Stop watching other leaders and do this instead
There's a post going around LinkedIn right now from a female CEO that's getting a lot of likes.
The gist: stop asking me to speak on panels about being a woman in leadership.
“My job isn't to talk about it. It's to BE it.”
"Watch me. Learn from me.”
I get the frustration behind it. Truly.
But if you're someone who's actively trying to grow as a leader? This framing is a trap.
Leadership is mostly invisible.
What you see when you watch a great leader is the output. The confident decision. The calm under pressure. The vision that became a strategy that became results.
What you don't see is everything that actually made them good. The moment they almost made the wrong call and caught themselves. The mental framework they used to cut through the noise. The self-doubt they sat with at 11pm before the big meeting. The question they learned to ask themselves before every hard conversation.
That's not watchable. You cannot learn it by observation alone.
And this is where so much leadership development goes sideways. We treat it like it's about doing more or watching the right people or being in the right rooms. But the actual work? It lives in your thinking. How you process information. How you make decisions. How you hold competing priorities without losing yourself. That's the work. And it's entirely internal.
So if you're in a season of developing your leadership, the question isn't "who should I be watching?"
It's "how am I thinking?"
Because watching a great leader and hoping something rubs off is like watching a chef plate a beautiful dish and thinking you now know how to cook.
The recipe is internal. And building it means getting honest about how you currently make decisions, where your thinking gets cloudy, and what assumptions you're still carrying that might be running the show without your permission.
That's the real work. You ready for it?
Let's go girls!
xoxo
Kelsey
Trash TV MBA: SLOMW
This week: Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (SLOMW). There's a clip of Harry Jowsey interviewing Layla where he can't hide his shock at how toxic the cast dynamic is and she calls it… “background noise.”
“We're so immune to being psychos with each other.”
This is just how it is.
SWLOMW and #MomTok are a workplace. And what Harry saw in five minutes, the cast can no longer see at all…because they've been inside it too long.
That's exactly how toxic cultures get baked in. Not from one big moment, but from a hundred small ones that each felt survivable until it just became the baseline.
As a leader, your job is to keep asking: does my behavior actually reflect the culture I say I want? Because by the time toxicity feels normal, it already is your culture.
(And btw…please get #dadtok off our screens!)
This Week's Thing:
Find a leader you genuinely admire. Someone whose thinking you want to understand better and ask if you can have 20 minutes with them. Not to network. Not to get advice. Just to ask them about how they make decisions.
If you're not sure what to ask, here are three questions to bring with you:
Can you walk me through a recent decision you had to make where you didn't have a clear answer right away. What was actually happening in your head?
Is there a question you ask yourself before making a hard call? Something that helps you cut through the noise?
Tell me about a time your gut said one thing and the data said another. How did you decide which one to trust?
That's it. Listen more than you talk. You're not there to impress them. You're there to borrow a peek at their recipe.