Strategies: 3 tools that help women leaders build clarity, collaboration and openness

In 2025, I asked more than 40 leaders across business sectors to uncover common themes in how women and men experience organizational uncertainty. While both sexes reported high levels of confusion and reactivity within their teams, women were twice as likely to recognize three additional pain points including: siloed achievements, a scarcity mindset, and exhaustion.

While men often focused on surface-level symptoms such as firefighting and stress, women more frequently identified the deeper structural issues beneath them. I discovered that women tend to notice and internalize disconnection more often, in fact twice as often. Because they often lead with higher emotional intelligence and empathy, that awareness helps them recognize when silos and scarcity mindsets are building.

What leaders really want

So, what would leadership feel and look like if these pain points were reframed? Female participants expressed that in a perfect world scenario, they would like to go from confusion to clarity; silos to collaboration; a scarcity mindset to openness; and exhaustion to energy.

There are three practical tools leaders can begin using immediately to create organizational change:

1) Get on the balcony

To move from confusion to clarity, I borrowed from Harvard’s Ronald Heifetz’s mindset of “getting on the balcony.”  This concept encourages leaders to step out of the emotional fray of their workplace and observe themselves and their teams from the balcony and at a strategic distance. It’s about balancing empathy with perspective—moving above the action to gain clarity while also regularly returning to the stage and their teams to re-engage on the ground.

2) Ask the magical delegation question

To tear down siloes and build collaboration, ask: What am I uniquely qualified to do? The rest can be delegated. This way of filtering what is on a leader’s plate not only frees up time for higher-level work that only the leader can do, but also creates space and opportunity for teams to step up, grow, and engage at ever-higher levels of responsibility.  This type of delegation then deepens trust as the leader displays trust in their team’s abilities to step into these bigger responsibilities.

3) Use the ‘yes, and’ technique

To encourage creativity and openness, think of how improvisational theater works. Team members build on each other’s ideas using the structure: “Yes, what I like about that idea is… And that makes me think of…” The end result is a solution to which each team member contributed and that is reflective of the team’s collective ingenuity. This results in a culture where contributions are valued, silos break down, and each idea is used to build the next idea. 

Whether it’s stepping up to the balcony to reflect, empowering a team member through delegation, or opening space for collective creativity, small shifts in behavior can and will create a ripple effect across an organization. These aren’t just leadership practices—they’re resilience practices. And in times like these, resilience is non-negotiable.