Episode 37: The Quiet Shift in Leadership: What Today's Best Leaders Are Doing Differently
Welcome, welcome to the People-Forward Leadership Podcast.
If you've been following Season 4, you know I've had the privilege of sitting down with some extraordinary leaders.
A Chief Nurse navigating the nursing workforce crisis at one of Oregon's largest health systems. A third-generation transit CEO reshaping public transportation from the inside out. A brand executive at one of the world's most recognized airlines, translating strategy into what frontline employees actually do under pressure. A philanthropic leader stewarding a two-billion-dollar commitment to cancer research. A nonprofit executive who has built 12-plus years of uninterrupted mentorship for youth who need it most. And an executive commercial leader in biopharma, building teams that perform at the highest level inside a very complex organizational structure.
Six leaders. Six industries. Six very different systems.
But across all of those conversations, a common thread kept showing up.
And it wasn't strategy. Or operational excellence. Or even talent acquisition — though all of those came up.
The common thread was awareness.
Specifically, the awareness leaders have — or sometimes don't have — about themselves.
That's why today I want to talk about what I'm calling the quiet shift in leadership. I'm starting here because it's the foundation of our People-Forward Leadership™ framework — and because it's the thing we've seen leaders struggle with most.
Most leaders aren't as self-aware as they think they are.
Not because they're not intelligent. Not because they're not committed.
But because self-awareness is genuinely hard to develop. And most leadership cultures never actually train for it — or ask for it.
We focus on competencies. On credentials. On performance metrics. But rarely do leaders stop and ask foundational questions like: How am I showing up? What unchecked stories are guiding my behavior? And what impact does all of that create on the people around me?
That gap — between how leaders see themselves and how their teams actually experience them — is often the single biggest obstacle to everything else. Trust. Retention. Performance. Culture.
It all runs through self-awareness.
And what I loved across every conversation this season is that the leaders getting the most extraordinary results all talked about how they're continuously doing this work. They weren't just leading with authority. They were leading with something far less visible and so much more powerful.
Self-awareness.
Humility.
Vulnerability.
And the willingness to ask: what am I bringing to this room? And is it what my people actually need?
So what does that actually look like in practice?
When I sat down with Dr. Kecia Kelly — Senior Vice President and Chief Nurse at Legacy Health, overseeing more than 5,000 nurses across clinical operations, philanthropy, pharmacy, and environmental care — I expected to hear about systems and strategy.
What I got was a masterclass in self-awareness as a leadership instrument.
She said something early in our conversation that I keep thinking about:
Leadership is a natural tendency. Management is something you can learn.
On the surface that sounds like a distinction about skills. But what she's really saying is that self-knowledge — knowing who you fundamentally are, what you're drawn to, how you're wired — is itself a form of leadership development.
She had to learn that the hard way. Early in her career, she decided she wasn't cut out for leadership. The military model she'd been trained in felt binary. She didn't have the tools to lead with nuance. So she walked away. Spent eight years in pharmaceutical sales.
And within less than a year of returning to clinical nursing — she was back in a leadership role.
Not because she sought it. Because the tendency was always there. And until she understood that about herself, she couldn't build on it.
That's self-awareness as a foundation. Knowing your own nature clearly enough to stop running from it.
But the deeper work came later.
Dr. Kelly described sitting in meetings for hours without saying a word. Not disengaged. Processing.
Early in her career, that silence was misread as indifference. As disengagement. Even as arrogance.
She could have spent her career defending that misperception. Or worse — forcing herself to perform a version of leadership that didn't match how she actually thinks.
Instead, she did the harder thing. She got curious about herself.
She examined how her introversion showed up. What it looked like to others. Where it served her — and where it was creating distance she didn't intend.
And that examination changed everything about how she led other people.
Because once she understood her own processing style — really understood it — she stopped projecting it onto her team. She stopped assuming the quiet person in the room wasn't contributing. She started asking: who is this person, and how do they do their best thinking?
She started creating space for different thinking styles — because she finally understood her own.
That is what self-awareness in leadership actually looks like. Not a personality assessment sitting unexplored on a shelf. Not a one-off retreat reflection that fades by Monday morning. But a continuous, honest examination of who you are — and the discipline to let what you discover change how you lead.
And here's what that produced for Dr. Kecia Kelly.
Her team built a coaching model that grew nurse onboarding capacity by 300%. Their two-year retention rate for nurses sits at 93% — in an industry where the national average hovers around 20 to 24%. The pharmacy team she trusted with real ownership transformed a business unit that was losing three million dollars a year into one projected to generate close to forty million.
None of that happened because she led with a strategy document.
It happened because a leader did the inner work first. She knew herself well enough to get out of her own way. To trust the expertise of the people around her. To create the conditions for others to bring their full potential to the work.
That's the return on self-awareness.
Shawn Donaghy, the CEO of North County Transit District in San Diego, came into leadership with something most leaders never have.
A front-row seat.
He's a third-generation transit CEO. His grandfather led a transit organization. His father led one too. He grew up going to work with his dad, watching how leaders handled things. He spent family reunions listening to his father and grandfather talk about the industry — what it was for, what it required, how to do it well.
If anyone should have walked into leadership fully formed, it was Shawn.
And he still had a significant blind spot.
Early in his career, he was so driven to build an excellent team that he didn't see what he was doing to the people outside of it. He was championing his group so hard that others in the organization felt like they didn't belong. Like leadership only cared about one corner of the house.
A leader finally pulled him aside and told him directly: you're going about this all wrong. You're isolating people. You're not managing your emotional intelligence in the workplace.
That's the nature of blind spots. They're not visible from the inside. They require feedback, honest relationships, and — most critically — the willingness to actually hear what's being reflected back.
Shawn heard it. And rather than defending himself or moving on, he turned that moment into a practice.
His deputy CEO has a phrase he still carries: walk in wisdom.
What does that mean? Before he walks into a difficult situation, he asks: when have I been in this place before? When did I get this wrong? What did I learn that I can bring forward now?
That's self-awareness applied in real time. Not just as reflection — as navigation.
And here's an important distinction worth naming: self-awareness and self-criticism are not the same thing. In fact, they're opposites.
Self-criticism asks: what's wrong with me? It keeps you stuck in shame.
Self-awareness asks: what can I learn from this? It keeps you moving forward.
In my work with leaders, this distinction matters enormously. When leaders believe that acknowledging a mistake makes them look weak — when they haven't done the thought management work around that — self-reflection turns into self-attack. And that's not growth. That's just a different kind of stuck.
A daily self-reflective practice works because it builds the muscle of honest examination without turning inward into criticism. Get in the habit of asking yourself — what did I do well? Where did I face challenges? What would I do differently? What did I learn about myself, and about others?
Notice those questions are curious. Not condemning. They're designed to build awareness, not wound it.
Shawn also made a decision early on that his mistakes wouldn't be private. He told me he's stood in front of 300 employees and said: I got that wrong. Here's what I was thinking. Here's where I missed it. What do we do differently now?
That's a leader who has done enough self-examination to be secure in his own imperfection.
And what that kind of leadership creates in a culture is profound.
Permission to be human. Permission to fail forward. Permission to say: I see something that isn't working, and I trust that naming it won't be used against me.
That culture of permission doesn't come from a policy or a value statement.
It comes from a leader who modeled it first.
Now let's take this into a completely different industry.
Carla Jeter leads People-Forward brand strategy for Delta Air Lines — which means her job is translating strategy into what frontline employees actually do on a Tuesday at 6 a.m. when everything is moving fast.
And when she was first brought in to lead complex initiatives supporting Delta's flight attendants, she made a decision most leaders wouldn't make.
She became flight attendant qualified.
She worked alongside them. Not to prove something. But to understand.
That decision didn't come from a strategy playbook. It came from a deep self-knowledge. Carla knows, fundamentally, that she's people-first at her core. She genuinely believes that trust — real trust, the kind that makes execution possible — cannot be built from a distance. It has to be earned through proximity and respect for the expertise of the people you're leading.
That's not a tactic she read in a book. That's a leader who knows her own values clearly enough to act on them — even when the action is unconventional.
Once she understood the work from the inside out — and earned the respect of the flight attendants alongside her — she was able to translate their needs into cross-functional action in a way that simply wasn't possible from a distance.
She said it plainly: trust starts with proximity and respect for the expertise around the table.
Carla also knows the shadow side of her strength.
In the People-Forward Leadership™ framework, we talk about this often — every strength casts a shadow. And the shadow side of being a people-first leader is the instinct to be a people-pleaser. To want to satisfy everyone. To avoid the uncomfortable decision rather than just make it.
Carla named that directly. Her instinct to please can blur the decisions that need to be made clearly. So she's had to develop the discipline to name constraints out loud. To sequence work intentionally. To say: here's what we're prioritizing, and here's what we're not.
This is a leader who knows herself well enough to manage the shadow of her own strength.
And that same self-awareness drives another practice she's built into her team culture — one that has nothing to do with managing weakness, and everything to do with staying in a posture of openness and genuine learning.
She created what she calls vulnerable moments in team meetings. A dedicated space where anyone can share what's on their mind — inside or outside of work.
And she always goes first.
Not because she has to. Because she knows that psychological safety isn't created by announcing it. It's created by modeling it. By being the first one in the room willing to be human.
That is self-awareness turned outward. Not just to understand yourself — but to build the conditions where your team can bring their full selves to the work.
And at Delta, where the brand lives or dies in what frontline employees do under pressure, that's not just a culture initiative.
It's a competitive advantage.
Kate Azizi, President of the OHSU Foundation, came to her leadership with a different kind of self-awareness story.
Not a moment of correction. A moment of recognition.
Early in her career, Kate was working in financial services. Good job. Stable. Respectable. And completely wrong for her.
She knew it because of what she noticed about herself outside of work. The things that gave her genuine energy weren't in the office. They were in volunteer work. Running races for charity. Teaching English as a second language. Working with nonprofits.
That contrast — between what drained her and what lit her up — was data.
And she was self-aware enough to act on it.
She watched a program on PBS about a hospital initiative helping children, picked up the phone, cold called the person featured in it, and offered to help for free on her lunch breaks and evenings.
Not because she had a plan. Because she knew herself well enough to follow what actually mattered to her.
That willingness to act on self-knowledge — even when it requires a pay cut and a leap into the unknown — is what she calls following your North Star. And she's carried that orientation into every leadership decision since. Including stewarding Phil and Penny Knight's two-billion-dollar gift to the Knight Cancer Institute at OHSU.
But Kate is also a people-first leader. And she knows the shadow of that strength well.
The instinct to bring everyone along. To build consensus. To wait until the moment is perfect. She calls it analysis paralysis.
And she's built a deliberate practice to counter it. Her team's operating principle this year is a single word: bold.
Not reckless. Bold.
Taking smart risks. Sharing ideas before they're fully formed. Moving forward at 80% rather than waiting for 100%.
She told me about a donor who was ready to make a significant gift to a cause OHSU was uniquely positioned to support. But the process of getting the right people in the room, building the right presentation, waiting for the perfect moment — took too long. By the time they were ready, that donor had given the gift to another organization.
Gone. Not because of bad strategy. Because good intentions moved too slowly.
Kate carries that story not as a wound but as a compass.
Self-awareness, according to Kate, isn't just about knowing your strengths and shadows. It's about knowing when your caution is wisdom — and when it's fear wearing a very professional disguise.
And building the discipline to tell the difference.
And then there was Donishea Martinez, an executive leader at Genentech, who gave me one of the most practical self-awareness practices I've heard in a long time.
Every morning, before the day starts, she takes quiet time. A moment to get grounded before she pours into anyone else.
And before she walks into any significant meeting, she stops and asks herself one question:
What's my role in this room?
Not what do I want to say. Not how do I want to show up.
What does this room actually need from me right now?
Am I here to listen?
Am I here to lead?
Am I here to guide?
Am I here to push back?
Because what she knows about herself — clearly, honestly — is that she is a natural dissenter. She is wired to question, to challenge, to push.
And in some rooms, that is exactly what's needed.
But in other rooms, it wasn't what the moment required.
And without that pause — without that deliberate act of self-examination before she walked through the door — she would default to her wiring every time. Regardless of what the room actually needed.
That is the quiet shift in leadership.
Not changing who you are.
But becoming conscious enough of who you already are to choose how you show up — rather than just reacting from instinct.
And then there's the perspective Traci Rossi, Executive Director of Friends of the Children, offered to close this conversation.
Traci has led one of Portland's most admired nonprofits for over a decade. Eleven consecutive years recognized as the most admired nonprofit in the region. Built on a 12-plus year commitment to youth — no matter what.
When I asked her what she'd learned about herself recently as a leader, she told me about a pen.
A friend gave it to her at a girls' trip. It said: take up space.
And her first instinct was — yes. Absolutely.
But she sat with it. And she found herself rewriting it.
Not take up space.
Create space.
That single reframe is a distilled version of everything this episode has been about.
Taking up space is about you as a leader. Your voice. Your seat at the table. Your right to be present and visible and heard. And that work matters — especially for women and leaders of color who have historically been told to make themselves smaller.
But creating space is about what you do with your presence once you have it.
It's the shift from asking — how do I show up?
To asking — what do I make possible for others when I do?
Traci told me that when opportunities come her way now — board seats, speaking invitations, leadership roles — her first thought is: I have people who should be considered for this. People who don't have the platform yet.
That's not selflessness.
That's self-awareness at its most evolved.
Knowing yourself clearly enough to know when your greatest contribution isn't occupying the space.
But opening it.
So let me bring this all together.
Because across six very different leaders, in six very different industries, I heard the same thing.
Not the same strategy. Not the same framework. The same foundation.
Kecia Kelly spent years figuring out that her introversion wasn't a liability — it was a thinking style. And when she finally understood that about herself, she stopped misreading the quiet people on her team. She started building cultures where different kinds of minds could do their best work. And the results followed.
Shawn Donaghy had a front-row seat to leadership his entire life — and still had a blind spot that someone had to hold a mirror up to show him. He could have defended himself. Instead he turned that moment into a practice. Walk in wisdom. And then he made his mistakes public — standing in front of 300 employees and saying: I got that wrong. That vulnerability became the permission his whole culture needed.
Carla Jeter knew herself well enough to know that trust couldn't be built from a distance. So she strapped herself into a jump seat. She knew her shadow well enough to name it — the instinct to please, to smooth things over, to keep everyone comfortable. She built practices that kept her honest. And she went first in every vulnerable moment so her team knew it was safe to follow.
Kate Azizi knew herself well enough to know that her people-first instinct — her desire to bring everyone along, to wait until the moment was perfect — was a genuine strength that could also rob her mission of momentum. So she built a single word into her team's culture: bold. Moving forward at 80% rather than waiting for 100% — because she'd learned that good intentions moving too slowly can be their own form of failure.
Donishea Martinez built a single question into her daily practice that changed everything about how she showed up: what does this room need from me right now? Not what do I want to give. What does this moment actually require.
And Traci Rossi sat with a pen that said take up space — and rewrote it to say create space. Because she knows herself well enough now to know that her greatest contribution isn't occupying the room. It's opening it.
Six leaders. Six different paths to the same place.
The willingness to see themselves clearly — and let what they saw change how they led.
That is the quiet shift in leadership.
Not louder strategy.
Not bigger authority.
Not more control.
A deeper, more honest relationship with yourself — so you can build a more honest, more effective relationship with the people you lead.
And here's what makes this shift so significant right now.
We are leading in one of the most complex moments organizations have ever faced. Workforce shifts. Generational complexity. Technology transformation. Competing pressures from every direction.
And in the middle of all of that complexity — the leaders who are performing at the highest levels aren't the ones with the most answers.
They're the ones with the most awareness.
Of themselves.
Of their people.
Of what the moment actually requires.
And it all starts with the first pillar of the People-Forward Leadership™ framework: Leader Awareness.
Thank you for joining me for this conversation on The Quiet Shift in Leadership.
If this episode resonated with you, share it with a leader in your world — emerging or established. Invite them to listen and find their own takeaways. Because this work lands differently depending on where you are in your journey, and the conversation it sparks is often where the real growth happens.
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In our next episode, we're going to explore why leadership development fails — and what actually works. Be sure to tune in.
Until next time, keep leading people forward.
I'll see you soon.
