When Ayla Schlosser, co-founder and former CEO of Resonate, first launched her leadership training program in Kigali, Rwanda, she wanted her team to feel egalitarian. Ayla decided that everyone on her new team would make decisions together. If they were hiring someone new, they had an all-team meeting to talk through the options. Deciding on sales strategy? All-team meeting. Marketing material? All-team meeting.

Within a few months, one of her new teammates pulled Schlosser aside to tell her that the team was struggling. The problem was that the process felt too collaborative. Schlosser’s team appreciated having their voices heard, and they felt that they lacked direction and couldn’t complete their work because they were included in everything.

Schlosser took the feedback to heart. She worked on a concrete vision and presented it to everyone. As a team, they decided which decisions felt large enough that everyone should be involved. They identified other decisions that required only some of the team and clarified which decisions Schlosser should make on her own. This brought a much-needed balance to the organization, which operated much more efficiently from that point forward.

Schlosser’s experience highlights an important element of holistic leadership: understanding complementary healthy traits and discerning which traits should be deployed based on the circumstances.

Many of the healthy traits work together to balance one another—the whole yin-yang thing—and can become toxic without that balance. Someone who is driven without being able to be present and attentive to others can become callous or selfish. Or, in Schlosser’s case, she needed to balance collaboration with being clear and decisive.

The most adept holistic leaders intentionally do not lean too heavily on any single trait and work to wield complementary traits together as needed to provide a healthy balance. Table 2.3 shows some key complementary healthy traits.

As you cultivate more healthy traits and understand how they work together, your leadership will expand. As it does so, discerning which trait is called for and how healthy traits complement each other will become your superpower. As former leadership coach and Talent to Team Co-CEO Hannah Drain Taylor says, “The best leaders I’ve ever worked with don’t have a default mode. They have tons of tools in their tool belt and can figure out which one they need based on the circumstance, easily switching between traits.”

Table 2.3: Examples of Balanced Traits

Tips for Cultivating Balancing Traits

1. Identify the Yin to Your Yang

Review the list of healthy traits and write down the ones that you feel you regularly lean on. Once you’ve done so, review each one and write down any traits you think complement your healthy traits. The simple process of doing so will help you be more aware of any imbalance in your leadership, especially when you identify a balancing trait that you don’t feel comfortable wielding yet.

2. Monthly Review

Building on the first tip from practice #1, at the end of each week, write down as many instances you can think of where you expressed a healthy trait. Review your notes at the end of the month to see whether certain traits show up more than others. If so, do you see any instances where you also expressed the balancing trait? Simply being aware of this dynamic will help you be more conscious of any unintentional imbalance in your approach.

With an estimated 70 percent of people saying their manager has as much of an impact on their mental health as their spouse does, it’s more important than ever that all of us are intentional about how we show up in the workplace. Fortunately, the pioneering leaders who’ve come before us have shown us that holistic leadership is not only more effective but reduces harm—to those working with a leader and to the leader themself. Additionally, the holistic leadership approach helps break down some anti-“feminine” leadership beliefs that hold women back. Each time you effectively wield “feminine” traits with your team, you demonstrate their power and chisel away at ingrained toxically masculine beliefs that anything “feminine” doesn’t belong in the workplace. Every day, your words, energy, and actions impact the people around you. It’s up to you what impact you want to make and what kind of leader you want to be.

Excerpted from This Isn’t Working: How Working Women Can Overcome Stress, Guilt, and Overload to Find True Success. Copyright © 2025 by Meghan French Dunbar. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.