Lead to Soar

Women are asked to lead hard change without authority, pay, or backing. Mel and Michelle on benevolent neglect.

In This Episode

Mel and Michelle look at shadow leadership: stretch roles, acting roles, and employee resource groups that bring visibility and responsibility without documented authority, budget, or air cover. Michelle shares a time she assumed her boss had her back, only to find out otherwise. A Lead to Soar member's stand-in negotiation shows what asking looks like.

Truth Bomb

"Don't do what I did and just assume you've got the air cover. Make sure you've got it." Michelle Redfern

What You'll Learn

Ask what you are expected to deliver, how success is measured and whether you will be backed before you say yes to a visible role

Get the title, decision-making authority and pay for an acting or stand-in role in writing

Spot whether you are the shadow preparing the ground or the sweeper clearing up afterwards

Give an employee resource group a charter, authority and funding, and keep problems like the gender pay gap with the executive team

Leaders: design the role, write the position description and delegate authority, rather than handing the hard things to the same woman each time

About The Hosts

Michelle Redfern is a gender equity strategist, author of The Leadership Compass and founder of Advancing Women in Business and Sport. She co-founded Lead to Soar.

Mel Butcher is a multidisciplinary strategist and consultant who helps leaders turn complexity into clarity. Her background is in engineering, across the public and private sectors.

Go Deeper With The Network

https://leadtosoar.network/landing

HR keeps getting scapegoated for executive decisions. Trina Sunday, founder of Reimagine HR, explains why HR isn’t the empathy department and why capability isn't neutral.

Mel and Michelle talk with Trina Sunday, creator of the HEART Work™ Model, about why equity and empathy are leadership capabilities that sit alongside decision intelligence and system design. Trina argues that HR leaders, and the CEOs they work with, need a clear answer to one question: what are we using our intelligence, credibility, and influence to serve?

Truth Bomb: Fix the system, don’t fix women.

What you’ll learn

Why HR so often gets scapegoated by executive teams that don’t take accountability for their own decisions

Why a seat at the table gives you proximity to power without automatically giving you influence

Why leadership carries a different price depending on who is doing it, and what organisations need to examine as a result

How Trina defines a boundary, and what holding hers has cost her

Why Trina tells HR leaders who won’t use their influence to get out of the game

About the guestTrina Sunday is a human-first leadership strategist, founder of Reimagine HR and creator of the HEART Work™ Model. She works with HR and people and culture leaders through her Game Changer HR Leader coaching program, and hosts the People Unconference (PUNC) in Perth, Western Australia.

About the hostsMichelle Redfern is a gender equity strategist and author of The Leadership Compass. Mel Butcher is a consultant and facilitator with an engineering background and more than 15 years of experience. Both women are mission-driven to teach women the business, strategic and financial acumen it takes to reach leadership.

Go DeeperIf this conversation put language to something you’ve been navigating without it, that’s exactly the work Lead to Soar Network members do together: https://leadtosoar.network/landing

A colleague decides to act on a workplace bully everyone else has been too afraid to challenge, after management’s own attempt to fix things made the problem worse. Michelle and Mel use the story to ask a harder question: how do you work out whether you’re actually safe enough to speak up, and what should you be asking for when you do?

In this episode

Mel and Michelle discuss a true story from Michelle’s network: a long-tenured bully in a 20- to 25-person team, protected for years by management inaction and then by a badly designed intervention that asked the whole team, bully included, to speak freely. A colleague, weighing their own employability and financial security against what their more vulnerable teammates stand to lose, decides to file a formal complaint and back the newly appointed manager who is trying to fix things.

Truth Bomb: leadership shows up at every level of an organisation, in acts like this one, using whatever power, safety and privilege you already have on behalf of people who have less.

What you’ll learn

* Why sitting an entire team down together, including the person accused of bullying, and asking everyone to “be honest” is a psychological safety failure, not a fix

* Why are some employees structurally unable to speak up, even when the misconduct is obvious to everyone else

* How to work out whether you have enough positional power, financial security or professional standing to act safely, and why that differs from person to person

* Why a woman is so often the one parachuted in to clean up a mess that several managers before her failed to address, and what that costs her

* The difference between alerting someone to a problem and asking for a specific outcome, and why “what outcome are you seeking” changes the conversation

* What a proper workplace investigation looks like, and why standing someone down while it happens protects everyone, not just the person who complained

About the hosts

Michelle Redfern is a gender equity strategist and author of The Leadership Compass. Mel Butcher is a consultant and facilitator with an engineering background and more than 15 years of experience. Both women are mission-driven to teach women the business, strategic and financial acumen it takes to reach leadership.

Go Deeper

If you’re weighing up whether it’s safe to speak up in your own workplace, that’s exactly the kind of decision Lead to Soar Network members work through together:

Years ago, Michelle Redfern told her manager at one of Australia's big banks that the team had a politeness problem. He told her to keep speaking up. A couple of years later she had a reputation, and one of the words attached to it was "abrasive."

Mel Butcher and Michelle look at who gets to speak their mind at work and who pays for it. They cover the question every leader needs to ask (am I consulting people for better ideas, or collecting yeses?), how psychological safety works in a team, and why women receive more vague, personality-based feedback than men. Textio's 2022 research found that women are 11 times more likely to be described as "abrasive" in performance feedback.

You'll also get three tools you can use this week: the "mad, sad, glad" team check-in, the "play the ball, not the player" approach from Susan Colantuono's The Language of Power, and a "more of, less of, and why" structure for feedback that is specific and actionable.

Related: Episode 161, Career Compass: Mastering Actionable Feedback and Overcoming Gender Bias.

Michelle's self-paced course on giving, receiving and asking for feedback is coming soon inside the Lead to Soar Network

What evidence do you see in your own workplace? Tell us in the comments.

Career pathing is rarely as linear as it looks, and in Michelle's organisational diagnostic work, the single biggest gap women report is that their manager isn't giving them useful career advice.

In this episode, Mel and Michelle pull apart why the traditional career ladder is a scarcity game, why leaving your progression in your manager's hands is a risk you can't afford, and what to do instead. They walk through a four-move framework for evaluating what's next: stay, reshape, shift, go, and cover salary benchmarking, strategic networking inside and outside your organisation, why women are so often asked to prove readiness that men get handed on potential alone, and what leaders owe the people they're meant to be developing.

A listener wrote in with a question anyone with a shelf of half-read leadership books will recognise. She reads good books. She underlines the useful parts. Nothing changes.

Mel and Michelle did not script an answer. They worked it out in real time, and the diagnosis arrives fast. If your life is already full, work stacked on caregiving stacked on more work, there is nowhere to put the advice.

Truth Bomb: The quality of the book is irrelevant.

When women still carry 75%+ of the world’s unpaid labour, getting advice to “just make time to reflect” will probably not hit the mark as great life advice!

The most useful example in the episode is also the smallest. Michelle read Atomic Habits years ago and took one thing from it: reduce the friction. Her walking shoes lived on the top floor of a three-storey house and she rarely walked, so she moved them to the door. She now keeps her bike, helmet and gloves ready to go wherever she is living. One idea, acted on. Mel read the same book twice, came away with a better grasp of habit theory, and changed no behaviour.

The other point made by Mel, after reading “You Can Do Hard Things” by Cate Hall, is that not everything has to be hard won. So thinking that a pile of TBR books is a failure is not, there might be an easier way to consume the content (audiobooks for example!)

Truth Bomb: stop trying to solve everything with a book. Take the one thing. Write it down. Do something with it this week.

Are you thriving or just surviving? Take Michelle’s life audit quiz.

Somebody has to clean up after a technology moving faster than the people responsible for it can manage, and that job keeps landing on women, unpaid and uncredentialed.

Kara Bombell, co-founder of Ethic AI and a former chief operations officer, joins Michelle and Mel to unpack the difference between a company genuinely disrupted by AI and a poorly performing company using AI as cover, why caution about AI got read as women falling behind rather than paying attention, and the shift from "human in the loop" to "human at the helm" as a better way to think about your own authority over these tools. They also cover two things you can build with AI in your own role this month, no technical background required.

About Kara: Kara Bombell spent years inside large corporates and consulting for blue-chip companies before co-founding Ethic AI, where she works with resource-constrained organisations, including not-for-profits, government and child safety services, to embed AI responsibly.

This episode takes the "world-class CEO" conversation personal: what does it look like if a CEO with that calibre of judgement took over your life the way they'd take over a business? Mel puts herself forward as the test case, and Michelle runs the exercise live, on air.

Mel's life gets mapped the way she'd map it herself: her career and finances under BQ, her relationships under SQ, and her emotional wellbeing and health under EQ. Michelle opens the way she'd open any real engagement, not with advice, but with the same first question: where are you now, and where do you want to get to?

Inside this episode: the design thinking chronology exercise Michelle built during her MBA and still uses today; the positional purpose question, what are you actually paid to do, and why it applies to every role, not just the ones with a sales target; the four things every CEO tracks, cash, growth, return and customer; a concrete way to set a financial goal and close the gap to it; and the disease to please, and why being liked and being respected are not the same test.

A version of the positional purpose exercise is running in the Lead to Soar Network this month, tracking a week's worth of hours against the same question Michelle asks Mel on the show.

Are we actually looking at CEOs the right way? No, we're not. We're doing it inside a patriarchal context, inside a capitalist system, and calling the result "world-class." Mel and Michelle went looking for a definition that holds up outside that frame and couldn't find one, so this episode builds one from scratch: BQ as the floor, EQ and SQ as the accelerant, and the safe-pair-of-hands test every leader claiming the title should have to pass.

Being praised as a good team player feels rewarding. Michelle Redfern and Mel Butcher call out what it actually costs this episode: a tax on women who’ve been socialised to say yes, one that rarely shows up in your pay or your title.

Two women in engineering consulting were asked to take on more work without extra pay. One agreed to become the “office manager,” took on the workload, and ended up stuck. The other said no, in writing, calmly and clearly, and protected her progression instead.

From there, Michelle walks through her “stop, breathe, reflect” framework: three questions to run before you agree to anything new.

In this episode:

* Why women pay the good girl tax, and what it costs in the long term

* Two stories: one costly yes, one considered no

* Three questions to test whether new work builds your career or just your workload

A script for buying time before you answer

Free resource: The Career Progression Evidence Test. Take it, then let Mel and Michelle know what came up for you.

The Lead to Soar Network

Lead to Soar equips women with the Business (BQ), Emotional (EQ), and Social (SQ) intelligence required to be recognised, trusted, and promoted.

We do not fix women. We build capability and redesign systems so talent rises.

How We Drive Impact

A global leadership accelerator for ambitious women.

Members gain:

• Weekly group coaching that solves real business challenges

• Practical tools to strengthen BQ, EQ, and SQ

• Strategic networking with women who are serious about outcomes

• Direct access to globally recognised experts in women’s advancement

Result: women negotiate pay raises, secure executive roles, strengthen commercial credibility, and become visible for strategic impact.

For organisations, the Network functions as a scalable, cost-effective leadership pipeline solution.

Paid subscribers get a 3-month guest pass - message Michelle to access your pass.