Lead to Soar

Reverse mentoring isn't performance management, and poor performers don't belong in mentoring.In this episodeMel Butcher and Michelle Redfern respond to a Lead to Soar Network member who was asked to fix a more senior colleague's performance under the label of reverse mentoring. Michelle explains why mentoring is for high performers, why performance management belongs to the manager, and how to design a reverse mentoring relationship that works.Truth Bomb"Your manager's job is to manage your performance." Michelle RedfernWhat you'll learnWhy mentoring programs need high performers on both sides, and what happens to participants when a poor performer is placed in one.How a manager can open a performance conversation: describe what is observed, show the indicators, ask what is going on.How to build a skills matrix for a team in a spreadsheet, and use it before hiring.Three questions to settle before a reverse mentoring relationship starts: the outcome, the mentor's authority and the guidance for the senior mentee.How to manage up when a performance problem lands with the wrong person.About the hostsMichelle 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. She has an engineering background across the public and private sectors.Go Deeper with the Networkhttps://leadtosoar.network/landing Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her, on women’s anger, tone policing and why resilience training lets organisations off the hook.In this episodeMel talks with Soraya Chemaly about Rage Becomes Her, The Resilience Myth and All We Want Is Everything. Soraya explains why women are taught that anger is not theirs, what anger tells us about need, and what to do with it when you cannot take it into work.What you’ll learnAnger is information about what a woman needs, and women are taught not to need for themselves.Tone policing turns a conversation from what a woman says to how she says it, and a sponsor in the meeting can turn it back.The dominant idea of resilience is individualistic and masculinised, and it puts the responsibility on the individual instead of the institution.Fixing the system takes change across policy, law, education and culture together, so tweaking one workplace falls short.Creativity gives anger an outlet and connects you to other people.About the guestSoraya Chemaly is an award-winning author and activist, and the former Executive Director of The Representation Project. She is the Director and co-founder of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project. Her book Rage Becomes Her was named a Best Book of 2018 by the Washington Post, Fast Company, Psychology Today and NPR. Website: sorayachemaly.comAbout the hostsLead to Soar is hosted by Mel Butcher and Michelle Redfern. It is a multi-platform resource for ambitious women on a leadership journey and for organisations serious about closing the leadership gender gap.Go Deeper with the NetworkJoin the Lead to Soar Network Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Women are asked to lead hard change without authority, pay, or backing. Mel and Michelle on benevolent neglect.In This EpisodeMel 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 RedfernWhat You'll LearnAsk what you are expected to deliver, how success is measured and whether you will be backed before you say yes to a visible roleGet the title, decision-making authority and pay for an acting or stand-in role in writingSpot whether you are the shadow preparing the ground or the sweeper clearing up afterwardsGive an employee resource group a charter, authority and funding, and keep problems like the gender pay gap with the executive teamLeaders: design the role, write the position description and delegate authority, rather than handing the hard things to the same woman each timeAbout The HostsMichelle 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 Networkhttps://leadtosoar.network/landing Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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 learnWhy HR so often gets scapegoated by executive teams that don’t take accountability for their own decisionsWhy a seat at the table gives you proximity to power without automatically giving you influenceWhy leadership carries a different price depending on who is doing it, and what organisations need to examine as a resultHow Trina defines a boundary, and what holding hers has cost herWhy Trina tells HR leaders who won’t use their influence to get out of the gameAbout 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 Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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 episodeMel 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 complainedAbout 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 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: Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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 NetworkWhat evidence do you see in your own workplace? Tell us in the comments. Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Lead to Soar Podcast at leadtosoarpodcast.substack.com/subscribe