I build organizations that perform through change.

For more than two decades, I’ve led and advised executive teams at Twitter, Lincoln Center, GLG, Verizon Media, Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank, and McKinsey on how to align people, strategy, and systems so that transformation doesn’t just start —it sticks.

My work sits at the intersection of HR, organizational design, and leadership behavior. I help CEOs, CHROs, and functional leaders architect operating models that accelerate performance, strengthen culture, and enable scale without chaos.

Through Leadership Rewired, I’ve worked with growth-stage and enterprise organizations to translate strategy into action, rebuild leadership alignment, and embed accountability where it matters most—at the behavioral level.

Whether leading from within or advising from the outside, my focus stays the same: clarity over complexity, systems over silos, and people at the center of every decision.

Specialties: Organizational Design | HR Transformation | Talent Strategy | Leadership Alignment | Change Enablement | People Analytics | Culture & Engagement | Executive Coaching

A regulated leader is a high-performing leader.

Calm is capacity.
Calm is clarity.
Calm is strategy.

You’ve seen it.
The leader who walks into the crisis and the room exhales,
not because they have all the answers,
but because their nervous system isn’t adding to the chaos.

They don’t need perfect information.
They just need enough regulation to think clearly
while everyone else is spinning.

High performance isn’t speed or intelligence.
It’s psychological capacity under pressure.

Consider this...
→ 71% of leaders report increased stress.
→ Stress management practices reduce burnout by nearly 2x.
→ Leaders with emotional regulation skills outperform their peers in every measure that matters...
→ execution, influence, decision-making, and team effectiveness.

Yet most leaders still treat regulation as a “nice-to-have.”
Something for wellness newsletters.
Something useful when things are calm, 
then abandoned the moment pressure hits.

Here’s what they’re missing:
→ Regulation isn’t what you do when pressure is low.
→ It’s what gives you capacity when pressure is high.

The cost of unregulated leadership:
🚩 When leaders lose capacity under pressure:
→ Panic narrows thinking — the solution becomes obvious only in hindsight
→ Decisions soothe anxiety instead of advancing strategy
→ Teams waste energy managing your emotional spikes
→ Reactivity becomes the operating system others must work around

What regulated leadership creates:
✅ When leaders stay grounded:
→ Thinking expands, you see options panic would hide
→ Strategy drives decisions instead of emotion
→ People bring you information early because they trust your steadiness
→ Teams stay focused on execution, not emotional cleanup

The pattern high-performing leaders understand:
→ Pressure doesn’t disappear.
→ Complexity doesn’t calm down.
→ Uncertainty doesn’t resolve.

What changes is your capacity to stay regulated inside all of it.

✅ The leader who can sit in a boardroom full of anxiety and not absorb it?
→ That’s who the board trusts with the hardest calls.
✅ The leader who can hear bad news without spiraling?
→ That’s who teams bring problems to before they explode.
✅ The leader who can feel the discomfort of the decision and make it anyway?
→ That’s who actually transforms organizations.

The compound effect:
Your regulation becomes your team’s capacity.

When you stay steady, they think more clearly.
When you stay grounded, they stop managing your emotions.
When you model composure, they learn how to navigate pressure themselves.

This isn’t “soft skills.”
This is organizational performance architecture.

Calm isn’t the absence of pressure.
Calm is having access to your full strategic intelligence
when pressure is highest.

👉🏾 How would your leadership change if you had full access to your strategic capacity, even under pressure?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

Allison Allen, ACC

Transforming Organizations Through People, Culture & Systems | HR & Talent Executive | Advisor to CEOs, CHROs & Growth Leaders | Founder, Leadership Rewired | Ex-Twitter, Expedia, GLG, Verizon Media, McKinsey

If you can’t do everything next week, 
choose the thing that will move anything.

Sunday night.
The week ahead is already too full.
The priorities are competing.
The urgent is screaming.
The important is shrinking into the background.

So here’s the question that cuts through all of it:
❓ What’s the one thing you could do next week that would unstick something else?

Not the biggest thing.
Not the loudest thing.
Not the thing that makes you look productive.
The thing that creates movement.

Here’s what I mean:
→ The conversation you’ve been avoiding that’s blocking three other decisions
→ The email you need to send that would clarify direction for your whole team
→ The 30 minutes of thinking that would save you an hour every day
→ The boundary you’ve been delaying that would protect your capacity

You already know what it is.
You’ve been circling it all week.

For the week ahead, try this:
Before you dive into Monday’s chaos, identify your one unlocking move —
the single action that, if you did it, would make everything else easier or unnecessary.

Not your whole to-do list.
Not your full list of priorities.
Just your unlock.

Then protect it like your most important meeting.
Because it is.

The difference between leaders who create momentum and leaders who manage overwhelm?
→ They don’t try to do everything.
→ They do the thing that moves anything.

And here’s what compounds:
When you consistently identify and execute your weekly unlock... 
 ✅ You stop drowning in tactics.
 ✅ You start seeing the levers that actually matter.
 ✅ You build the muscle of strategic action, not just strategic thinking.

Next week doesn’t have to be perfect.
It just has to move.

Your Sunday Practice:
What’s one thing you could do next week that would unstick something else?
→ Write it down.
→ Block time for it on Monday.
→ Do it before anything that feels more urgent.
 ✅ That’s your week.

👉🏾 What’s your unlock for this week, the one move that would create momentum for everything else?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

Exhaustion makes every leader reactive.
I watched it happen in real time once.

A client — brilliant strategist, 15 years building the company, universally respected.

She called me because “something felt off.”
〰️ Her leadership wasn’t landing. 
〰️ Her team felt distant. 
〰️ Her decisions felt heavier.

She kept talking about the transformation, the pressure, the board expectations, the market demands.

After an hour, I asked one question:
“When’s the last time you slept more than five hours?”

She went silent.
She couldn’t remember.

And in that moment, it was clear:
The issue wasn’t her capability.
It was her capacity.

She’d been operating on fumes for so long that depletion became her normal.
She forgot what it felt like to lead from a full tank.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after twenty years with leaders:
Exhaustion doesn’t show up with a dramatic collapse.

It shows up in a thousand micro-reactions:
→ The midnight email that creates problems you didn’t intend
→ The meeting where your tone lands sharper than you meant
→ The decision you rush because uncertainty feels unbearable
→ The strategic conversation you can’t think clearly through because your brain simply has nothing left to give

None of these moments feel connected.
You tell yourself it’s a bad day. 
A tough week. 
A heavy quarter.

🚩 But your team?
→ They see the pattern long before you do.
→ They start managing you instead of trusting you.
→ They adjust their behavior to your exhaustion.
→ They work around you instead of with you.
And exhaustion compounds.

👉🏾 Reactive leadership creates messes that generate more pressure.

What helped that client wasn’t more strategy.
It was one question:
“What would it take for you to lead from capacity instead of depletion?”
✅ She blocked three days.
→ No email.
→ No Slack.
→ No “quick check-ins.”
→ Just space.

When she came back, she said:
“I didn’t realize how reactive I’d become until I had enough rest to feel what regulated actually feels like.”

Her team noticed before she even told them.
Not because she changed her strategy —
but because she stopped leaking instability into the system.

If something feels off this weekend…
→ Maybe it’s not your strategy.
→ Maybe it’s not your team.
→ Maybe it’s not the transformation.
→ Maybe it’s your capacity calling for protection.

The work will still be there on Monday.
The pressure isn’t leaving.
The complexity isn’t easing.
But your ability to lead through all of it?
That depends on a nervous system that isn’t running on fumes.

Weekend Reflection:
What would change if you gave yourself permission to rest, not as a reward for finishing everything, but as the foundation that makes your leadership sustainable?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

Sunday night. You’re looking at the week ahead and it’s already overflowing,
 → back-to-back meetings,
→ strategic decisions, 
→ team dynamics, 
→ fires to put out, 
→ problems waiting for your brain.

All of it matters. None of it works if you show up depleted.

👉🏾 You can’t think strategically when your nervous system is running on fumes. 👉🏾 You can’t regulate your responses when you’re already overstretched. 👉🏾 You can’t hold the room when you can barely hold yourself.

The week doesn’t need your exhaustion. It needs your capacity.

For the week ahead, try this:
→ Identify the 10 minutes that protects everything else.

Not the 10 minutes you hope you’ll find. The 10 minutes you will actually protect even when the week goes sideways.

For some leaders, it’s 10 minutes before the day begins to ground themselves. For others, it’s 10 minutes between meetings to reset their nervous system. For some, it’s 10 minutes at day’s end to process before going home.

It doesn’t matter when. It matters that you protect it like your most critical meeting. Because it is.

Why 10 minutes matters:
Not because 10 minutes fixes everything, but because 10 minutes of protected space changes everything downstream.

→ It’s the pause that lets you respond instead of react. → The reset that keeps stress from compounding into impatience or reactivity. → The quiet moment that prevents your team from absorbing pressure you haven’t processed yet.

Ten minutes sounds small. But it’s a leadership leverage point, a tiny hinge that moves the entire week.

🚩 Leaders who don’t protect capacity:
* Leak stress into every interaction
* Make reactive decisions they undo later
* Burn out teams trying to compensate for their depletion
* Lose clarity by Tuesday and momentum by Thursday

✅ Leaders who do protect capacity:
* Think more clearly
* Regulate better under pressure
* Make decisions from strategy, not stress
* Build environments where teams can do their best work

The difference isn’t working less. It’s protecting the space that makes the work sustainable.

Your Sunday practice:
What are the 10 minutes you will protect this week, the space that keeps you leading from capacity instead of depletion?

→ Write it down. → Block it on your calendar. → Protect it like a board meeting.

Because how you lead next week depends on it.

👉🏾 What’s your 10 minutes this week and when exactly will you protect it?

♻️ Repost to promote taking 10 minutes…
📌 Follow Allison for more leadership insight.

Consistency is a strategy. 
Intensity is a gamble.

The leader who works 80-hour weeks for six months and then burns out.
The team that launches three major initiatives at once, then abandons two.
The executive who’s “all in” until the pressure hits, then disappears.

This isn’t commitment.
It’s unsustainable theater.

Long-term leadership isn’t built on heroic sprints.
It’s built on small, compounding decisions most people never see.

Transformations rarely fail because the strategy was wrong.
They fail because leaders can’t sustain the consistency required.

These efforts are “punishing in their relentless need for consistency, consistency, consistency on the part of leadership.”

Yet intensity gets the applause.
Consistency gets ignored.

We glorify the late nights.
We praise the “whatever it takes” mentality.
We mistake exhaustion for dedication.

But the math doesn’t lie:
Intensity burns out.
Consistency compounds.

What intensity-driven leadership actually creates:
🚩 The intensity trap:
→ Unsustainable patterns that guarantee burnout
→ Teams that sprint, crash, and disengage
→ Results that spike briefly and then crater
→ Cultures built on crisis mode instead of capability

What consistency-driven leadership builds:
✅ The compounding effect:
→ Sustainable practices that grow over years
→ Teams that deliver reliably, not heroically
→ Trust rooted in predictable follow-through
→ Systems that outlive individual effort

The truth about long-term impact:
A leader who shows up at 80% for ten years
will outperform a leader who shows up at 120% for eighteen months
every single time.

Because leadership isn’t about how hard you push today.
It’s about whether your team can count on you to show up
tomorrow, next month, and five years from now.

The best leaders aren’t the weekend warriors trying to prove commitment.
They’re the ones... 
✅ Who build systems that don’t require heroics.
✅ Who create rhythms they can sustain.
✅ Who understand that presence beats performance theater.

Intensity is impressive.
Consistency is rare.

And in a world addicted to hustle culture,
the ability to show up steadily, not spectacularly,
becomes your competitive advantage.

Your team doesn’t need you to be extraordinary for a quarter.
They need you to be reliable for a decade.

That’s not less ambitious.
It’s just harder to Instagram.

👉🏾 Are you building leadership that compounds, or burning intensity you can’t sustain?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

You know what needs to happen.
The strategic move is obvious.
The direction is clear.
The data supports it.
Your experience confirms it.

So why isn’t it happening?

Because between knowing what to do
and actually doing it sits the hardest part of leadership:

Managing yourself.

Your strategy isn’t the problem.
The emotional discipline to execute it is.

Organizations spend millions on strategy, consultants, frameworks, offsites, planning cycles, alignment sessions.
But execution stalls for one simple reason:

Doing what the strategy requires feels emotionally uncomfortable.

Research shows emotional intelligence accounts for twice as much impact 
as IQ and technical skill in leadership effectiveness.

Yet most development dollars still go into strategic tools, 
not emotional discipline.

Most strategy failures aren’t strategy failures.
They’re self-management failures.

What happens when emotional discipline is missing:
🚩 The avoidance pattern:
→ The conversation needs to happen 
      ↳conflict feels unbearable → delay
→ The decision needs to be made 
      ↳uncertainty feels dangerous → wait for more data
→ The accountability moment arrives 
      ↳disappointing someone feels costly → soften it
→ The boundary needs protecting 
      ↳saying no triggers fear → say yes

What emotional discipline enables:
✅ Courage-based execution:
→ Having the hard conversation even when your stomach tightens
→ Making the call with 70% clarity because waiting costs more
→ Holding people accountable even when the relationship strains
→ Saying no to protect what matters, not to avoid discomfort

This has nothing to do with intelligence.
And everything to do with your willingness to tolerate discomfort long enough to lead.

The leaders who break through aren’t the ones with better strategies.
✅ They’re the ones who’ve built the emotional discipline to execute strategy
when execution feels terrible.
✅ They can recognize the spike of anxiety and not let it veto the decision.
✅ They can feel the discomfort of the hard conversation and have it anyway.
✅ They can sit inside uncertainty without manufacturing false clarity to soothe themselves.

That’s not a strategy skill.
That’s self-management.
And it’s the difference between leaders who are smart
and leaders who are effective.

Your team doesn’t need another strategic framework.
They need you to manage yourself well enough to execute the one you already have.

👉🏾 What strategic move are you avoiding right now, not because you don’t know what to do, but because doing it feels too uncomfortable?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

Your biggest competitive advantage isn’t speed, capital, or strategy.
It’s whether you can stay steady when pressure spikes.

Imagine this:
→ A competitor launches something disruptive. 
→ The board starts asking questions. The team gets anxious. Slack lights up. → Everyone wants a fast response.
→ Most leaders reach for activity, more meetings, faster decisions, louder communication.

But the leaders who outperform don’t move faster.
They move steadier.

That steadiness? Emotional endurance.

Strategy doesn’t fail in moments of disruption.
It fails when leaders lose the capacity to think clearly through disruption.

Here’s what I see over and over:
Two organizations face the same pressure.
Same data. Same market. Same urgency.

One spirals into reactive decisions and mixed signals.
The other holds the line, adapts intelligently, and compounds trust.
The difference isn’t intelligence.
It’s endurance.

🚩 What low endurance looks like:
→ Urgency replaces strategy
→ Anxiety drives decisions
→ Teams spend energy managing leadership stress
→ “Agility” becomes chaos

✅ What high endurance enables:
→ Clear thinking under pressure
→ Consistent decisions even when uncertainty rises
→ Teams that execute instead of brace
→ Strategy that survives contact with reality

Here’s the part most leaders miss:
Emotional endurance isn’t built during crises.
It’s built before them, in small, repeatable ways.

Not retreats. Not apps. Not slogans.
But things like:
→ Protecting a small, daily reset that keeps you regulated
→ Naming pressure early so it doesn’t leak into behavior
→ Designing your operating rhythm to reduce decision fatigue

That’s not self-care.
That’s leadership architecture.

Because when pressure hits, and it will,
your team doesn’t need you faster.
They need you steadier.

👉🏾 As you head into the weekend:
What would change if you treated emotional endurance as a strategic asset, 
not a personal nice-to-have?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

You can’t out-strategize emotional dysregulation.

Your transformation plan is brilliant.
The roadmap is clear.
The communications are crisp.
The milestones are defined.
Then the first obstacle hits.

Suddenly:
💥 A late-night email reverses yesterday’s decision.
💥 An emergency meeting creates more questions than answers.
💥 Priorities shift, not from strategy, but from panic.

A system can’t work when the leader running it is reactive.
When anxiety makes decisions, strategy becomes optional.

70% of change initiatives fail.
Leaders blame strategy, resources, or timing.
But here’s the truth behind the failure rate:
The plan didn’t collapse; the leader did.

73% of employees report moderate to high stress during change.
Employees experiencing change-related stress perform 5% worse.
But the real cost isn’t the team’s stress, it’s how leaders respond to their own.

When leaders can’t regulate themselves under pressure, they create:
→ Chaos their teams must absorb
→ Confusion that erodes trust
→ Whiplash pivots that look like incompetence
→ A culture where everyone manages emotions instead of executing strategy

What reactive leadership looks like during change:
🚩 When leaders lose regulation:
→ Monday’s priority becomes Friday’s “why are we even doing this?”
→ Anxiety gets translated into false urgency
→ Every problem triggers a meeting → every meeting triggers three more problems
→ Strategic pivots happen weekly because uncertainty feels unbearable

👉🏾 Teams manage the leader’s emotions instead of the organization’s change

What regulated leadership enables:
✅ When leaders stay grounded:
→ Decisions hold steady even when pressure spikes
→ Anxiety exists, but doesn’t drive strategy
→ Problems get solved without organizational chaos
→ Uncertainty is acknowledged without forcing premature answers

👉🏾 Teams stay focused on execution, not emotional cleanup

What most leaders miss:
→ Emotional regulation isn’t about staying calm.
→ It’s about staying strategic when your nervous system wants to run.
→ It’s noticing the spike of panic and refusing to turn it into policy.

✅ The leader who can feel uncertainty and still hold the line?
→ That’s who teams trust through transformation.
→ The leader who needs to “do something” to soothe their discomfort?
→ That’s how change turns into theater, not progress.

Stress management practices reduce burnout by nearly 2x.

👉🏾 Leaders who build emotional discipline create the only environment where change can actually land.

And this is the real reason 70% of change efforts fail:
Not because the plan was wrong.
But because the leader couldn’t stay regulated long enough to execute it.

👉🏾 What change are you leading right now, and how are you managing your own stress so it doesn’t become your team’s strategy?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

Unexpressed stress becomes unintentional harm.
Leaders leak what they don’t address.

You think you’re hiding it.
You think the team can’t tell.
You think if you just “get through the meeting,” no one will notice.

They notice.
They always notice.

Unexpressed stress doesn’t disappear.
It seeps, into tone, decisions, silence, timing, and presence.

Teams absorb what leaders won’t acknowledge.

What I’m noticing:
→ 71% of leaders report increased stress.
→ Only 29% of employees trust their immediate managers.
→ Employees with supportive managers are 11x more likely to trust their leaders.

Leaders are drowning in unspoken stress.
Teams are losing trust without knowing why.

Because stress you refuse to name doesn’t stay contained, 
it leaks into leadership in ways you can’t control.

What unexpressed stress actually looks like:
🚩 How unaddressed stress harms teams:
→ Anxiety: confusion (teams assume they caused it)
→ Irritability: vigilance (people manage mood, not work)
→ Withdrawal: isolation (silence feels like punishment)
→ Perfectionism: paralysis (fear trickles down and freezes initiative)

What acknowledged stress creates:
✅ When leaders name what they’re carrying:
→ Transparency builds trust: “Here’s what I’m managing — not your performance.”
→ Humanity spreads: teams feel permission to show up honestly
→ Clarity returns: they stop interpreting tension as failure
→ Culture shifts: problems get named instead of navigated around

What actually helps:
Leaders don’t need to process stress publicly.
But they do need enough transparency to remove misinterpretation.

Statements like:
✅ “I’m managing a lot right now. If I seem distracted, that’s me, not your performance.”
✅ “I’m under more pressure than usual this week. I’ll do my best not to let it spill over.”
✅ “My bandwidth is tighter than normal. Here’s why, and here’s what you can expect.”

That’s not oversharing.
That’s leadership that understands the cost of silence.

Stress is personal.
Its impact is not.

The moment you lead people, your inner state becomes an outer experience.

When you won’t name what you’re carrying, your team carries it for you, without context, without support, and without knowing it’s not about them.

✅ Leaders who create psychological safety through transparency 
build trust that survives pressure.
🛑 Leaders who hide their stress create cultures where everyone performs invulnerability until something breaks.

👉🏾 What stress are you carrying that your team is absorbing, and what would change if you simply named it?

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve got leadership backwards.

We chase development like it’s a fix,
more training, 
better frameworks, 
sharper models. 

As if clarity only comes once everything is perfectly defined.

But real leadership doesn’t happen in the polished moments.

It happens in the messy ones. 
The uncertain ones. 
The days when you’re not sure if you’re doing it right.

Building resilient cultures during change isn’t about avoiding chaos.

It’s about staying present inside it. 
Letting disruption teach you instead of rushing to control it.

I’ll be honest, there are moments when leadership feels like translating strategy into action without a clear map. 

When you’re making calls with imperfect information
and trusting your judgment more than your certainty.

And maybe that’s the work.

Leaders who are willing... 
To ask questions. 
To stumble a little. 

To admit they don’t have all the answers, but stay engaged anyway.

So if you’re feeling a bit lost today, you’re not behind.

You’re in it.

And sometimes, that’s exactly where growth happens.

📌 Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
♻️ Please repost if this resonates and follow for more leadership insights.

taplio

Allison Allen, ACC's Linkedin Analytics