Something I figured out early in my career is that the most important thing a leader can do is see people more clearly than they see themselves.
The right person in the right role at the right moment is one of the most powerful forces in any organization, and I’ve spent most of my career looking for that combination. Not just in the obvious candidates, but in the people who have the talent and the ambition but haven’t yet been given the room to prove it. I also realize that, historically, this instinct hasn’t been applied equally, and I’ve benefited from a version of the world where it was more readily extended to people who looked like me.
I’ve always been drawn to the opportunity in people rather than the constraints of what their job description says today. People gave me opportunities throughout my career that I hadn’t fully earned on paper yet. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I didn’t. But the belief placed in me before I’d proven myself is exactly why I now place it in others. There’s also a particular satisfaction in watching someone push past the limits of what they thought they were capable of; owning a number, owning a function, and realizing the ceiling they assumed was there was just in their head. That’s the part of leadership I find most meaningful, and it’s what makes this conversation feel personal rather than professional.
The Revenue Function Is Where It Gets Real
Organizational power isn’t solely distributed in boardrooms or captured in mission statements. It lives in the revenue function, where future enterprise leaders are built or overlooked, and where the gap between what companies say about inclusion and what they actually do becomes measurable in ways that are hard to argue with.
Most organizations have gotten very comfortable having the diversity conversation. The vocabulary is so well-rehearsed that you can participate without actually saying anything. The harder and more revealing question is this: who owns the revenue number?
Who actually carries the forecast, owns the customer relationships, and gets held accountable when the quarter doesn’t close? That’s where careers are made, where boards look for their next generation of operators, and where the distance between stated values and actual behavior becomes impossible to hide.
Where Trust Gets Distributed, and Where It Doesn’t
Revenue is an unusually honest environment. Forecasts hold or they don’t, customers buy or they don’t, and the feedback loop is short enough that the gap between how organizations talk about trust and how they actually distribute it becomes visible quickly.
What lives underneath that are decisions that individually look like judgment calls. Collectively, they tell a different story. Who gets handed the difficult territory? Who gets backed after a rough quarter rather than quietly reassigned? Who gets the high-pressure role where the outcome is genuinely on the line, versus the well-resourced role that was never really going to fail?
Those decisions shape careers far more effectively than any corporate initiative. And their accumulated weight shows up in the data. Despite research showing that female sales reps outperform men in quota attainment by 11% or hit quota at a rate of 86% compared to 78% for men, they face a persistent gender promotion gap. According to Women in Revenue (an organization doing some of the most important tracking and advocacy work in this space), one in five women in revenue roles were laid off in the past year, and those who remained reported feeling overworked, undervalued, and passed over for promotion. That’s not a pipeline problem forming on the horizon. It’s one already in progress.
The Business Case Is Not the Interesting Part
The argument for fixing this has been made so many times it’s starting to lose its edge. What I will say is that companies navigating faster sales cycles, AI adoption pressure, and increasingly complex buying environments need leadership teams with broader range than most currently have. That gap is showing up in who closes the business, who gets promoted, and who eventually runs the company.
The part of this conversation that doesn’t get enough attention is sponsorship, because that’s where the distance between intention and action tends to be widest. Senior women in revenue have generally already figured out how to work hard, build relationships, and navigate organizations. What actually changes careers at that level is something simpler and harder to systematize: someone in a position of authority who says, at the right moment, you should.
In practice that means giving her the difficult territory rather than the safe one, backing her publicly after a rough quarter instead of quietly reassigning the account, and putting her name forward when the high-visibility role opens up before she has to ask. These are not grand gestures. They are ordinary decisions that most leaders make without much scrutiny, which is exactly why they matter.
Sponsorship requires the people allocating opportunities to ask themselves honestly whether the criteria they’re applying are actually about capability, or simply about who feels familiar.
The Pipeline Problem Is a Choices Problem
The urgency is real. According to Women in Revenue, 43% of women in revenue roles considered leaving their jobs in the past year, citing lack of mentorship, job insecurity, and workplace discrimination. When nearly half the talent pool is actively reconsidering their commitment, the pipeline problem stops being a future risk and becomes a present one that revenue leaders need to own.
I’ve seen what happens when organizations get this right. The bench gets deeper, the leaders that emerge are sharper, and the business performs differently as a result. The gap, when it exists, doesn’t announce itself. It shows up quietly, when you’re looking for your next generation of operators and realizing the pipeline you assumed you were building was never really there. By that point, the decisions that created it are years behind you.
