The Courage to Redesign: Start with How You Operate

MONTHLY NEWSLETTER | September 2025

Last month, we explored the permission to disappoint, recognizing that your loyal soldier's strategies, while once helpful, may now be constraining your authentic leadership. The topic resonated with many readers. Thank you to those who shared their own “aha” moments and related to the concept of living from the outside in. Your messages always make my day. I noticed in those emails that same follow-up question emerged several times: "Now what?" So that will be the focus of this week’s post.

You've started questioning how you define success, but you haven't yet built new structures to support an emerging revamped vision for what it means for you to lead authentic authority. This is exactly where you're supposed to be. Now is the perfect moment to move from recognition to redesign. Authentic authority isn't just about shifting your mindset—it’s about intentionally re-engineering how you show up and lead. Think about it as upgrading your operating system, so everything you do has greater alignment.

An executive who called me last week captured this challenge perfectly: "I know I need to stop people-pleasing my way through leadership, but I have no idea what to do instead. I understand the theory of authentic leadership, but I don't know how to actually practice it."

If this resonates with you, you're experiencing what I call the "architecture gap"—the space between knowing you need to lead differently and having the actual structures in place to support that different way of being.

Here's what I've learned: Authentic authority requires conscious design. You can't just stop operating from your loyal soldier's playbook without replacing it with something else. You need new systems that make authentic leadership the easier choice, not the harder one.

AUDIT YOUR CURRENT LEADERSHIP ARCHITECTURE

Before you can redesign your leadership architecture, you need to understand how your current leadership is structured. Your loyal soldier's influence shows up in predictable patterns. Here are a few common examples:

The Over-Commitment Pattern: We pack our calendars with obligations that drain energy but feel impossible to decline. We join committees that don't align with our priorities.
The Perfectionism Pattern: We delay decisions and deliverables until they're flawless, often missing opportunities or burning out our teams. We struggle to delegate because others won't do it "right."
The Harmony-Maintaining Pattern: We manage others' emotions more than leading toward outcomes. We delay difficult conversations until they become crises.
The External Validation Pattern: We measure success primarily through others' reactions. We manage up more than empowering down.

The Audit Questions

Look at your past month and ask yourself:

What percentage of my time was spent on activities I chose versus activities I felt obligated to accept?
How many decisions did I make based on what I believed was right versus what I thought others expected?
When did I feel most energized? When did I feel most drained?
Where did I say yes when I wanted to say no?

The goal isn't self-judgment; it's gaining clarity about exactly how your current systems work so you can consciously redesign them.

DESIGN NEW OPERATING PRINCIPLES

As you followed your loyal soldier, you operated from rules: Always say yes to leadership opportunities. Never let anyone be uncomfortable. Make sure everyone likes the decision before implementing it. The list goes on.

Authentic authority is rooted in principles, flexible guidelines that help you navigate complex situations while staying true to your values. It all starts with personal values. If you haven’t taken the time to define your personal values, you can follow this link to grab the resources for an exercise that will help you with this.

Sample Principle Redesigns

As for redesign your guiding principles, you can do this in a couple of ways: you can choose what you want to stop doing or what you want to start doing. Either way works, pick what seems most realistic for you to implement. Here are a few examples:

Old Rule: Never decline a meeting request from someone senior.
New Principle: I attend meetings where my presence adds unique value or where important decisions affecting my work are being made.

Old Rule: Always smooth over conflict to maintain harmony.
New Principle: I address conflict directly when it's preventing progress or damaging relationships, even if the conversation feels uncomfortable.

Along with figuring out new Principles, you want to pay attention to how you make decisions.

Your Decision-Making Framework

Here's a simple three-question framework for making decisions under pressure:

What does this situation actually require? (Not what would make everyone happy.)
What action aligns with my values? (Even if it's difficult or unpopular.)
What would I choose if I weren't afraid of disappointing people?

RESTRUCTURE YOUR LEADERSHIP ENVIRONMENT

For these new principles to trigger desired changes and make room for authentic authority your environment needs to be organized in a manner that supports different behaviors.

Calendar Architecture

Protect thinking time: Block regular time for strategic thinking. This isn't selfish—it's essential for leading with vision.
Create buffer zones: Build space between meetings for processing and decision-making. Our brain is simply not capable of jumping from one meeting to the next, full stop.
Audit recurring commitments: Which standing meetings and obligations still serve your authentic leadership goals?

Communication Boundaries

Response time expectations: You don't need to be instantly available. Set clear expectations. And please don’t apologize for taking a bit of time to get back to the sender. You can start your reply with something like “thank you for your patience with my reply”.
Meeting participation guidelines: Clarify when you'll attend versus when you'll ask for a summary.
Decision-making processes: Be clear about when you're seeking input versus when you're seeking approval.

NAVIGATE THE TRANSITION DIPLOMATICALLY

The hardest part isn't the internal work—it's managing others' reactions to your changes. People have become accustomed to your loyal soldier's patterns. When you start operating differently, they may experience it as a loss.

Expect pushback. When you stop being endlessly available, some people may feel abandoned or disappointed that they will need to do things themselves. When you start making decisions based on vision rather than universal approval, some people will feel excluded, it’s for them to deal with.

This isn't a sign you're doing something wrong—it's a sign you're doing something different.

Diplomatic Strategies

Be transparent about your evolution: "I'm working on being more strategic about how I spend my time so I can be more effective in my role."

Acknowledge the adjustment: "I know I'm operating a bit differently lately. I'm learning to be more deliberate about priorities and boundaries."

Demonstrate the value: "I've realized that when I try to make everyone happy with a decision, I often end up with solutions that don't really serve anyone well."

YOUR ARCHITECTURE IN ACTION

The goal isn't to become a different person. It's to create structures that support the leader you're becoming, the one that is true to who you are. Structures that make it easier to choose authenticity over approval, vision over consensus, and long-term effectiveness over short-term comfort.

You already know what kind of leader you want to be. Now it's time to build the architecture that makes that leadership sustainable, not just aspirational.

The redesign begins with your next decision. What will you choose?

My final recommendation is to start small! Pick actions you know you can commit to and don’t underestimate the power of small changes, they can have a big impact and they help us build momentum.

Kindly,

THIS MONTH'S REFLECTION QUESTIONS

Auditing Your Current Architecture

What patterns in your leadership feel most draining? Where do you find yourself operating from obligation rather than choice?

Identifying Your Decision Framework

Think of a recent difficult decision you handled in a manner that feels good to you, you feel that it was the right thing to do. What principles guided you? How can you apply those same principles more consistently?

Environmental Design

What one change to your calendar, communication, or decision-making process would best support your authentic leadership?

COMING NEXT MONTH

Next month, we'll explore how to handle the inevitable pushback that comes when people are invested in your old patterns, and the specific conversations that help others adjust to your more authentic leadership.