The Leadership Work Everyone Relies On + Very Few Reward

Every March, during Women's History Month, we celebrate the breakthroughs women have made in business, politics, science, + culture. We highlight the CEOs, the pioneers, the headline-makers.

But there is another kind of leadership happening every day inside organizations — quieter, often unseen, + rarely rewarded.

It’s the leadership work that keeps teams functioning.

The leadership work that repairs relationships.

The leadership work that builds culture when no one has assigned the task.

+ much of that work is being done by women. Who’s surprised?

The Leadership Work? Is That on My Job Description?

Think about the moments that make a team work:

• The colleague who notices tension in a meeting + diffuses it.

• The leader who checks in privately when someone seems off.

• The person who helps a new hire feel welcome.

• The teammate who mentors someone even though it’s not part of their role.

This is emotional labor.

It’s also leadership.

Women - + especially Black women — disproportionately carry this responsibility inside organizations. They become the informal culture keepers, translators, mentors, + stabilizers of teams.

Yet this work rarely appears in performance reviews, promotion criteria, or compensation structures.

Organizations reward outputs.

But culture is sustained by behaviors.

+ behaviors are sustained by people.

+ people that are valued, seen, + heard? Well, they drive better organizational outputs. (See what I did there?)

My previous (+ fav) leader did all this. She acknowledged me; she saw the potential in me that I didn't see in myself. She gave of her already sparse time to mentor me + potentially ended up creating a role in her department for me, which set me up for the success that I'm experiencing today. She saw what needed to be done to benefit me, her team, + our organization + did it!

Informal Leadership Is Still Leadership

Many women operate as leaders long before they are given the title.

They influence team dynamics.
They shape how people collaborate.
They help others grow.

This is what I often see in my consulting work.

When leaders encounter the concept of my Present Continuous Leadership, something interesting happens.

Women immediately recognize it.

They don’t see it as a new framework. They see language + a tangible structure for something they’ve already been practicing in all areas of their life.

Because Present Continuous Leadership is fundamentally behavioral leadership.

It’s the daily practice of shaping culture through consistent actions - not occasional misaligned initiatives. 🙃

It shows up in small moments:

• how leaders respond under pressure

• how they repair trust after conflict

• how they create space for others to contribute

• how they reinforce values through repetition

Leadership, in this sense, is not episodic.

It’s continuous. + WE ARE ALL LEADERS – regardless of your title

+ many women have been practicing this form of leadership intuitively for years.

The Culture Work That Keeps Teams Alive

Organizations often underestimate how much invisible leadership work sustains their teams.

Mentorship.

Relationship repair.

Conflict navigation.

Emotional awareness.

Cultural stewardship.

These are the things that determine whether the strategies will actually land.

You can design the most brilliant strategic plan in the world.

But if trust is low, communication is fractured, + psychological safety is missing, the plan will fail long before execution begins. + veeeeeery few organizations are investing in this.

Culture determines whether strategy has oxygen.

+ culture is built in the everyday behaviors.

Why This Work Gets Overlooked

Most organizations still measure leadership through a narrow lens:

Revenue.
Deliverables.
Operational outcomes.

Those metrics matter.

But they are forgetting the human infrastructure that allows work to happen.

Because emotional labor + cultural leadership are harder to quantify, they often become invisible. The people doing this work are seen as “supportive,” “nice,” or “team players.”

Rarely are they recognized as the bad b%tch leaders they are!

Why So Many Women Are Stepping Away

Across industries, research continues to show that women -  particularly Black women - are leaving the workforce in large numbers.

One reason is the accumulation of invisible labor.

Women are expected to produce results + hold the emotional weight of teams.

They mentor without credit.
They smooth conflict without authority.
They carry culture without compensation.

Over time, that imbalance becomes unsustainable.

Organizations lose extraordinary leadership capacity when they fail to recognize this work/worth.

Present Continuous Leadership: Making the Invisible Visible

Present Continuous Leadership offers a way to rethink how leadership works inside organizations.

Rather than focusing only on formal authority, it focuses on consistent leadership behaviors — the daily actions that build trust, alignment, + momentum over time.

These behaviors are captured in the CREATE elements:

• Consistency – modeling values reliably

• Repetition – reinforcing culture through everyday actions

• Energy – bringing intentional presence to leadership moments

• Attention – noticing people, dynamics, + signals others miss

• Time – investing in relationships + development

• Empathy – understanding the human experience inside work

Many women leaders recognize these behaviors immediately.

Because they’ve already been practicing them. They grew up being trained to give a damn + “take care of”. Alexa play DNA by Kendrick Lamar!

The framework simply gives language - + legitimacy to work that has long been dismissed as “soft skills.” (I DESPISE that term!)

A Moment to Recognize the Leaders Already Doing the Work

This Women’s History Month, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge something powerful.

Many of the leaders shaping healthy teams today are doing so without formal recognition.

They are mentoring.
They are building culture.
They are stabilizing organizations from the inside.

They are practicing leadership in the present continuous.

To the women already carrying this work: your leadership is real, whether the title reflects it or not.

+ to organizations hoping to build resilient cultures in the years ahead, one of the most important steps is simple:

Start recognizing the leadership that’s been there all along.