Both/And Leadership
If you’ve ever been asked to “pick a lane” in your leadership, you know how heavy those words can feel.
Be strong or be soft. Be strategic or be compassionate. Be ambitious or be likable.
These are the false binaries that so many of us internalize. They start early — in school, in family roles, in the ways we’re rewarded for fitting in — and they follow us into boardrooms, classrooms, and leadership roles.
But here’s what I know: the most powerful leaders are the ones who refuse the trap of either/or.
They live into both/and.
The Either/Or Trap
The myth of either/or is baked into most systems of leadership.
Performance reviews frame feedback in binary terms: you’re either “decisive” or you’re “too collaborative.” Mentorship often teaches us to tone down one quality in order to highlight another. Even leadership development programs — with all their good intentions — sometimes reduce growth into a neat equation of “strengths vs. weaknesses.”
The problem? Either/or strips us down. It forces us to compartmentalize, to shrink, to hide what doesn’t fit the mold.
It tells us: if you want to be taken seriously, you have to cut away the parts of yourself that make other people uncomfortable.
That’s not leadership. That’s self-erasure.
Both/And as a Reframe
What if leadership didn’t require you to choose?
What if clarity and compassion weren’t opposites, but collaborators? What if your ambition could live alongside your humanity? What if strength didn’t cancel out softness, but deepened it?
This is the shift from either/or to both/and.
Both/and leadership refuses to fracture us. It says: you can lead from the fullness of who you are, not the performance of who you think you’re supposed to be.
What It Looks Like in Real Life
Here’s how it plays out:
Decision-Making
Communication
Boundaries
Identity
When leaders embrace both/and, they stop cutting away pieces of themselves just to fit in. They begin leading as whole people.
Why This Matters for Women in Leadership
For women — and especially women in systems not designed with us in mind — either/or is often weaponized.
Too ambitious, too emotional, too direct, too quiet. Not ambitious enough, not confident enough, not tough enough.
We know the drill. The double-binds are everywhere.
Both/and leadership disrupts that cycle. It lets us say: I am ambitious and compassionate. I am direct and relational. I am intuitive and strategic.
The power of both/and is that it doesn’t ask us to tone ourselves down. It asks us to lead from wholeness.
And when women lead this way, it doesn’t just free us — it frees the system. It expands the definition of what leadership can look like.
The Risk of Both/And
Here’s the part we can’t ignore: both/and leadership is not always easy.
People who are invested in the binary may resist it. They may push back when you show up with your full self. They may project confusion, discomfort, even criticism.
That’s the risk.
But here’s the deeper truth: those same people also trust both/and leaders more. Even if they can’t name it at first, they feel the congruence. They sense the alignment. They see that your clarity isn’t brittle and your compassion isn’t performative. They see that you are rooted.
And rooted leadership is contagious.
What Happens When You Lead Whole
When you stop splitting yourself, here’s what changes:
Your energy stabilizes. You no longer waste it on constant self-editing.
Your clarity sharpens. You know what you mean and you say it.
Your presence deepens. People feel you in the room.
Your resilience grows. You’re less rattled by external pressures because you’re not outsourcing your leadership to them.
This is what integrated leadership looks like. And it’s what both/and makes possible.
A Story From My Own Leadership
There was a season when I was constantly told to be “more strategic.” The feedback was well-meaning, but it was also incomplete. What people meant was: don’t lead with your intuition, don’t lead with your care, don’t lead with your heart.
So I tried. I cut back on the very instincts that had made me effective. I forced myself to present every idea with data first, hiding the truth that the data usually followed my gut. I stopped naming the human cost of decisions because I thought it made me look less serious.
And you know what? It worked — for a while. People praised my strategy. They stopped calling me “too emotional.” But inside, I felt fractured. And my leadership felt hollow.
The turning point came when I realized I didn’t have to choose. I could be strategic and intuitive. I could bring the data and name the human impact. I could speak from my head and from my heart.
That shift — from either/or to both/and — changed everything. My leadership felt like mine again.
A Practice for This Week
Before your next decision, conversation, or meeting, pause and ask yourself:
Where am I defaulting to either/or?
Then try this reframing:
What would both/and look like here?
Let yourself imagine a response that integrates more of you — not less.
It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be as simple as bringing both the data and your gut to the table. Or delivering a “no” with both firmness and kindness. Or naming both the vision and the risk in the same breath.
These small shifts add up. They build a pattern of leadership that is whole, not fractured.
Closing Thought
Both/and leadership isn’t about being everything to everyone. It’s about being your whole self — without apology.
It’s about rejecting the myth that you have to choose between clarity and compassion, strength and softness, strategy and spirit.
As I write Lead Like You Mean It, this is the thread that runs through every chapter: your wholeness is not a liability. It’s your greatest strength.
And when you lead from that wholeness — when you embody both/and — you don’t just change the way you lead. You change the possibilities for everyone around you.