Welcome And What To Expect

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Welcome to the 12-Minute Leadership Podcast, where in 12 minutes or less, I'll share small things that you can put into immediate practice that will make a big difference in your leadership effectiveness. I'm your host, Elise Boggs Morales, leadership professor, consultant, and coach. For the last 17 years, I have helped thousands of leaders level up their influence and achieve remarkable results. If you want to treat compliance for true commitment and create your dream team, you are in the right place. Get ready for a quick hit of practical wisdom to increase your team's engagement, inspire top performance, and retain your best talent. Ready to level up your influence and get better results? 12 Minutes starts now. Hi everyone, Elise here. Welcome back to the podcast.

Why This Women In Leadership Series

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Today we're beginning a new series focused on empowering women in leadership. If you are a male senior or executive leader, I encourage you to listen to all of the episodes in this three-part series because I believe it will give you the insights to better understand the female leaders on your team, how you can best leverage their talent, and how to effectively support their development and career success. I'll also address the women specifically, how women can grow their confidence, influence, and leadership presence without feeling like they have to become someone else to succeed. This topic is especially important to me not only because I am a female leader who has successfully navigated a career within more male-dominated industries, but the topic is currently front of mine because I recently gave a keynote to a room full of female leaders on this exact subject. The response was incredibly strong, not because these women lacked capability, quite the opposite. These were intelligent, accomplished, high-performing women. But underneath all of that capability was something I hear often. I know I have more to contribute, but sometimes I still hesitate to use my voice. Whether it's the way we are socialized, individual personalities, or something else, I think a lot more women experience this than people realize. This is especially true in environments that are highly competitive, fast moving, or predominantly male. As I mentioned earlier, I know that world well. Throughout most of my career, I've worked in male-dominated industries and alongside very strong personalities. Today, I also spend much of my time coaching senior leaders and executives, and about 80% of my one-on-one coaching clients are men. So I've had a unique opportunity to see both sides, what women are navigating internally, and how leadership environments often shape confidence and influence externally. So today, I want to talk about why so many highly capable women still struggle to find their voice in leadership and what their male counterparts can do to support them.

Confidence Is Built Not Born

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One insight I've learned is that confidence is often misunderstood. I think one of the biggest misconceptions about confidence is that some people naturally have it and others don't. We look at confident leaders and assume she's just naturally confident. What I've seen over and over again is this confidence is rarely something people are born with. It's something that is built. And often it's built through things like experience, self-awareness, resilience, and learning to trust themselves over time. Here's where I think many women struggle. A lot of highly capable women are constantly evaluating themselves while they lead. Second guessing, over-editing, replaying conversations afterward, questioning whether they sounded smart enough, direct enough, likable enough, confident enough, that internal noise can affect how they show up. Another insight I've gained is that capability and confidence are not the same thing. This is important. You can be extremely capable and still hesitate to use your voice. You can be intelligent and still doubt yourself in high-stakes rooms. You can be experienced and still hold back your perspective. I saw this firsthand when I asked the women attending my keynote session a question and no one raised their hand. When I train leaders within companies and have a mixed crowd of men and women, I have often witnessed the same thing. Women are not often the first to raise their hands. And I know this is not because they lack leadership ability. It's often because somewhere along the way they learn to become very aware of how they're perceived, especially in environments where they feel different from the dominant leadership culture. Often this comes from the pressure to lead correctly. I think many women feel an unspoken pressure to lead correctly, not too emotional, not too direct, not too quiet, not too assertive, not too accommodating. That balancing act has become exhausting. Instead of simply leading, they're constantly managing perception. And over time, that can disconnect people from their natural leadership strengths. I know early in my career, I thought I needed to lead more like the leaders around me in order to be taken seriously. Maybe it was more forceful or more rigid, less relational. And while some of those behaviors created short-term results, something always felt off because I wasn't leading authentically. I was performing leadership, and people can't connect with that. What I've learned is that self-awareness is the foundation. One of the things I shared in the keynote is this confidence is built through self-awareness, not perfection, self-awareness. Knowing your strengths, your patterns, your blind spots, your value, and the impact you have on others. When you truly know yourself, you stop relying so heavily on external validation to determine your worth as a leader.

Stop Managing Perception Start Leading

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You become more grounded, more consistent, more intentional, and people feel that. Another thing I often see women doing is undervaluing their feminine strengths that are actually incredibly powerful in leadership. Things like relational intelligence, emotional awareness, collaboration, empathy, being able to read the undercurrents in a room, and building trust. These are not soft leadership skills, these are strategic leadership skills, especially today. The best leaders are not simply technically strong. They know how to navigate people, they know how to get buy-in, they know how to create trust, they know how to influence. And many women are naturally strong in these areas, but often underestimate their value because they don't always look like traditional leadership stereotypes. Another challenge I see frequently is overperforming. A lot of high-achieving women become incredibly responsible. They carry everything, they overfunction, they say yes too often, they take on emotional labor nobody else notices. Externally, it can look impressive, but internally, it often creates exhaustion. And exhaustion quietly erodes confidence. It's very difficult to feel grounded, clear, and confident when you're chronically overextended. Sometimes the issue isn't capability, it's capacity. That's an important distinction. So it actually builds confidence. Not pretending, not performing, not becoming louder. Confidence grows when your leadership becomes more aligned with who you actually are. You understand your value clearly. You stop trying to lead like someone else. And you build the ability to navigate discomfort without compromising yourself. That's real and grounded confidence.

Practical Support From Men And Next Steps

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And I also want to say something to the male leaders listening. One of the best things male leaders can do is recognize that confidence does not always present itself the same way. Some incredibly capable women may not self-promote aggressively. They may not dominate meetings, they may not communicate in the same style as some of the men around them. That does not mean they lack leadership potential. Sometimes it means their strengths present differently. And strong organizations learn how to recognize and develop a broader range of leadership strengths, not just the loudest voices in the room. Given these differences, if I were to coach the male leaders in the room, I would say one of the best things that you can do is to invite your female leaders to contribute in meetings, verbalize their value, and be intentional in creating opportunities to discuss their career goals and development opportunities. For the women's side of things, come prepared to meetings. Bring solutions and ideas that add value. Raise your hand first. Ask for feedback from those you know and trust so you know where you're hitting the mark and where you can grow. And be intentional in setting up time with your leaders to communicate your desired career path and asking for clear feedback on how to get there. So here's a question I want to leave with the female leaders today. Where are you editing yourself unnecessarily as a leader? Where are you holding back your voice? Where are you trying so hard to lead correctly that you've stopped leading authentically? Your leadership becomes far more powerful when it comes from a grounded understanding of who you are, not who you think you should be. And for the male leaders, here's some questions for you. Do I unintentionally equate confidence with a specific communication style? Am I developing leaders?