BlueSky Lisa

A client asked me last week: how do I know when to push back, and when to just let it go?

It's not really a tactical question. Every senior professional I work with can read a room, they know how to choose their battles on paper. What's harder is the moment itself, when something happens and you have half a second to decide whether this is worth spending your capital on.

Push back too often and you become the difficult one, the person whose objections stop landing because there are too many of them. Let too much go and you slowly disappear from the decisions that matter, quietly training the room to expect your silence.

Neither extreme is wrong on its own. What matters is whether the choice is actually yours, made on purpose, or whether it's just the pattern you've fallen into because it's easier than deciding each time.

Has push back or let go, in this exact case, actually been chosen? Or has it just become the default?

I'd love to hear how this resonates with you.

How much of yourself should you adapt to fit the culture around you?

When I began working in Swiss banking, I was Australian, often one of the only women in the room, and learning to operate in an environment very different from the one I had grown up in.

So I adapted.

I became more careful and measured. I paid attention to how decisions were made, who was listened to and what leadership was expected to look like.

Some of that adaptation was valuable. It helped me understand the organisation and work effectively within it.

But over time, I also realised that adapting too far can come at a cost. When you become overly focused on fitting the culture around you, you can lose some of the qualities that make you effective in the first place.

For me, that meant reconnecting with my directness, trusting my own judgement and becoming more comfortable leading in a way that felt natural to me.

I didn't stop adapting. I became more conscious about what I adapted and what I chose to retain.

That distinction made me a better leader.

Where is the line for you between adapting to an organisation and losing too much of yourself?

For years at UBS, in addition to line roles, I also led transformation projects where I had no formal authority over the people I needed to move.

These were change projects, initiatives that ran across divisions, across functions, where the people whose work I needed didn't report to me and had no reason on paper to prioritise what I was asking for.

I remember sitting in a planning meeting, watching a colleague from another business area quietly deprioritise something I'd asked for three weeks earlier, and realising I could either escalate it - and burn the relationship - or work out why it hadn't happened and start again.

I chose the second one. Most days, still would.

What I learned in those years is that influence without authority isn't really about tactics or clever persuasion. It's about earning enough trust and clarity that people choose to follow, because they can see what you're building and want to be part of it.

Is the issue really that you don't have the authority? Or is it that you haven't yet given people a clear enough reason to choose you?

I'd love to hear how this resonates with you.

"How do I become more visible without sounding self-promotional?" is one of the questions I hear most, almost word for word.

Is it really fear underneath that? Or is it a value quietly being protected, humility, maybe, or fairness, the belief that good work should speak for itself?

Is self-promotion actually the same thing as visibility? Talking about yourself, and making sure the right people have accurate information about your work, might not be the same thing at all.

If they're not the same, which value do you think being visible would actually breach?
Looked at honestly, would it really breach that value, or does it just feel that way?

I'd love to hear how this resonates with you.

Reach for the Sky, Lisa

Most of the professionals I work with are already over-performing. That's rarely the issue. They deliver, they're reliable, they get it done, and somewhere along the way that became the whole of their reputation.

"What got me here isn't working anymore" is how one client put it to me. She wasn't wrong about her work. She was right that hard work alone had stopped being the thing that moved her forward.

Here's what I've noticed: reputation isn't something that happens to you as a reward for effort. It's something you decide, and then build, on purpose.

So the real question isn't "am I working hard enough." It's "what's the reputation I actually want, three years from now, and am I doing anything today that builds it."

A couple of questions worth considering:

What are the three words you'd want people to use about you in three years?
Is anything you're doing this week actually building toward that, or just toward getting through it?

I'd love to hear where this lands for you.

Reach for the Sky, Lisa

I was at a leadership retreat in Connecticut once, in a room full of very senior bankers, listening to a man named Marshall Goldsmith.

He said something I'd never heard anyone say in all my years in corporate life: when you change your own behaviour, other people change how they respond to you.

I sat very still. Around me, people were taking notes and moving on. I couldn't move on. I'd spent most of my career adapting, to the room, to the circumstances, to whatever the environment seemed to want, working harder and louder to fit it. I had never once tried changing my own behaviour to change how the environment responded to me.

By then I had a title, a salary, a team, a track record across three continents. On paper, it was all working.

It took two years from deciding to leave to actually leaving. Two years of retraining as a coach alongside a senior executive role, and being honest with myself that walking away from a Managing Director salary takes real courage, whatever else is true.

I left before I turned fifty.

It didn't stay tidy after that. Two years later I said yes to a CFO role, which is an entirely different story. But that retreat is where it actually started. One sentence, in a room I nearly wasn't paying attention in.

Reach for the Sky,
Lisa

You've been meaning to have that conversation for six weeks. The one where you tell someone on your team the role isn't working, or push back on a decision that's already been made, or admit to your own boss that the plan isn't going to land on time.

Every week there's a reason it isn't quite the moment. The team's under pressure. It's nearly year end. You want to see how next quarter goes first.

None of that is exactly false. It's also not exactly true.

There's a question worth asking yourself in moments like this: what is the lie I'm telling myself? Not to be dramatic about it, just to notice the story you've built to make waiting feel sensible, instead of what it actually is, which is avoidance.

The lie is rarely "I'm too scared to do this." It's dressed up better than that. Not the right time. Not enough information yet. Better to be prepared than sorry. All reasonable-sounding. All doing the same job, buying you another week.

Facing the actual truth usually means acting on it, and acting on it is uncomfortable. The lie is comfortable. That's the whole appeal of it.

Worth considering: what have you been putting off, and what's the story you've told yourself about why now still isn't the moment?

Reach for the Sky,
Lisa

You're in the meeting. Someone floats a decision you don't actually agree with. You could push back. Instead you nod, add a small qualifier nobody notices, and let it go through.

Nobody clocks it as anything. You've just been reasonable. Flexible. Easy to work with.

Do that enough times, in enough rooms, over enough years, and one day you're leading a team, running a division, sitting in the seat you worked for, and you can't entirely remember when you started editing yourself to fit the room instead of shaping it.

That's not the same as being adaptable. Adaptability is a genuine strength, arguably the thing that gets most senior people promoted in the first place. Self-betrayal is what adaptability turns into once you stop noticing you're doing it.

The difference isn't whether you flex. It's whether you still know where your own ground is when it matters, and whether you're willing to stand on it.

A couple of questions worth considering:

Where are you currently being flexible because it's smart, and where are you being flexible because pushing back feels like more trouble than it's worth?
If you looked at your last six months of decisions, whose room were you actually shaping, yours or everyone else's?

I'd love to hear what comes up.

Reach for the Sky,
Lisa