By Claire Brumby is a leadership coach, trainer, entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author.

At first most women don’t even realise they are diming their light. It’s a slow process. A slow erosion of who they are, and what they stand for. What they believe, what they value, and what they are capable of. 

For years women were told to ‘lean in’. Work harder, speak up, be more confident. Despite following this advice, progress at senior levels has remained slow.  According to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report, for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 87 women are promoted. This gap is at the first step to leadership and compounds year on year.

Women haven’t lacked capability or ambition. The environments have been the issue. This has led to women ‘dimming their light’ as a survival strategy. That has now reached its expiry date.

The leadership landscape has shifted, and it’s not going back to ‘normal’ which is why we need to forget that normal. Hybrid work, workforce burnout, generational change and market volatility has illuminated the limits of the old, patricidal (patriarchal?), command and control leadership.

Organisations now need leaders who can navigate ambiguity, build trust, and make brave, values-led decisions, even when the path isn’t clear. They need leaders to use their skills of working with data and intuition in tandem. Many women are realising that the qualities that they were once told to dial down and soften are exactly what modern leadership requires.

So, just how are they learning to take up space? Here’s a few ways I’m seeing coming through:

1 – A willingness and openness to share the integrated way of working; intuition with strategy. Modern leadership operates in uncertainty. It’s rare that decisions can be made in isolation with spreadsheets alone. Historically women have been encouraged to suppress instinct and ‘gut feeling’ in order to appear ‘rational’. That is changing. 

So it should. Our guts have over 100 million neurons, and sometimes this is why our gut is referred to as the ‘little brain, or ‘second brain’. This is why our gut feeling is so relevant. Strategy, however, comes from the prefrontal cortex in our brain. So, you can see by combining the two it’s a match made in heaven – rocket fuel for leadership, using this full range of intelligence.

The women stepping forward are blending commercial rigour with pattern recognition from their gut feeling. This shows up as ‘the data shows X. My concern is Y’. That second sentence is powerful. Strategic self-trust is a competitive advantage.

2 – I see an increase in women starting to get more and more comfortable with being visible before they feel fully ready.  Historically it’s been the case that women have toiled for the illusive ‘perfection’ before making a move. Hewlett Packard’s internal report famously reported that men applied for promotion when they met around 60% of the criteria, whereas women tended to wait until they met nearly all of them!

Now though, that’s shifting. Women are learning that leadership identity forms though action not illusive readiness. This is showing up as applying for promotion earlier or asking for pay rises directly.

3 – Evidence is coming through of redefining what strong leadership looks like. Women are starting to evolve existing leadership models, rather than occupy the old and outdated, inherited ones. 

Pairing high performance with psychological safety.

Decisive action paired with transparent communication.

Commercial results with cultural intelligence. 

Research from Gallup consistently links employee engagement to managers who demonstrate trust and empathy alongside accountability. In the old world this would have been labelled as ‘soft’ leadership. It’s not soft, it’s powerful and it’s highly effective.

As more women lead in this integrated way, without apology, without dimming their light, and the way they know they inherently want to lead, leadership and what it means and equals, shifts.

Taking up space is no longer about shape shifting to fit into outdated, unsustainable and in the long-term unproductive models. It is about leading the evolution of what leadership looks like.

Organisations need to recognise that as women are learning to take up more space, they, as an organisation, need to change too. This means to sponsor women into visibility, not just mentor them quietly, and to also recognise holistic intelligence of strategy and intuition as commercial value.

The future of leadership is more aligned, it’s more awakened. Women dimming their lights isn’t on the agenda anymore. The women rising into senior leadership today are not waiting for permission. They are claiming through their own sovereignty their clarity, resilience and self-trust.

The organisations who recognise and make space for this, rather than resist or be brought kicking and screaming into the new world of modern leadership, will outperform the ones who don’t.

To be clear, this isn’t a fad or even a trend. It is evolution. It’s time to forget the ‘normal’. It’s already started.

About the author

Claire Brumby is a leadership coach, trainer, entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of Forget Normal – I Want Magic: The 5 Rules of Leadership, published by Kogan Page 3 April.