Lead to Soar is the podcast where ambitious women get strategic, evidence-based guidance to reach their full potential and reshape the systems that hold them back. Each episode delivers practical leadership insights grounded in Business, Emotional and Social Intelligence so women can lead with impact and advance their careers on their own terms.
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Who Gets to Speak Their Mind at Work, and Who Gets Called Abrasive?
Years ago, Michelle Redfern told her manager at one of Australia's big banks that the team had a politeness problem. He told her to keep speaking up. A couple of years later she had a reputation, and one of the words attached to it was "abrasive."
Mel Butcher and Michelle look at who gets to speak their mind at work and who pays for it. They cover the question every leader needs to ask (am I consulting people for better ideas, or collecting yeses?), how psychological safety works in a team, and why women receive more vague, personality-based feedback than men. Textio's 2022 research found that women are 11 times more likely to be described as "abrasive" in performance feedback.
You'll also get three tools you can use this week: the "mad, sad, glad" team check-in, the "play the ball, not the player" approach from Susan Colantuono's The Language of Power, and a "more of, less of, and why" structure for feedback that is specific and actionable.
Related: Episode 161, Career Compass: Mastering Actionable Feedback and Overcoming Gender Bias.
Michelle's self-paced course on giving, receiving and asking for feedback is coming soon inside the Lead to Soar Network (https://leadtosoar.network/landing)
What evidence do you see in your own workplace? Tell us in the comments.
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27 Sept 2026
No One Should Care About Your Career As Much As You Do
Career pathing is rarely as linear as it looks, and in Michelle's organisational diagnostic work, the single biggest gap women report is that their manager isn't giving them useful career advice.
In this episode, Mel and Michelle pull apart why the traditional career ladder is a scarcity game, why leaving your progression in your manager's hands is a risk you can't afford, and what to do instead. They walk through a four-move framework for evaluating what's next: stay, reshape, shift, go, and cover salary benchmarking, strategic networking inside and outside your organisation, why women are so often asked to prove readiness that men get handed on potential alone, and what leaders owe the people they're meant to be developing.
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20 Sept 2026
You Read the Book. Nothing Happened
A listener wrote in with a question anyone with a shelf of half-read leadership books will recognise. She reads good books. She underlines the useful parts. Nothing changes.
Mel and Michelle did not script an answer. They worked it out in real time, and the diagnosis arrives fast. If your life is already full, work stacked on caregiving stacked on more work, there is nowhere to put the advice.
Truth Bomb: The quality of the book is irrelevant.
When women still carry 75%+ of the world’s unpaid labour, getting advice to “just make time to reflect” will probably not hit the mark as great life advice!
The most useful example in the episode is also the smallest. Michelle read Atomic Habits years ago and took one thing from it: reduce the friction. Her walking shoes lived on the top floor of a three-storey house and she rarely walked, so she moved them to the door. She now keeps her bike, helmet and gloves ready to go wherever she is living. One idea, acted on. Mel read the same book twice, came away with a better grasp of habit theory, and changed no behaviour.
The other point made by Mel, after reading “You Can Do Hard Things” by Cate Hall, is that not everything has to be hard won. So thinking that a pile of TBR books is a failure is not, there might be an easier way to consume the content (audiobooks for example!)
Truth Bomb: stop trying to solve everything with a book. Take the one thing. Write it down. Do something with it this week.
Are you thriving or just surviving? Take Michelle’s life audit quiz. (https://www.research.net/r/ZZR9568)
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