Episode 300

Women in Leadership: 300 Episodes, 1500 Women,and Everything I’ve Changed My Mind About

Women in Leadership: 300 Episodes, 1500 Women, and What I Actually Know Now

Women in leadership is a topic I have been exploring, debating, and refining my thinking on for over 20 years and now 300 episodes of this podcast. When I started, I had things I wanted to say and a conviction that the challenges facing women in tech leadership were not being addressed with the specificity they deserved. What I did not anticipate was how much the work itself — 300 episodes and approaching 1500 women I’ve coached — would change what I actually believe.

But I want to be clear about what this milestone actually represents — because it is not just 300 episodes. Alongside this podcast, I have spent the last 8 years coaching women across every corner of the tech sector. Corporate tech, startups, entrepreneurship, academia. Women at every level from the first leadership role through to founder and C-suite. Approaching 1500 women, some for a single session, some for years. And it is that combination — the conversations on this show and the coaching work — that has genuinely changed what I think.

Today I want to share what I have changed my mind about.

Not what I was wrong about — though some of it I was wrong about. But more specifically: what I believed when I started this journey, what the evidence of 300 episodes and 1500 women has taught me, and what I would say now that I would not have said then.

I am also going to weave in some of the best and worst advice I have heard — both from guests on this show and from clients I have worked with — because the patterns in that advice have shaped my thinking as much as anything else.

This is not a greatest hits. It is not a celebration in the self-congratulatory sense. It is my honest account of an evolving perspective. And I hope it gives you something useful to take into your own leadership, wherever you are right now.

Let’s dive in.

What Female Leadership in the Workplace Taught Me About Leaning In

When I started this podcast, the dominant conversation about women in leadership was built around a simple premise: the reason women were underrepresented at the top was that they were holding themselves back. The solution was to lean in — to take up more space, speak up more, claim the seat at the table, project confidence, be more ambitious.

I understood why that argument was appealing. It was empowering. It put agency in the hands of women. And there is a kernel of truth in it — there are absolutely ways in which women hold themselves back, and some of this podcast has been about addressing exactly that.

But here is what I know now that I did not fully see then.

Leaning in, as a concept, is built on a male model of what leadership looks like. It assumes that the way to succeed is to adopt the behaviours and postures that have always been rewarded — the ones that were rewarded because men designed the system, and men’s ways of operating were built into it. Lean in means lean into the existing model. And for most women, that model does not fit.

It is not that women cannot be direct, decisive, authoritative, and politically astute. They absolutely can. But when those qualities are performed in the style the male model expects — the specific communication patterns, the specific energy, the specific presence — it often does not land the way it lands for men. And it costs something. The women I coach who try hardest to perform leadership in the male style are often the most exhausted and the most disconnected from what actually makes them effective.

The most powerful thing I have seen in coaching is what happens when a woman stops trying to lead like the men around her and starts leading in a way that is genuinely, authentically hers. The communication style that feels natural to her. The way of building relationships and trust that she is actually good at. The approach to executive presence and authority that she does not have to perform because it is already who she is.

That is not leaning in. That is something more interesting and more sustainable.

What to replace it with: find the leadership style that is genuinely yours — not a performance of someone else’s model of what leadership looks like.

Getting a Seat at the Table Was Never the Whole Answer

For a long time, the rallying cry for women in leadership was getting a seat at the table. Be visible. Be present. Be in the rooms where decisions are made.

I still believe in visibility. I still believe that being in the room matters. But I have changed my mind about what the goal actually is.

Because what I have seen repeatedly — in conversations on this podcast and in coaching — is that getting in the room is only the beginning. What happens when you are in it is the question. Whether your voice lands. Whether your ideas are heard. Whether you are in the room as a full participant or as a demographic checkbox. Whether the table itself is worth sitting at.

The women I coach who have the most traction in their careers are not primarily focused on getting into rooms. They are focused on what happens when they are in them — how they show up, how they influence, how they ensure that being present translates into being heard and being consequential.

And some of them have made the more radical decision: that there are tables that are not worth sitting at. That the organisation, the culture, the leadership above them, is so misaligned with their values or so hostile to their success that the most powerful move available to them is not to fight harder for a seat but to find a different table entirely.

Vote with your feet is an idea I have come to believe in more strongly over the years — but with a specific caveat that I want to name clearly.

Too many of the women I work with have left jobs not because they made a strategic decision to go, but because they reached a limit that should never have been reached. They burned out. They endured long past the point where leaving would have served them. They stayed out of loyalty, out of fear, out of the belief that they should be able to handle it. And then they left in crisis rather than in choice.

Voting with your feet, at its best, is a proactive leadership act. It is making a clear-eyed assessment of whether this organisation deserves your talent, your energy, and your best years — and leaving intentionally, on your terms, when the answer is no. Not as a last resort. As a strategy.

Leave intentionally, on your terms, before burnout makes the decision for you.

Women Leadership Styles: Why “Just Speak Up More” Is the Wrong Advice

If I had a pound for every time a woman was told to speak up more, I would be funding this podcast in perpetuity.

And I want to be honest: early on, I said versions of this myself. Because there is a dimension of it that is real. There are women who have the insight, the expertise, and the perspective — and who hold it back. And the work of building the confidence and the skill to share it is genuinely useful work.

But here is what the advice to “just speak up more” almost always gets wrong.

It locates the problem inside the woman. It says: you are not speaking enough, and that is the reason your ideas are not landing. The solution is more of you.

What it does not say is: you are speaking in a room where the conditions make it harder for your voice to be heard. You are operating in an environment that has higher thresholds for women’s ideas than for men’s. You have spent years in spaces where speaking up came with real cost — being labelled difficult, aggressive, too much — and your nervous system has learned to be cautious in ways that are completely rational given your experience.

The advice to speak up more, without any of that context, is advice that blames the woman for a structural problem.

What I believe now is more specific: the goal is not more volume. It is more impact. And impact comes from understanding how influence actually works in your specific environment, communicating with clarity when the stakes are high, and — crucially — building the confidence that comes not from being told to have it, but from doing hard things and surviving them.

And there is one more thing I want to say here — about speaking up when you see something wrong.

One of the things I believed early on was that calling it out was always the right answer. Witnessing bias, bullying, unfair treatment — you name it, speak it, challenge it. Be the one who names what is happening.

I have changed my mind about the absoluteness of that.

Not because I think calling out injustice is wrong. But because the advice to always speak up when you see something wrong carries a cost that is not evenly distributed — and it is a cost that falls disproportionately on the very women who are already carrying the most. The woman who is already the lone voice, already hypervisible, already having to fight harder for every inch of credibility. The cost of always being the one who names it is real, and sometimes it is too high.

What I believe now: protecting yourself first is not cowardice. It is strategy. And it is entirely possible to hold a strong private moral position on what you are witnessing while being strategic about when, how, and whether you speak it publicly. Choosing not to speak in a particular moment does not mean you are complicit. It might mean you are choosing the fight you can actually win.

You Can Have It All — and Why That Phrase Does So Much Damage

“You can have it all — just not at the same time.”

I have been thinking about this one for a long time, because it has become so woven into the cultural conversation that it is almost invisible.

Here is what I think that phrase actually does — and why I have come to believe it is far more harmful than it looks.

The phrase is usually deployed in one of two ways. The first is as reassurance: you do not have to choose between career and family, it will all work out, just pace yourself. The second — and this is the more insidious version — is as permission to put your ambition on hold. Wait. Scale back. This is not the right season. Your time will come.

What it almost never says, but almost always implies, is: your ambition is the variable. Your family, your relationships, your other responsibilities — those are fixed. So when there is not enough bandwidth for everything, it is your career that gives. Not the systems around you. Not the organisations that do not provide adequate support. Not the cultural expectation that women are the primary holders of domestic and emotional labour. Your ambition.

And here is the thing that I find particularly maddening: men face the same constraints. A man who wants to be deeply present as a father, who wants to be the primary carer, who wants to build a career that does not consume his entire life — he also cannot have it all at the same time. The difference is that this is rarely the frame through which his ambition is managed. Nobody tells the ambitious man to be patient about the career he wants.

What I want to say instead of “you can have it all, just not at the same time” is this:

You cannot plan everything. You cannot predict what you will want in ten years, or what your life will look like, or which opportunities will appear. So stop holding back your ambition today based on a future you cannot see. Stop deferring the career move, the promotion conversation, the stretch role, because you are pre-empting a clash that might not happen in the way you are imagining.

Plans are essential and always wrong. Make them, know them, and be completely ready to change them. But do not let the uncertainty of the future become a reason to shrink in the present.

The reframe: you cannot predict everything, so stop shrinking in the present based on a future you cannot see.

Career Tips From Women in Leadership: The Zone of Genius Trap Nobody Warns You About

Career Plans

I am a believer in career plans. I want to be clear about that upfront, because what I am about to say is sometimes misread as “don’t bother planning.”

Career plans are valuable. Knowing what you want, articulating the direction, understanding what the next move requires, being intentional about how you build your experience and your reputation — all of that matters. I do this work with clients all the time and it makes a real difference.

What I have changed my mind about is not the value of planning but the grip with which we hold the plan.

The women I have coached who have had the most remarkable careers are almost never the ones who executed a plan they designed at 25. They are the ones who knew what they valued, stayed curious about what energised them, took opportunities that were not in the original script, and were honest with themselves when the map stopped matching the terrain.

The plan is the starting point, not the destination. Hold it lightly. Update it often. And above all: do not let the plan become the reason you pass on something interesting that was not in it.

The Zone of Genius Trap

This one is harder to talk about, and I want to take a moment with it because I see it costing women enormously.

Most of you will be familiar with the idea of the zone of genius — the work that uses your unique strengths, that energises you, that you do not just do well but that you do in a way that feels alive. The work that is distinctively yours.

Staying in your zone of genius is the goal. I believe that completely. The problem is not the concept. The problem is that your zone of genius changes — and most women do not notice when it has, because the thing that was their zone of genius five years ago has quietly become something different.

Here is what happens. You find the work that lights you up. You are extraordinary at it. People notice, you get promoted, you get rewarded, you build your identity and your reputation around it. And then — gradually, without a clear moment when it changed — you start doing it because you are good at it rather than because it energises you.

This is the zone of excellence. Brilliant performance. Diminishing joy. And the trap is that because this work is where your success came from, because it is what got you to where you are, it is very hard to let go of. Letting go feels like abandoning the thing that made you.

But staying in your zone of excellence — doing excellent work that used to be your zone of genius but no longer is — is one of the most direct paths to burnout I see. Not the dramatic burnout of someone who has been working impossible hours. The quiet, gradual dimming of someone who has been excellent at something they stopped loving years ago and never gave themselves permission to notice.

The work is to stay honest about the question: is this still my zone of genius, or is it my zone of excellence? Am I doing this because it lights me up, or because I am good at it and it is what people expect of me?

And if the honest answer is the second one — that is not a failure. That is useful data. It is the signal that it is time to find the new zone of genius. Which means it is time to get curious again, to try things, to be willing to be a beginner in something that might become the next version of your best work.

High Performance Leadership Requires All Three: Mentors, Coaches, and Sponsors

The advice to “find a good mentor” is so ubiquitous in conversations about women’s career development that it has become almost meaningless. Of course you should have a mentor. Of course good guidance helps. But the advice, as usually given, stops far too soon.

Here is what I know from working with hundreds of women: the ones who progress fastest, who move through the system with the most traction, who end up in the rooms and the roles that match their capability — they almost never just have a mentor. They have a mentor, a coach, and a sponsor. Often without formally labelling those relationships, but functionally, all three are present.

And here is the important thing: if you look at the senior male executives who have progressed furthest in tech, the same is true. They have all three. A mentor who gives them honest guidance. A coach who helps them develop. A sponsor who uses their own political capital to open doors.

The difference is that for most senior men in tech, those three relationships developed naturally — through networks, through informal sponsorship, through being in the rooms where those relationships form. For most women, they do not develop naturally in the same way. The networks are different. The informal sponsorship is less readily available. The rooms are less accessible.

So let me be precise about what each of these is, because the distinctions matter.

A mentor advises. They share their experience, they help you think through decisions, they offer perspective from their own path. Invaluable. Not enough on its own.

A coach develops. They help you build capability, shift mindset, work through the specific blocks that are limiting your performance and your confidence. They are not there to tell you what to do — they are there to help you become more fully the leader you are capable of being.

A sponsor advocates. This is the relationship most women are missing. A sponsor uses their own political capital to speak up for you in rooms you are not in. They recommend you for the stretch role. They bring your name up when an opportunity arises. They take a risk on you — and the distinction between a mentor and a sponsor is exactly that: mentors give advice, sponsors take risks.

If you have one of these, that is a start. If you have two, you are better positioned than most. If you have all three — actively, intentionally, with people who are genuinely invested in your growth and your advancement — you are operating with the full infrastructure that careers at the top require.

Most senior men in tech have all three. Why would we expect women to succeed with less?

Working Harder Is Not the Answer — But What Is?

I want to talk about one of the most persistent and damaging pieces of advice given to women in tech: work harder and they will notice.

The women I coach are not, in the main, people who are not working hard. They are some of the most capable, most driven, most committed people I have ever met. And many of them are working significantly harder than their male counterparts — in some cases doing more actual work, and in almost all cases carrying the invisible labour that does not show up in any performance metric: the culture maintenance, the team holding, the mentoring, the gap-filling, the emotional weight of keeping things together.

And yet they are not always progressing at the rate their effort and capability deserve.

This is the evidence that breaks the “work harder and they will notice” model. Because for many women in tech, the problem is not that they are not working hard enough. The problem is that the work they are doing is not the work that gets you promoted. The work that gets you promoted is the visible, attributable, strategic work. And that is not automatically the work that lands on a high-achieving woman’s desk.

What I believe instead: the goal is not harder, it is more targeted. It is understanding which work builds career capital and which work builds the organisation without building you. It is being strategic about what you take on, what you say yes to, what you let go. It is making sure that the extraordinary things you deliver are known about by the people who need to know about them.

This is not cynical. It is not about doing less for your team or your organisation. It is about not being the person who does everything and gets credit for nothing.

You Have to Be in X Location to Succeed

I am going to keep this one brief because the pandemic made the argument for me in a way I could not have done alone.

For decades, women in tech — and in many other industries — were told, explicitly or implicitly, that to have the career they wanted they needed to be somewhere specific. In the UK, that meant London. In the US, it meant the Bay Area or New York. Move to where the opportunity is. Make the geographic sacrifice. Prove your commitment.

This advice was, in many cases, a way of filtering out the people — disproportionately women, disproportionately people with caring responsibilities, disproportionately people without the financial runway to uproot their lives — who could not or would not make the move. It was gatekeeping dressed as career advice.

What the last five years have demonstrated is that outstanding leadership does not require a particular postcode. The argument has been made. The data is in. And while some organisations have pulled back toward in-person requirements, the principle — that location is a proxy for commitment and that your career ceiling should be determined by your willingness to relocate — has been substantially dismantled.

One of the most satisfying things I heard on this podcast was Sarah Walker, CEO of Cisco UK and Ireland, talking about being told early in her career that she would not reach her potential unless she moved to London. She did not move. She became CEO anyway.

If you are being told that your career requires a location sacrifice you are not willing to make, that is worth questioning carefully. It may be true in specific cases. But it may also be a filter that has nothing to do with your capability and everything to do with a system that was designed before remote work was possible.

Self-Awareness and Leadership: We Are More Individual Than Society Would Have Us Believe

One of the clearest things that nearly 1500 coaching relationships has taught me is this: there is no single path forward for women in tech leadership. There is no template. There is no one way to do this.

The women I have worked with are extraordinarily diverse — in their backgrounds, their values, their leadership styles, their definitions of success, their relationships with ambition, their approach to authority, their ways of building trust and influence. And the coaching that works for one woman is often exactly wrong for another.

What I have seen cause real damage is the assumption — sometimes explicit, often implicit — that there is a right way for women to lead. That to be taken seriously as a leader, you should communicate in a particular style. That executive presence looks a specific way. That ambition should be expressed in a specific register. That the model of success worth pursuing is the one that everyone around you seems to be pursuing.

Some of the most effective leaders I have ever coached were women who had spent years trying to fit a model that did not suit them — and who, when they finally stopped trying and started leading in a way that was genuinely theirs, became extraordinary. Not despite being themselves. Because of it.

The corollary of this is equally important: what works for you now may not work for you in five years. The approach that serves you brilliantly at this stage of your career and your life will evolve. The things that energise you will change. The version of success that feels right today may feel constraining in ten years.

Giving yourself permission to evolve — to be a different kind of leader as your context changes, to want different things, to find that the path that made complete sense at 35 needs significant revision at 45 — that is not inconsistency. That is wisdom.

What I Actually Believe — and Why I’m Optimistic

I want to close with something that I feel strongly about, because episodes like this one can tip into bleakness if you let them. Here is what I actually see.

Yes, the system has problems. Yes, there are organisations that are actively hostile to women’s leadership, or passively indifferent to it, or making the kind of backward steps that make the work of this podcast feel urgent in a way it should not still need to feel after all this time.

But here is what I also see, and what 300 episodes and 1500 women have shown me.

Women-led teams are outperforming. Consistently, across sector, across organisation size, across context. The evidence is clear and it has been accumulating for years. Teams with significant female leadership — at every level, not just the top — generate better results, healthier cultures, more sustainable performance. This is not a feel-good story. It is a business case.

Women-led businesses are flourishing. The rise of women founding and leading companies — particularly in tech — is one of the most significant structural shifts in the industry over the last decade. Women who could not find the table they wanted at someone else’s organisation have been building their own. And many of them are thriving.

The employers who get this right are winning. The organisations that have invested genuinely — not performatively, not as a DEI checkbox — in the conditions that allow women to lead fully, to advance on merit, to build careers that do not require them to become someone they are not — those organisations are attracting the best talent and retaining it. The gap between them and the organisations that have not figured this out is widening. That is not nothing.

And the women coming through now — the ones in their twenties and early thirties who are the early-career listeners of this podcast — are entering the industry with a clearer-eyed understanding of what they deserve, what they will and will not tolerate, and what their options are when an organisation does not deserve them. That is a generational shift that cannot be reversed.

So yes — there is a lot still to change. The work is not done. I would not still be making this podcast if it were.

But I am not pessimistic. I am watching women lead in ways that are extraordinary. I am watching organisations figure out — sometimes slowly, sometimes imperfectly — what genuinely inclusive leadership looks like. I am watching the evidence accumulate that the way women lead is not a liability to be managed but an asset to be developed.

Three hundred episodes. Approaching 1500 women coached. And what I know, more clearly than anything else, is this:

That is worth 300 episodes. And it is worth 300 more.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening — whether this is your first episode or you have been here since the beginning. And as always:

Keep leading.

Internal Link Summary — For Web Publisher

All hyperlinks are applied to thematic phrases within the text. Update [CONFIRM SLUG] placeholders before publishing.

Ep 286 (Executive Presence) tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/286-executive-presence-for-women-in-tech — used twice: S2 “executive presence”, S10 “executive presence”

Ep 196 (Cost of Constant Hustle) [CONFIRM SLUG] — used in S3: “burned out”

Ep 272 (Should You Stay, Go, Redesign) [CONFIRM SLUG] — used in S3: “Voting with your feet”

Ep 298 (Communicating With Clarity Under Pressure) [CONFIRM SLUG] — used in S4: “communicating with clarity when the stakes are high”

Ep 282 (2026 Leadership Roadmap) tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/leadership-roadmap-2026-career-planning/ — used in S6: “career plans”

Ep 248 (Identifying Early Indicators of Burnout) [CONFIRM SLUG] — used in S6: “zone of excellence”

Ep 256 (No More Crickets) [CONFIRM SLUG] — used in S7: “mentors give advice, sponsors take risks”

Ep 276 (Busy ≠ Valuable) tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/276-busy-not-valuable-how-to-prioritize-work-that-gets-you-promoted — used in S8: “work that gets you promoted”

Ep 228 (Mastering Your Value) [CONFIRM SLUG] — used in S8: “making sure that the extraordinary things you deliver are known about”

Ep 293 (Sarah Walker / Non-Traditional Career Path) tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/293-women-in-tech-leadership-non-traditional-career-path/ — used in S9: “Sarah Walker, CEO of Cisco UK and Ireland”

Ep 180 (Women Led Companies) [CONFIRM SLUG] — used in S11: “Women-led teams”

Episode 300 | Leading Women in Tech | Toni Collis | tonicollis.com