There’s a question a surprising number of senior women in tech carry quietly for years: could I actually be a coach? Sometimes it surfaces after the promotion that didn’t feel like you thought it would. Sometimes it’s the realization that the mentoring conversations are the part of the week you actually love. Sometimes it’s simpler: twenty years of hard-won experience, and a growing desire for work that’s more yours. In this episode of Leading Women in Tech, Toni Collis takes that question seriously. What a coaching second act really looks like, inside your company, alongside your career, or as the next chapter entirely, what it pays, what it demands, and how to know if it’s for you.

When a client goes quiet, most leaders assume everything is fine. Alisha Esmail would tell you silence is the clients exit ramp — because it's far easier to disappear quietly than to tell someone you're leaving. Alisha is the founder of Latch AI, an AI-native client retention engine, and her path to tech was anything but conventional: seven years in international development across Haiti, South Africa, Nepal, Jordan and Panama, followed by building an award-winning coffee company with direct supply chains across three countries and a micro-loan program supporting female-owned farms. In this episode, Alisha and Toni make the case that retention is not customer success's problem — it's a leadership problem that belongs to everyone. They get into what AI is genuinely doing to the retention landscape, why cutting CS teams has backfired badly for some companies, and the practical diagnostics any leader can run this week regardless of function.

You have “coaching conversations” with your team. Career chats, problem-solving sessions, one-to-ones where you share your experience and point people in the right direction. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of those conversations aren’t coaching. They’re mentoring. Powerful, well-intentioned, and the wrong tool for what you’re trying to build. Because advice creates dependence, and coaching creates capability. In this episode of Leading Women in Tech, Toni Collis breaks down the difference, why it matters more than almost any other leadership skill gap, and how genuine coaching skill transforms your team, your calendar and your career.

Burnout is not caused by too much work. That's the argument at the heart of this episode — and Yana Carstens has earned the right to make it. After 12 years in the design and tech space, and her own burnout behind her, Yana shifted into executive coaching, where she now focuses on burnout prevention and authentic leadership for women in tech. In this conversation, Yana and Toni get into what taking radical responsibility for your own wellbeing actually means — and why most of what we call "wellness" is polishing the car while nobody looks under the hood. They dig into hyper-responsibility, the reflex that makes everything your fault; why rest is a prerequisite for success rather than a reward for it; and how leaders who model genuine wellbeing quietly reset the culture of everyone around them. If you're stepping into a new role, carrying everyone around you, or wondering why the vacation didn't fix it — this one is for you.

Ever looked at an opportunity, a stretch role, a speaking slot, a bold idea, and thought “I could do that”… and then let it pass? And then been quietly furious with yourself weeks later? It probably wasn’t a courage problem. It was an energy problem. In this episode of Leading Women in Tech, Toni Collis introduces the Leadership Energy Model: the relationship between bravery, grit, and confidence, and why understanding it changes how you take on hard things, how you recover from them, and how you lead a team through them.

What outcome are you actually after? It's one of the most important questions a leader can ask — and one most organizations get wrong. Jessi Szurek, Associate Partner at Synthesis, joins Toni for a conversation about outcome-focused leadership, AI adoption done right, and the career-defining skill of speaking up when you're being overlooked. Jessi's path took her from an architecture degree at Cornell to an MBA at NYU, through 17 years at Ernst & Young working across process automation and AI with global financial institutions, to a smaller consulting firm reinventing what client value really means. This episode is full of practical wisdom for anyone leading change, adopting AI, or trying to get clear on what actually matters — plus one of the best examples of calling out being ignored that we've had on the show.