, or what challenge is most pressing. Our role is to help you identify which one that is, and to make sure the debrief and coaching that follows translates the data into something genuinely useful.

For organizations, our team development workshops use DISC, The Five Behaviors, and even Immunity to Change at a group level for leaders to build the shared visibility and common language that turns a group of talented individuals into a genuinely high-performing team.

The leaders who invest in this work consistently tell us the same thing: they wish they had done it sooner.

If you are ready to close the gap between the leader you are and the leader you intend to be, we would love to talk. Visit evolvedpeoplecoaching.com to explore our coaching programs and team development workshops, or get in touch directly to discuss which assessment is the right starting point for you.

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