Leveraging Leadership
Leadership is messy. Most advice isn't built for the reality of competing priorities, difficult stakeholders, limited time, and imperfect information.
Leveraging Leadership is a practical leadership podcast for Chiefs of Staff, executives, founders, and senior operators who want to lead more effectively and navigate complexity with confidence.
Hosted by Emily Sander, former Chief of Staff and executive advisor, each episode delivers real-world lessons, practical frameworks, and candid conversations with leaders across business and beyond.
Topics include executive communication, leadership presence, decision-making, delegation, organizational influence, operating rhythms, team effectiveness, and the often-unspoken challenges leaders face behind the scenes.
If you're looking for thoughtful conversations, practical takeaways, and leadership advice you can actually use on Monday morning, you're in the right place.
Leveraging Leadership
Consultants as Chiefs of Staff: Using Big Picture Thinking for Real Results
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Emily Sander talks about how consultants who become Chief of Staff often excel at big-picture thinking and mapping companywide projects, but tend to get stuck over-analyzing instead of taking action. She shares real stories of consultants perfecting charts and data while delaying implementation, and suggests asking yourself if you need to "think more or do more" to avoid getting in your own way. The episode highlights both the strengths and blind spots consultants bring to the Chief of Staff role.
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Who Am I?
If we haven’t met before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.
Time Stamps:
00:25 Background Shapes Your Lens
01:14 Consultant Superpowers
02:14 Analysis Paralysis Trap
02:58 Start Imperfectly
04:37 Think More Or Do More
05:48 Stop Getting In Your Way
07:09 Pretty Charts Vs Progress
09:13 Stakeholders And Big Picture
11:46 Wrap Up And Sponsor
Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, chief of staff to an executive leadership coach. This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you.
Background Shapes Your Lens
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850A lot of former consultants become chiefs of staff, which is neither good nor bad per se, but whatever route you take to becoming chief of staff, your background experience training will inform how you approach that role and what you see and what you don't see, and what you think of and what you don't think of, and your natural default or tendency towards things versus other people's. So just know that going in. So f- uh, any which way you've become chief of staff, know that that's a thing, right? Your background experience is gonna dictate some of the lens and how you look in, look at things and how you perceive things in your current role. This makes sense when people say it out loud, but it's often good to remind people of this because it's like, "Oh yeah, that's, that makes logical sense, but I totally forgot that I have a inherent bias in whatever I'm doing."
Consultant Superpowers
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850I have worked with many, many, many consultants who have become chiefs of staff. One of the great things that consultants bring is they see across the board. So a consultant and chief of staff often have to see across the company, company-wide initiatives, multiple departments, multiple stakeholders, multiple constituents, multiple, "Okay, this has a interdependency here, and if I push over here, this is gonna bulge out over here, and if I take this away over here, that's gonna decrease their thing over there," and they can see the big picture. And they are very good typically at mapping the whole picture. Like, "Let me sh- let me show you. Like, let me go collect data and also put that in a easy-to-understand visual or a spreadsheet or a graph or just an easy to c- easy-to-consume information for you to, for you to look at." That's awesome. Where they tend to, and these are all generalities, right?
Analysis Paralysis Trap
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850But where they tend to be less instinctive is, "Here's, here's all the data I've collected. Here's my recommendation. Now go. Go. Go make it happen. Go implement it. Go start. Start with the teams. Go do something." "Well, I gotta tinker with it. I wanna slice and dice some more data. I wanna run some more charts. I wanna do some beautiful pie charts and Gantt charts and more analysis and some research and some prettiness and some meetings and a little bit of some more meetings. I wanna check with these people, too, and, like, with the board and with the principal." And like, you're like, "Holy cow." Like, okay, like, we've analyzed this thing to death and you have pretty charts and pretty words and pretty color-coded things, but we haven't done anything. Like, go do the thing. "Well, I just wanna make sure..." No, no, no, no.
Start Imperfectly
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850Just, like, start. Start imperfectly, and then your charts and analysis and your research might have to change, and that's okay. Iterate as you go. But a lot of consultants get into, "I'm gonna analyze this thing to death. Analyzing it with rigor is important, and good, and positive, and more people should probably be doing that. Consultants tend to be very good at that. Consultants tend to not implement things. And I know there's, like, a whole subset of consultants going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa," like, "I implemented stuff, Emily." Fine. Great. Good for you. Pat on the head. A lot of consultants are taught and are paid for, here's the problem set, here's the map of the thing, here's how to fix it, now you go do it. And they get paid for that, and that's what they're trained to do. Okay, so if you're trained to do that, and if you've done that over and over and over again with success, and you move into a new role, it's probably gonna be what you tend to do or what you default toward doing. And so just know that if you're a consultant making this jump, that oftentimes it is the, "Oh, I've gotta actually implement that thing, and I might have to be implementing the first steps of the process while I am collecting data on some of the other pieces Sometimes th- more thinking is good. Lots of people can stand to be more thoughtful in life, in business, in everything. Just take a little bit more time and be thoughtful, have some care with things, think things through, ask some questions, think through scenario... All that, all that is great. All that is great.
Think More Or Do More
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850Sometimes you wanna think more, and sometimes you wanna do more. So one question you can ask yourself right now, ask this of yourself, ask this of your team: Do I need to think more or do I need to do more? Does my team need to be more thoughtful about this here, or do they need to take more action right now? That's a good question to ask yourself as a, on a ongoing basis, right? Do I need to think about this more? Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I am... Like, if I'm, in my heart of hearts right now, I'm, like, chomping at the bit. I'm jumping the gun. I want, I want this done. I wanna, I wanna show this thing, but in my heart of hearts, I know I should probably slow my roll. Okay, let me think about this. Let me have a meeting with the team about this. Let's talk about it. Other times it's like, if I'm, if I'm really being honest with myself, like, I feel the compulsion to think about this some more, and I want some more charts, and I want some more meetings, and I want some more validation that this is the right track, and we've already done that. Like, we've had eight meetings on this thing that are kind of the same, and it's just for making me and some other people feel better when really we need to go. We need to go, and we need to go right now. So have that question always in the background a little bit.
Stop Getting In Your Way
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850Um, a, a similar question to that, which I would al- uh, often get asked by my coaches when I was chief of staff, and I still do now, is, "Emily, where are you getting in your own way?" Oh, darn it. Yes, okay, there, there, and there. Got it. Okay. Changing course. So where are you getting in your own way? Where are you I mean, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably have a high s- high self-awareness. You probably know what you're good at, what you tend to not be so good at, where your default modes tend to take you, and where you need to grow in order to get better. So just apply a heavy dose of that self-awareness and go, "All right," look at myself in the mirror, "Where am I getting in my own way here? Seriously." All right, and then even though it doesn't feel good, you gotta do something differently, 'cause if you're doing the same thing over and over again, we all know definition of insanity, so you gotta change it. You gotta break the loop. "Okay, I don't like this. It's not my default mode. It's not what I'm trained to do, but in this particular case, we gotta go. In this particular case, whoa, whoa, whoa, pull back. Pull... Whoa. Pull the team back. Slow, slow down. Slow down. That's an irretrievable mistake we couldn't reverse if we got it wrong. Slow it down, slow it down, slow it down." Okay, um, back to the consultant angle.
Pretty Charts Vs Progress
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850This is just something I see over and over and over again. Uh, I've had consultants doing coaching sessions with me, and they're showing me so many pretty charts, and seriously, these things are, like, beautiful. It's like, wow, that is really gorgeous to look at. Yeah, what if you slice the data like that? Ooh, what if you pivot ta- ooh, what if you, like, did it like that, and you cross-sectioned it like that, and you crosswalked it here, and you did change vectors, and, like, all these different... Oh, my gosh. Like, this is beautiful. It's like, yeah, but, like, what has actually happened on the ground in the last six weeks since you showed me this, this... the last version of this chart? "Well, you know, we had to th- you know, I wanted to think about... I wanted to cut this data like this, and I wanted to meet with these people." I'm like, "Yeah, but, you're, like, you're already behind schedule. Like, you gotta, you gotta go." "Well, we're getting new team members in, and I wanted to get, like, their input and blah, blah, blah." Like, yeah, that's great, but you gotta do that on the fly sometimes. So I just sit in a lot of these conversations where it's like, oh my gosh, so pretty. So, so, so pretty, and you gotta go. You gotta go now. And it's like, okay, once I started, then, you know, once I started, I got actual information, and once I started, the discussion with the team changed because they saw something in motion. They saw something on the ground. Oh, this is actually moving on the ground. Okay. So-and-so isn't talking about this in theory or in concept or kind of flow charts and project plans. Okay, that's nice to see in concept once, but I, I can't really give you any more information because I don't really know what that looks like or feels like on the ground for me and my team. But once you start, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're going down the road. Okay, now I have some input. Now I have some more real-time conversations with you, and, uh, I can see that happening on the ground, and I, I like this part of it, and I really don't like that part of it. I did not intend for that part of it to happen that way, so let's have a conversation. So you might get more actionable intelligence when you just start. So always be iterating, always be having conversations, but sometimes it's time to go. Okay.
Stakeholders And Big Picture
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850But I do wanna say, uh, many times consultants are very skilled at, again, seeing the big picture, seeing across department lines, really understanding interdependencies and workflows. They can usually put together a really good project management, like here's, you know, this, these, this is gonna take eight months, so we gotta g- eight month lead time for this piece of it. Right here we gotta start on this next week, on this next month, and they can map that all out, which is, which is awesome. If you don't have anyone like that in your team and in your org, that's, that can be a little tough. That can be rough. So if you have someone with this training, with this background, that's, that can be very positive. The other thing that many consultants, not all, not all of them, some of them fall on their face, but many consultants that I've come across at least, are very good at stakeholder management. So they're not only good at mapping the different stakeholders and interdependencies, but they can often, um Have good conversations with various stakeholders. One about collecting and, and getting true data. So not just, let me ask some- someone a surface level question, get a surface level answer, maybe an answer they think I want to hear or that I... or they think they're supposed to give, but really get to the true state of things, get accurate data. And they're also able to explain and negotiate in a sense of, "Here's the overall puts and takes that we're dealing with, and so here's why your thing is getting delayed. But here's the big picture of it. It's getting delayed, but in the long run you want this because of X, Y, and Z. Because look, I know it's painful for the n- next nine months, and you're gonna have to sit in front of your team and explain like why you guys don't get this thing and other teams are getting their things. But in 12 months, let me tell you, you're gonna be a freaking hero, and you're gonna be able to do this, this, and this with the tool, this, this, and this with your customers, and this, this, and this with your team. And so because we're doing it this way, you get that big payoff in 12 months." Like, they're often able to have those kind of conversations. I know, um, a former consultant right now I'm working with, and she is just so, so good with people, and strong personalities don't bother her, and they can send her into any group setting, uh, any group facilitation. She knows if there's a problem between teams, she'll be able to resolve it. She has that confidence in herself and people have that confidence in her, and that's just a really strong place to be and a strong player to have on your
Wrap Up And Sponsor
emily-sander_2_06-23-2026_125850team. So all by way of saying, I've worked with just a l- I've worked with and I've heard from and spoken to so many former consultants who move into chief of staff roles, and these are just some of the trends I tend to see. Are there exceptions? Of course. Of course there are. But these are just the trends that I tend to see. So if you're in that bucket where it's like, "Hey, huh, that's funny. I'm a consultant and I'm kind of tinkering around with maybe becoming a chief of staff. What kinds of things should I be thinking about? What do I bring to bear in a positive way and what might n- I need to change up?" Those are some things you can, you can think about and consider. If you are in a chief of staff role and you have a consulting background and you're like, "Yeah, I keep kind of getting stuck on this, like, one thing with the team over and over again, and it tends to be around, oh, yeah, I mean, looking back, looking back at my, my time as chief of staff, if I had taken to action sooner it would have been better in these five things I can look back and do a postmortem on. Yeah, we got there in the end. It was fine. It was to- it was fine, totally fine, but if I would've moved, like, two months sooner on that thing, we could've been that much more ahead. So kind of thinking through those pieces. Um, so yeah, if you're a consultant thinking about chief of staff, if you are a chief of staff with former consulting background or anything around the edges, these might just be food-for-thought items for you to, to consider and mull around. So anyway, hopefully that's helpful or makes you think about something you didn't think about before, and I will catch you next week on Leveraging Leadership.
This episode is brought to you by Next Level Coaching. If you or anyone you know would like to learn more about executive leadership coaching, please visit www.next level Coach.