Introduction
Every leader has a question hanging over them that nobody says out loud. Something like: she's brilliant at public speaking, but can she actually run the P&L? He's a great project manager, but can he manage the business? Nobody puts it in a performance review. Everybody in the room already knows it.
In this episode of the Everyday Leadership Podcast, Sope Agbelusi sits down with Dr. Stacy, a management partner at EDC, an executive development consultancy that has worked with C-suite leaders at organisations including Apple, JPMorgan Chase and PayPal. Before EDC, she led Deloitte's succession and leadership development work. The conversation moves through why senior leaders get stuck, why training alone rarely changes behaviour, and why the leaders who keep growing are the ones willing to name the question nobody else will ask them directly.
From Psychology Student to C-Suite Advisor
Dr. Stacy's interest in why people behave the way they do started in high school, training as a peer counsellor and later studying Japanese, where she noticed something that stayed with her: you cannot choose the right vocabulary in a conversation without first understanding your relationship to the other person. Language, and behaviour, is shaped by context.
That observation became the spine of her career. Rather than only asking who a leader is, she looks at the overlap between the person and their context: their history, motivations and strengths, set against what their role and organisation actually require of them. Where those two things line up naturally, leadership feels easy. Where they don't, that's where the real work is.
Why Leaders Need to Get Comfortable With "No"
Early in her career, Dr. Stacy researched the family experiences that shaped women who reached senior leadership. What she found wasn't about ambition or intelligence. It was about how early they learned to question and push back on authority, and kept doing it.
That matters because the higher you climb, the more often people tell you no. A founder hears it constantly. By the time someone reaches vice president level, the expectations placed on them stop aligning: one stakeholder wants one thing, another wants the opposite, and both are reasonable. Leaders who haven't practised pushing back, and not taking it personally, find this disorienting the first time they meet it at scale.
The common trap is trying to make everyone happy. Dr. Stacy's answer to leaders who ask how: you don't. You decide who you're going to make happy, and you get clear on why, so the choice comes from what you stand for rather than from guilt.
Behaviour Is Shaped by Context, Not Just Character
Much of classical psychology looks inward for explanations of behaviour. Dr. Stacy's approach looks outward first. Ask most people why they behaved a certain way today and they won't reference their ego, they'll reference what happened to them: the weather, a stubbed toe, a deadline that moved. Context drives behaviour more than we like to admit.
That has direct implications for leadership development. A competency model built by asking senior leaders what made them successful mostly captures a projection of their own preferences, and it looks backward at what worked ten years ago. The more useful question separates who a leader wants to be from what their current environment now requires of them, because those two things can pull in opposite directions.
A branded consumer business selling through wholesalers rewards leaders who are inspirational and can command a room. The same business moving online, competing on iteration and digital talent, may need leaders who listen more and hand solutions to their teams instead of delivering them. The right kind of leadership isn't fixed. It's dictated by what the business now needs.
The Leap Nobody Talks About
Dr. Stacy left a senior partner role at a well-established firm, well paid and well resourced, to start EDC. She made that decision on the first of January. Covid hit two months later. She remembers her kids' school putting caution tape around the playground and thinking she'd made a terrible mistake.
She didn't. What she tells people now is that she's glad she made the decision in January, because if she'd tried in April, once the world had visibly fallen apart, she would have talked herself out of it. Fear rarely arrives before a rewarding decision announces itself as fear. It usually looks like doubt, timing, or a reason to wait. The leap that turns out to matter is usually the one taken before it feels safe.
Naming the Fear Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
One of the things Dr. Stacy pushes leaders on is how hard it still is for people to say the word "fear" at work, as though naming it will make something bad happen. Meanwhile, commentators wonder aloud why productivity is at record lows, as if the answer weren't obvious: people are exhausted, and they're afraid.
That fear is specific. Employees are being asked to do things they've never had to do before, often several new things at once, in front of people whose opinion of them is tied to their livelihood and their identity. Layoffs across entire sectors add another layer: people work harder not because they're inspired, but because they're trying to prove they shouldn't be next. Leaders who acknowledge that openly, rather than leaving it unspoken, give people a language for what they're already feeling and take some of the charge out of it. Leaving it unnamed only lets it build.
Momentum, Not Rest, Is the Antidote to Burnout
Burnout isn't only about how hard people have worked. It's about whether they can feel progress. When leaders hold people accountable only against a final goal, and say nothing until that goal is hit or missed, people disengage long before they get there.
Dr. Stacy's comparison: nobody teaches a child to tie their shoes by waiting until they've failed and then pointing it out. You mark the small steps of progress on the way. Leaders managing burned-out teams need to do the same: actively surface and reward momentum, not just judge the finish line. The goals people are being asked to hit are more complicated than they used to be, which makes this more necessary, not less.
Leading People Who Are Playing Not to Lose
Motivating a chief executive and motivating the layer beneath them are not the same job. CEOs are usually playing to win. They're energised by competition, opportunity and the scale of what's possible. Talk to them about the size of the opportunity and they lean in.
Most of the leaders under them are playing not to lose. They have more to protect and less appetite for risk. Sell them on how exciting the future is and what they hear is danger. The way to reach them is different: acknowledge what they already have, and show that holding onto it requires adapting to how the world is changing, rather than framing change purely as upside. Leadership development that only knows how to sell excitement will consistently miss this group.
This is also why training alone rarely shifts behaviour. Telling someone how to run a difficult performance conversation doesn't change whether they'll actually have it. What stops them is usually the emotional cost: worry about damaging a relationship, hurting someone's feelings, or being exposed as inexperienced. Real behaviour change means addressing the emotional state and the motivation underneath the skill, not just supplying the skill.
The Key Question That Decides Your Next Opportunity
Most people in an organisation are carrying an unspoken question that colleagues quietly hold about them. She's excellent at client relationships, but can she run the business? He's a strong operator, but can he handle the board? Nobody says it directly. Everyone already knows what it is.
Dr. Stacy's observation, after years of watching how leaders actually move forward: development plans, assessments and talent reviews are useful tools, but they're not what actually moves someone to the next opportunity. Answering the key question people privately hold about you is what does. And the work doesn't end there. Once you answer it, a new question appears, and answering that one is what opens the next door.
The practical move for any leader is simple to state and harder to do: get honest about what the unspoken question about you actually is, then decide how you're going to answer it.
