Lead to Soar

Reverse mentoring isn't performance management, and poor performers don't belong in mentoring. In this episode Mel 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...

Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her , on women’s anger, tone policing and why resilience training lets organisations off the hook. In this episode Mel 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...

Women are asked to lead hard change without authority, pay, or backing. Mel and Michelle on benevolent neglect. In This Episode Mel 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 ot...

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 th...

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 episode Mel and Michelle discuss a true story from Mic...

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 consu...

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....

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. Tru...

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...

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 emoti...

Are we actually looking at CEOs the right way? No, we're not. We're doing it inside a patriarchal context, inside a capitalist system, and calling the result "world-class." Mel and Michelle went looking for a definition that holds up outside that frame and couldn't find one, so this episode builds one from scratch: BQ as the floor, EQ and SQ as the accelerant, and the safe-pair-of-hands test every...

Being praised as a good team player feels rewarding. Michelle Redfern and Mel Butcher call out what it actually costs this episode: a tax on women who’ve been socialised to say yes, one that rarely shows up in your pay or your title. Two women in engineering consulting were asked to take on more work without extra pay. One agreed to become the “office manager,” took on the workload, and ended up s...

Michelle ran an experiment. She asked Gemini and Claude the same question, at the same time: how do I ask my manager for a pay rise? Gemini's answer was generic and gendered: just be bold, ask for what you want. No mention of the barriers women navigate to be heard as credible in the first place. Claude's answer looked completely different, but not because one platform beats the other. Michelle's...

Mel sits down with English and rhetoric professor Dr Jenny Young, whose Burn the Haystack method teaches women to read the language men use on dating apps for what it actually reveals. This conversation goes well past dating: toxic rhetorical patterns, the "test and apologise" tactic, and why a boss who lowered everyone else's chair three inches is doing the same thing as a man who glares down at...

Executive women are still judged against a narrow idea of what credible leadership looks and sounds like. Warmth can be mistaken for a lack of commercial acumen, authority can be interpreted as aggression, and likeability can become part of an assessment that should be about capability and results. In this episode of Lead to Soar , Michelle Redfern and Mel Butcher explore what happens when women r...

The conversation about non-promotable tasks does not end when women reach the executive table. It just gets more expensive. In Episode 229, Mel and Michelle take the office housework conversation somewhere it rarely goes: into the C-suite and executive tier, where the stakes are higher, the patterns are harder to see, and the costs show up in titles, salary bands, and what you actually spend your...

There's a question Michelle puts to every group of women she works with on leadership reputation: what would your boss say about you? The answers are almost always the same. Helpful. Dependable. Reliable. Great team player. And then silence where strategic, consequential, and trusted with outcomes should be. This episode is about that silence and what breaks it. Mel and Michelle dig into three thi...

The answer most women get when they've outgrown their role is one of two things: be patient, or go find something better. Mel and Michelle don't buy either as a default response. In this episode they work through the third option. Using the real story of a CFO-ready executive who's been blocked by an incumbent boss for two years, they break down three practical moves: closing your readiness gap th...

Radical transparency is not just a leadership style. For women at work, it is a structural advantage. When leaders commit to genuine transparency, the conditions that have historically worked against women start to shift. Pay gaps narrow when salaries are visible. Promotion processes become fair when the criteria are clear. Information networks open up when knowledge is shared, not hoarded. In Epi...

This one is a little different. No frameworks. No research papers. Just Mel and Michelle getting real about what actually sustains them when life is heavy, and the load is relentless. They cover sleep as serious infrastructure, not a lifestyle indulgence. The quiet shift away from alcohol and what that has actually changed. Movement that brings genuine joy rather than punishing obligation. And the...

Job hunting hell is real. Submitting applications into the void, waiting, hearing nothing, wondering what is going wrong. Mel and Michelle are here with the tough love answer. A significant chunk of advertised roles are not real openings. AI-assisted applications are not the edge anyone thinks they are. And online applications are the career equivalent of throwing your CV into the wind. This episo...

Leaders are measuring the wrong things. The work that holds organisations together, the mentoring, the client salvage, the culture-building, the covering, the onboarding, does not fit neatly into a KPI. So it goes uncounted. And the people doing it are, consistently and disproportionately, women. In episode 223, Mel and Michelle make the leadership case for fixing this. Leaders who expect this wor...

A young lawyer has just been pulled aside about her billable hours. Her male partner at the same firm, same credentials, has not had that conversation. He also hasn't been asked to mentor the grads, organise anything, or carry any of the work that holds a team together, but shows up nowhere in the performance data. She has been asked to do all of it. The gap in their billable hours did not happen...

Your boss's brand doesn't stay contained to your boss. If they're seen as an order-taker, someone who receives agendas rather than shaping them, that lens gets applied to your team. Your work gets filtered through their credibility before it reaches anyone with real decision-making power. In Episode 221, Mel and Michelle break down what to do when the people around you don't have the influence you...

What happens when your team is genuinely excellent but the organisation around it is a mess? In this episode, Michelle and Mel unpack a real coaching scenario: a high-performing project management team that had convinced itself the problem was its own communication skills. It wasn't. The problem was accomplishment amnesia, structural invisibility, and a leadership layer that hadn't yet connected d...