The Leadership Catalyst is where municipal power and women’s leadership collide. I expose how staff culture builds or breaks public trust, and why women leaders must set the standard for their teams and their communities. This is unapologetic strategy, rooted in SCALE™, for leaders who refuse to carry the weight of broken systems alone. Subscribe and join a community that’s rewriting the rules of government leadership.
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Issue 44: Nobody Warned You That the Seat Would Follow You Home | The Record™ Series | Issue 4 of 5
Published 2 months ago • 5 min read
Dear Reader,
In Issue 43 I told you about the Community Foundation and the moment their words became testimony rather than advocacy.
What I did not tell you is what happened after the meetings ended. What happened when I walked through the door and my husband could tell from the way I closed it what kind of night it had been.
Nobody warned me about that part.
The Catalyst Perspective
I served as mayor of a city with 14 council members. Approximately half had been aligned with the previous mayor and from early in my tenure they made it their mission to challenge my authority publicly, deliberately, in rooms full of residents watching to see how I would respond.
Years after I left office, research confirmed what I had already lived. The Under Pressure study published by the Mayors Innovation Project, University of Wisconsin-Madison, in September 2025 documented that the opposition I navigated was not random or personal. It was structural. Women in elected office experience obstruction and scrutiny at rates their male counterparts do not, and that disparity does not close simply because a woman governs well. (Midthun and Spear, Mayors Innovation Project, September 2025.).
Most nights I came home needing time before I could be present with the people I loved. My husband learned to read the sound of the door.
The role followed me into every room of my house.
That is the part nobody tells you before you take the seat. Not because they are hiding it. Because most of the people who would tell you have never sat in it.
Photo Credit: WTTW - The pressure that follows you home is not in your job description. It is in the nature of the seat.
The Monday She Finally Called
My daughter had not been feeling well and had been coughing for several days.
On a Monday she finally called. She had been carrying it for days before she reached out and when she did, she framed it carefully. She did not want to disturb me.
She drove herself 25 minutes from her home east of town into Kankakee. I met her at the hospital. The doctor made a decision quickly. My daughter needed to be transported to a hospital further north. We waited while they called two hospitals to find one that could take her. Then the ambulance came.
I could not ride with her. I stood in that hospital wing, watching the ambulance pull away with my daughter and my unborn grandson inside it.
I was terrified in a way the seat had never made me terrified. This was not a hostile council. This was my child.
She delivered early. My grandson spent two months in the NICU before he came home.
When I finally asked her about those days before she called me she told me what I already feared. She had not wanted to bother me. She knew how much I was carrying.
I told her that I did not care what seat I held. If she needed medical attention she needed to call me.
No council meeting. No crisis at city hall. Nothing on my agenda would ever be more important than being her mother.
The seat had followed me home so consistently that my own daughter had learned to wait before she called me. Naming that cost changed how I carried everything that came after.
Photo Credit: Keith Armstrong - The people closest to us absorb the cost of the seat whether we name it or not.
The SCALE™ Framework Connection
Component 4 of The Record™ maps directly to L — Leadership Longevity™ in the SCALE™ Framework for Public Sector Leadership™. And every letter of SCALE™ lives inside what happened in that hospital wing.
S — Strengths-Based Leadership™ When my daughter called me that Monday I did not have to decide what mattered most. I already knew. Narrative anchors are not just the story you tell in a public meeting. They are the foundation that tells you who you are when the role has asked for everything and someone at home is still waiting for the version of you that existed before the title did.
C — Confidence and Cognitive Reframing™ The obstruction is not a verdict on your competence. It is a pattern applied to the seat and who holds it. The woman who names that distinction governs differently than the woman who absorbs every challenge as personal.
A — Aligned Values and Boundary Negotiation™ My daughter did not cross a boundary. She honored one she thought existed. She believed the role came first. Making it clear to the people you love that they do not have to compete with the seat for access to you is not a one-time conversation. It is infrastructure you build and maintain across the entire arc of the role.
L — Leadership Longevity™ The leaders who sustain across seasons built something to hold what they felt. A relationship at home that could carry the weight. A practice that allowed them to put the role down at the end of the night. Leadership longevity is not endurance. It is infrastructure built before the crisis reveals its absence.
E — Emboldened Ecosystem Building™ The women who last do not just endure the systems they inherited. They change them. Every leader who makes it through has a choice. She can absorb what the system was not built to support and keep moving. Or she can use the authority she holds to make the environment measurably better for the woman who comes behind her.
Photo Credit: Lesley Whitehead Photography - What you build in the quiet season holds you through the loud one.
What I Want You to Walk Away Knowing
The seat will ask for more than your professional competence. It will ask for your evenings and the availability of the people who love you most.
The woman navigating a new mayor who does not yet trust her is not starting from scratch. The record she built before the transition speaks while the new trust is still forming. The woman told she is too much of a generalist is sitting on a record that has never been properly named. Her breadth is not a liability. It is a municipal education that no single department role could have given her.
Both are navigating Leadership Longevity. Not the length of the career. The infrastructure underneath it.
Take Action Today
Before this week ends find the person in your life who has been waiting before they call you. Make it clear that they do not have to measure their need against your schedule.
Then ask yourself one question. What is one thing I can change, build, or name that makes this environment measurably better for the woman who comes after me?
That is the work. Reply and tell me about the moment the seat followed you somewhere it was not supposed to go. I read every reply and I respond to every one.
Issue 45 of The Leadership Catalyst™ arrives Saturday, June 27, 2026. It is Part 5 of 5 of The Record™ Series - You Have Been Doing This Alone and It Is Costing You More Than You Know.
Forward this issue to one woman in your network who is navigating public leadership. She can subscribe and confirm her subscription at the link below so the next issue lands directly in her inbox.
Leadership Strategist for Municipal Teams Former Mayor | Village Manager | City Councilor | Congressional Staffer Creator of the SCALE™ Framework for Public Sector Leadership
The Leadership Catalyst is where municipal power and women’s leadership collide. I expose how staff culture builds or breaks public trust, and why women leaders must set the standard for their teams and their communities. This is unapologetic strategy, rooted in SCALE™, for leaders who refuse to carry the weight of broken systems alone. Subscribe and join a community that’s rewriting the rules of government leadership.
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