Shifting from Command and Control to Serve and Support as Executive Director

Executive overview

New executive directors often carry high-achieving habits — jumping in, brainstorming loudly, directing — that worked well as individual contributors but land as command-and-control to their teams. Marisol Bello, executive director of the Housing Narrative Lab, discovered that her intended "brainstorms" were being received as firm orders, stalling conversation rather than sparking it. The fix was not a leadership overhaul but a single small practice: pause, stop, and listen before speaking. Scaling that habit over time reshaped her team's culture from compliance to genuine give-and-take.

A leader's whisper sounds like a yell — intentional pausing is the mechanism that closes the gap between intent and impact.

The achiever-to-leader inflection point

• Moving from journalist to executive director stripped away existing mentorship structures
• Early leadership felt like navigating clouds at 10,000 feet with no roadmap
• Joining a coaching cohort surfaced the gap between big-picture vision and day-to-day practice
• Marshall Goldsmith's "winning too much" pattern was directly recognisable in her own behaviour
• Identifying top strengths (context, big picture) helped, but translating them into action required external support

Whispers that land as orders

• Command-and-control behaviours persisted despite a genuine intention to serve and support
• Verbal brainstorms were interpreted by staff as decisions, not exploratory thinking
• When she changed direction mid-riff, the team was confused — they thought a direction had already been set
• The core lesson: positional power amplifies every utterance, even casual ones

The stop-breathe-listen practice

• First Academy commitment: pause before speaking in every conversation
• A yellow post-it note — "stop, breathe, listen" — stayed on her desk throughout
• Did not hit 100% adherence; treating partial progress as meaningful was itself a key shift
• Moving from 23% to 62% consistency is real progress, not failure

Leading with questions, not statements

• Shifted default response from answering to asking: "tell me more," "I'm curious about this"
• Brainstorms now happen in smaller groups or are explicitly named: "let's brainstorm — I'm wondering about XYZ"
• Signal that culture has shifted: a team member pushes back on her idea and offers an alternative
• Hanging back before speaking stops conversation from closing prematurely around her first idea

Why inflection points demand behaviour change

• Habits that drove individual achievement actively undermine leadership effectiveness at scale
• Key inflection triggers: new senior role, team change, major initiative, or direct feedback
• Change is possible alone but significantly more successful with structured, cohort-based support
• Even small behavioural shifts register as large to those with less positional power