If you’re ready to lead without fear, grow on purpose, and find rooms that value your talent, press play

Forget the myth that leadership means being the loudest voice in the room. We share a raw, funny, and practical journey from crash-and-burn manager to a leader who lifts, protects, and empowers. If you’ve ever had a boss who dumped everything on your desk at 5 p.m., you’ll recognize the old model—and you’ll get a blueprint for doing the opposite.

We start with early missteps: mistaking a title for freedom, delegating without accountability, and learning what happens when you disappear on your team. Then we pivot to a new model built on service with standards: learning your team’s jobs well enough to backfill them, defending quality under pressure, and turning skepticism into trust with consistent action. Expect concrete examples of covering vacations, safeguarding clients, and translating values into daily behaviors that actually scale.

Career growth is a thread throughout. We lay out a simple three-year cadence: master your role in year one, expand your impact in year two, and advocate for title and pay in year three. You’ll hear how to build receipts—revenue influenced, projects delivered, risk mitigated—and how to spot red flags like goalposts that move, gaslighting, or surveillance disguised as feedback. When the answer is always “not now,” we explain how to exit with clarity and momentum. This is a playbook for women navigating agencies and beyond, blending candid stories with tactics you can use tomorrow.

If you’re ready to lead without fear, grow on purpose, and find rooms that value your talent, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a push, and leave a review with the best leadership lesson you’ve learned. Your story might help someone else step up.

Chapters

• 0:00 Redefining Leadership
• 1:12 Early Promotion And Hard Lessons
• 3:10 Surviving Toxic Boss Archetypes
• 4:25 Choosing A New Leadership Model
• 5:25 Proving It By Backfilling The Team
• 6:15 What Real Leaders Do And Don’t Do
• 7:20 Empowerment Over Control
• 8:20 Growth In Bad Environments
• 9:35 The Three-Year Promotion Playbook
• 11:10 When To Leave And How To Ask
• 12:05 Recognition, Data, And Red Flags

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello everyone, this is Steele Roses Podcast. This podcast crew is created for women by women to elevate women's voices. And I hope you're all having a wonderful week so far. Thank you for checking in with me today. Today I want to talk a little bit about something that I've talked about before, but I want to revisit it as a topic because I do think it's pretty important. And that is what it is. What is it to be a leader? Now, this is something that I know professionally applies, but I do think personally it applies as well. Because when you're a stay-at-home mom, you very much are leading. So there are social things across that you can really pull through. But I'm gonna discuss personal experience professionally. So when I was very young in the industry, you know, the examples that I had that I was exposed to were really women who were, you know, kind to your face, cutthroat behind your back kind of people, right? And then I had media examples in movies like The Devil Wears Prada, right? And if you've seen it, I know I'm dating myself a little bit. It was still to this day one of my favorite movies, I think mostly because of the fashion. But something that also had caught my eye was the cutthroat, you know, big boss Miranda, who would clomp around the office and everybody would scatter and hide because they were afraid of her. That's what was given to me as like an example as a leader, right? Now, the very first time I was promoted and given the opportunity to lead, um, I crashed and burned so friggin' badly, I almost got fired. I tell this story today at my job and I tell it to my colleagues now and my team that I manage now. And everyone thinks it's hilarious because they can't see me being as mean as the person that I describe. Jenny, early 20s, mid-20s, was a completely different person. Now, when I was given this responsibility to lead, I took it as, well, I don't have to do anything. I'm gonna tell people what to do and I'm gonna take off and I'm not gonna come in, I'm gonna show up late, or I'm gonna leave early, and I'm not gonna really do anything. And, you know, I that's how I looked at it. And so that worked for a couple of weeks and then promptly, promptly blew up in my face. I learned the hard way, as my parents would say, I usually did throughout my entire life. It's the Jenny way, apparently. But it took me a while to recognize what went wrong there. And I don't even think in the moment when I I did not get fired, by the way. I gutted out the uncomfortable situation that I was in because I was being this person that I thought I had to be, a lot of people hated me because of it. Interns were frightened. And this is what I was told later on. I had to work through that, which was incredibly uncomfortable. If you've ever worked in a professional setting, and this is back when you were required to be in office all the time, it is very awkward and difficult to be in a place where nobody likes you, but I had brought that on myself. So I kept my head high, I sucked it up, and I figured it out and I stayed still for another year or two, I believe. And I still made it out in good form. Now, I learned a lot from that initial situation, but I didn't quite know still how to manage people. Now, with every single position that I held at every company that I was at, I remember being in instances where I would have majority not good bosses. Actually, majority of the bosses were pretty awful. I think we all saw the same example. It was the really beat-you-down example. It's the toxic, toxic example, it's the boss that dumps everything on your desk as they leave to go have dinner at home. You know, like those are the examples. And this is what I consistently experienced every single time, time and again. And with every experience like that, I remember thinking to myself, if you're ever given a chance to lead again, you have to do differently. You can't let people feel this way. You have to do better than this. So I'm fortunate enough that my career has been has gone well enough where I was given that opportunity again to lead. And that time that I had it, it was a few years back, was the next opportunity that I had to lead. I with gusto embraced the whole thing. And I showed up and I said, Well, why don't you all? It was my first day at this agency. And I said, Well, why don't you guys show me what to do? Show me what it is you're doing. I need to learn the ropes with you because I need to be able to backfill you. Backfill is basically somebody goes out sick because I was the leader in my mind. That meant that I had to step in. Now, I know a lot of the people at that one company sort of took it for a gr as a for as for a grain of salt at first, right? They were like, Well, yeah, sure, we'll we'll teach you. But nobody really expected anything because again, they had only been exposed to people also that just dumped on them. So I come along the first time somebody's out for vacation, I said, Well, don't you show me everything you need, tell me what needs to happen, we're gonna get it done while you're gone. Skeptical. Because again, I'm an anomaly now. Everybody, the week goes by, this person was out, I took care of everything. I am not the kind of person that is going to let an account or a client suffer that is not in my genetics. I am a very much, we're all in this together. That is a leader. A leader is not someone who's going to just pass the buck. A leader is not someone who's going to just dump work on your desk, not give you proper guidance, not give you proper support, not tell you clearly what needs to happen. A leader is not going to do all those things. A leader is going to show up for you. They are going to make sure that you have what you need to succeed. Because a true leader is a successful leader if their team is succeeding. If your team is getting promoted, if your team is climbing up that ladder, that is because you are a good leader and you've shown them the way. But that can only happen with a good leader. Now, when I was at that one particular agency, when the week ended, everybody was shocked that I had lifted a finger. I came to find out why later on, because my predecessor and people around me in the same position and role refused to help, refused to lift a finger, pushed it off on everyone else. They were quote unquote too busy to help. But the fact of the matter is, you cannot be too busy, you cannot be too busy to help because that is why we're here. We're here to help. So flash forward to now. Now, I take this still very seriously. If I have to work every single night after work, that's because I'm in meetings all day making sure I'm supporting people. I'm making sure everyone else has what they need to succeed. And then I will get to the things that I need to get to. But the first and foremost job that I have is to make sure that the people around me are succeeding. I've seen quotes recently on LinkedIn that support this. And I've reposted them because to me, I'm like, this is really the finest example that someone can have of what it is to be a leader. I'm gonna read the quotes to you because I this is actually what triggered me to want to record this for you. The most powerful woman in the room isn't the loudest or the most intimidating. She's the one who lifts others up, who believes in the success of those around her, and who knows that true leadership is about empowerment, not control or competition. That's the biggest thing here. I have experienced time over time that when I showed up as my best self, the managers that I had at prior places would immediately begin to try to tear me down. Now, you might be saying, Jenny, you sound a little full of yourself because I am full of myself, because I work very hard. I work very hard, as I'm sure you do at your job. I know my strengths, I know my weaknesses, and I know what I readily admit. I make mistakes all the time. It happens. I'm a human being, but so is my team. And so, in order to really be the leader that everybody needs, you have to empower others to know that what they're doing is right. They know what they're doing is right because they feel comfortable because you have given them that comfort level, because you've encouraged them and helped them grow. A quote that somebody in my agency recently said was, I will grow wherever I am planted, meaning wherever I land, I'm going to learn everything around me and then I'm gonna grow from there. That I love that quote so much. That's something that I have felt many times throughout the years, and I was never able to articulate it quite so nicely as that. But it's it's a fair, it's a fair thing to say. Now, if you're in an environment that is really bad around you, the growth isn't gonna happen, but you are gonna learn things. And in those instances, you're gonna learn what not to do. Every opportunity, every situation is a growth opportunity. Some of them let you grow upward, but others let you grow inward because you are recognizing things that you would never want to do to someone else. And you'll make sure that when you get to your leadership position, you're gonna make sure your people don't feel as badly as you did in that moment. The key here is to learn from every scenario, turn it around and make it so that you've learned from that and you will make sure that other people do not have to experience that too. It's very much entangled, but it's it's really, it's really all there. This whole framework of beating people down professionally to let just a few rise to the top is, in my hope, on its way out the door. I know this is a little bit of an odd one. I don't really usually focus this heavily on professional thing, but it was something that's really been in my mind. So I wanted to share it with all of you. For those women out there that are working through your career and trying to make your way up the ladder. I hear you, I feel you. As long as you keep your head up and you just keep doing your job, you will get there. And, you know, you do have to be strategic in some senses. Make sure that you don't stay too long in a role that you think is not serving you. If you look at my trajectory, you will see that every three and a half years, I have moved from agency to agency. That was does that was a strategic choice. I did that on purpose because I had a basic formula for Jenny getting promoted. You give yourself one full year from the start of a new job to learn everything about that job and get really confident. You need a year. It's three months to learn to get your bearings, and then it's a full year to really own and learn everything. After that first year, then you go into growth. So year two is when you're starting to grow. You've now mastered everything about your role that you need to know. What can you do else? What is extra that you can do? That's year two is that growth period. Year three is when you start knocking on the door of a promotion. I'm ready to go. I'm strong in my role. I know more than my role now, I can support more than my role. What do I do? You have to knock on that door. You have to speak up. If you do not open your mouth, you will not get a promotion. That is not being pessimistic. That is real. You will not just be recognized for your work just because that's not a thing. You have to knock on the door, you have to open your mouth. Year three, if you're continuously pushed to the side, if you feel like your boss is gaslighting you, if you're flat out told, well, you're good in your role that you're you're in. So we're gonna keep you there, which I say it like that because I was told that at one agency. I also was told once, um, I was laughed at. I put together a full PowerPoint presentation about how much money I was bringing in and the amount of projects that I was managing was far exceeding everyone else's book of business. And my manager laughed. He laughed when he saw the presentation and he said, We'll, we'll talk about it. It went nowhere and I was subdued quite a bit. Instead of actually getting elevated, he um he enlisted some coworkers to spy on me and let them know, let him know if I missed any emails. And so when I did bring to him my request for a promotion and brought him all of these quotes from clients and all of this actual metric data, he said, Well, you didn't reply to this one email within 24 hours. And so, you know, we're not gonna do this right now. That's when I know it's time to go. If you're not being recognized and you really don't have, if you're not given that branch that's saying yes, we're gonna do this and you're not seeing anything happen, then you need to leave. Do not let yourself get comfortable. If you truly want to grow your career, then you have to be aggressive. And I'm not lying, if you look at my resume on LinkedIn, you will see every three and a half years, I left. Because if I am told no, then there's someone else out there that is gonna see some talent in me. And I'll make sure I keep going until I find them, which is why I am where I am, because the talent is recognized and they're wonderful people. I am always here for those looking for professional guidance, and I am always here to help. If you ever feel that you want an ear, if you want to run a scenario past, I love it. I'm here for it. You can email, you can message on LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever you want to find me. I hope you found this episode informative. I appreciate you being with me, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.