Change Maven Musings: My Leadership Path Officially Commences

Real stories. Real people. Real change.

One of the most recent changes to sweep into my life arrived in the form of a new career opportunity. I am now in a leadership role where I am standing up a brand, spanking-new new function, focused on organizational strategy and design. As I contemplated whether or not to take the role, I found myself to be alternately thrilled and terrified, which I decided was about the right mix. The call to stretch and grow in ways new to me was stronger than the desire to stay comfy in my amazing-in-many ways previous role. It’s always hard to take these big leaps because we are creatures of habit and routine, and don’t really want to change unless we have to. So if we have a choice to change - and we take it - we prove ourselves to be creatures cut from a different cloth that ultimately didn’t fit into the status quo anyway. If we are being honest with ourselves, we would have left anyway or stayed and become deeply dissatisfied, which often has this weird way of working against us, undoing a lot of good that happened. I’ve always been one who’s tried to know when it’s time to exit stage right, even if I didn’t want to, which I found to be the case here.

As I return to my Substack writings, I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to refocus a bit, sharing my emerging experience of embarking on the leadership path with all of you. I know there are a million and one perspectives out there today on leadership and what it means to be a good leader, a bad one, and everything in between, yet even so, I’d like to add my voice to the conversation. The majority of my career has been focused on ways to support, encourage, and empower leaders, whether new-in-role or tenured, as individuals or in their team/functional area context. There are so many ways to lead, and I’ve experienced first-hand a lot about what works, what doesn’t, and what I’m curious to consider and discover for myself as I step into this role.

I also plan to repurpose my Substack discussion threads and notes for questions and musings on leadership that I’d love you all to chime in on (and add some of your own!), and for sharing resources I come across that could support our desire and pursuit of a greater awareness of self, the role of influence, how to discover our true purpose and what we are in service to, and to be honest and messy about where we stumble and need to ask for help.

Thank you for continuing to be on the journey with me; here we go!