Lead to Soar

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.

Michelle ran an experiment. She asked Gemini and Claude the same question, at the same time: how do I ask my manager for a pay rise? Gemini's answer was generic and gendered: just be bold, ask for what you want. No mention of the barriers women navigate to be heard as credible in the first place. Claude's answer looked completely different, but not because one platform beats the other. Michelle's Claude carries months of her own directives about what a business-savvy, woman-first answer actually looks like.

That's the real subject of this episode: what your AI defaults to when you don't intervene, and what to do about it. Michelle and Mel cover how to prompt for advice that accounts for structural barriers rather than erasing them, a practical exercise for turning technical work into an executive-ready summary, and a warning for leaders: AI is already shaping pay, performance and promotion decisions in your organisation, mostly without anyone checking how.

Leaders: read the paper, then take the audit, both linked in the show notes. Lead to Soar Network members get Michelle's full prompt library, including the exercises mentioned above.

Mel sits down with English and rhetoric professor Dr Jenny Young, whose Burn the Haystack method teaches women to read the language men use on dating apps for what it actually reveals. This conversation goes well past dating: toxic rhetorical patterns, the "test and apologise" tactic, and why a boss who lowered everyone else's chair three inches is doing the same thing as a man who glares down at the camera in his profile photo. Contains direct discussion of dating apps, sexual testing tactics and abusive relationship dynamics.

Executive women are still judged against a narrow idea of what credible leadership looks and sounds like. Warmth can be mistaken for a lack of commercial acumen, authority can be interpreted as aggression, and likeability can become part of an assessment that should be about capability and results.

In this episode of Lead to Soar, Michelle Redfern and Mel Butcher explore what happens when women refuse to assimilate into workplace cultures built around hard-coded gender stereotypes. They discuss why warm, energetic and relational women are so often underestimated, how BQ, EQ and SQ shape leadership credibility, and how women can read the room and make their value unmistakable while staying connected to who they are.

Truth Bomb: organisations keep mistaking warmth for a lack of business acumen, then lose commercially capable women to competitors with better judgment.

Michelle and Mel also share practical language women can use when feedback starts sounding more like a style preference than a serious assessment of leadership.