Explores the gap between organizational empowerment rhetoric and reality, examining how leaders can build infrastructure to genuinely empower employees, reduce turnover, and develop capable leaders through trust, clarity, and delegated authority.
Verified Member
Influential Woman · Leadership Development Coaching
Gwendolyn A Opel
Leadership Development Consultant & Executive Coach, Lady Boss Leadership
Tempe, AZ 85288
4Years experience
2Articles published
Her Story
About Gwendolyn
Gwen is the founder of Lady Boss Leadership, a leadership development coaching practice built on the foundation of a nearly three-decade career spanning military service and federal government work. After rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel over 26 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, and spending roughly 15 years in federal national security work with a three-letter agency, Gwen transitioned into civilian leadership development in 2022, channeling the lessons of high-stakes, high-consequence environments into practical coaching for emerging and entry-level leaders. She holds a bachelor's degree in elementary education, a master's degree in Military Strategic Studies from the USAF Air War College, and professional certificates in HR Management, Leading Remote teams, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from Cornell University Gwen is currently completing the iPEC Coach Certification Program toward her Certified Professional Coach credential. Throughout her career, Gwen built a reputation for developing people and organizations, from leading multinational teams within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to designing leadership curricula for graduate-level military education and state government agencies.
Her coaching philosophy centers on integrity, transparency, and the idea of "failing forward," treating setbacks not as detours but as essential material for growth and resilience. She is passionate about translating the traits instilled by military service into strengths that emerging leaders and female veterans can carry into civilian careers, and she is currently writing a book that shares the experiences of women who served, aiming to bridge the understanding gap between military and civilian workplaces. Beyond her consulting work, Gwen remains deeply engaged in her community and the veteran space, serving as vice chair of her local Veterans Commission and her son's PTA. Her contributions have earned her recognition as a featured honoree in Influential Women for 2026. A single mother raising a young son, Gwen balances her professional pursuits with personal interests in travel, writing, and home improvement, and she continues to measure her success not by titles or accolades but by the lasting relationships she has built with the soldiers and colleagues she has led.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Gwendolyn
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to failing forward. There has been plenty of failure throughout my career, and I believe your relationship with failure, along with what you choose to do next despite your last mistake, is what really determines your resilience. Failure has taught me a great deal, even the failures that were only perceived as such, and that has kept me both humble and moving forward.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I've received is that, "What got you here won't get you there." I often think of the scene from Devil Wears Prada to illustrate this point: the skills and approach that earn you a new role won't necessarily be what allows you to thrive once you're in it. Advancing successfully requires adjusting to new environments and leaning on emotional intelligence.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I'd tell young women that there is a leader in all of us, so go for it. Take the interview, take the chance, and stop underselling yourself. You will learn something valuable no matter the outcome, even from failure, because that's where real growth happens.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Coaching remains a largely unregulated field with few governing bodies, which makes finding your niche and effectively marketing and selling it a real challenge. At the same time, we're in the middle of a major generational shift, with Baby Boomers exiting the workforce and Gen Z entering it, which creates both challenges and opportunities in how we share and apply our specialties.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Integrity, transparency, and honesty matter most to me, values that were ingrained in me through my military background alongside leadership, loyalty, duty, respect, honor, self-service, and personal courage. I believe that transparency in leadership positions empowers employees and builds stronger, more trusting organizations.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Gwendolyn
When Empowerment is Just a Word on the Wall
How leaders can transform empowerment from a slogan into a practice that truly unleashes organizational potential.
The Leader Within
When Empowerment Is Just a Word on a Wall
Written by: Gwen Opel
Empowerment is easy to declare. It is much harder to practice.
Walk through enough organizations and you will find familiar words displayed on walls, embedded in strategic plans, repeated at town halls, and celebrated in recruitment materials:
Trust. Innovation. Collaboration. Empowerment.
Often, the leaders saying those words genuinely believe them.
The harder question is whether employees experience them.
Empowerment can be especially powerful at the beginning of a leadership journey. A high-performing employee is recognized for their ideas, initiative, judgment, and potential. They are promoted because someone believes they can contribute at a higher level.
They enter the role energized.
They see possibilities. They bring ideas. They want to solve problems. They believe they have been given permission to lead.
And then they begin trying to do exactly that.
Suddenly, the qualities that helped earn the promotion can become sources of friction.
New ideas require additional approval. Decisions are revisited. Initiative is constrained. Attempts to change systems are slowed because the new leader is told they lack experience, context, tenure, or organizational knowledge.
The organization selected them for their potential and then constructed barriers around their ability to use it.
Promotion Without Authority Creates Friction
There is an important distinction between giving someone responsibility and empowering them to exercise it.
Organizations can assign titles, teams, programs, and outcomes. But if every meaningful decision still travels upward, responsibility has been delegated while authority has not.
That creates an exhausting organizational contradiction:
You are accountable for the outcome, but you are not trusted with the decisions necessary to produce it.
Over time, people internalize that contradiction.
Initially, they may work harder. They try another approach. They build another justification. They gather more data. They learn the politics. They seek another approval.
Eventually, some stop offering ideas.
Others stop challenging ineffective systems.
And some of the most capable people simply leave.
Organizations experiencing repeated turnover often focus on the departures themselves: compensation, workload, personality conflicts, competing opportunities, generational differences, or individual fit.
Those explanations may sometimes be true.
But repeated attrition, particularly among capable employees and leaders, should also prompt a much more uncomfortable leadership question:
What are people experiencing here that makes leaving feel more promising than staying?
Empowerment Requires Infrastructure
Empowerment cannot survive as a slogan. It requires organizational infrastructure beneath it.
Employees need clarity about the mission and the outcomes they are responsible for achieving. They need boundaries around their authority. They need access to information. They need leaders willing to coach rather than control. They need permission to make reasonable mistakes while learning.
Most importantly, they need evidence that leadership trusts them.
Without those things, empowerment becomes little more than organizational branding.
The military offers a useful model for thinking about this: Mission Command.
At its core is a deceptively simple idea. Senior leaders establish clear intent and create shared understanding so subordinate leaders can exercise disciplined initiative when circumstances change.
That matters because warfare does not allow every tactical decision to travel back through layers of hierarchy. The person closest to the problem may have seconds, not hours, to act.
Effective commanders, therefore, cannot simply retain decision-making power at the top. They must deliberately extend it throughout the organization.
That requires trust.
It requires competence.
It requires shared understanding.
And it requires leaders to communicate not only what must be accomplished, but why it matters, so people can make sound decisions when the original plan inevitably meets reality.
Senior leaders have enormous responsibility. They establish intent. Set conditions. Develop people. Communicate priorities. Allocate resources. Define acceptable risk. Build shared understanding. And hold people accountable.
Then they do something that can be extraordinarily difficult for leaders accustomed to organizational power:
They release the reins.
What Civilian Organizations Can Learn
Most civilian organizations are not operating on battlefields, but the leadership principle transfers remarkably well.
Whether someone is negotiating policy among competing stakeholders, managing scarce public resources, leading a technical program, serving customers, or supervising a frontline workforce, the people closest to the work often possess information senior leaders simply cannot see from above.
Their perspective is not a threat to leadership authority.
It is an asset.
The leader's job is not to personally make every good decision. The leader's job is to build an organization capable of making good decisions.
That means selecting talented people and then creating the conditions in which their talent can actually matter.
Promoting your strongest employees while simultaneously inhibiting their progress because of their "inexperience" creates friction, frustration, and eventually failure.
If someone was qualified enough to receive the responsibility, leadership must help them develop the judgment necessary to exercise it—not continuously reclaim their authority whenever their decisions become uncomfortable.
The Hidden Cost of Control
Micromanagement can feel safe.
Centralized authority can feel efficient.
Political control can even feel strategically necessary.
But those choices carry costs that rarely appear immediately on an organizational dashboard.
People begin protecting themselves instead of innovating.
Emerging leaders learn that initiative is risky.
Managers spend more energy navigating internal politics than solving external problems.
Trust erodes.
High performers disengage.
And eventually, some leave.
Then organizations pay again.
They pay to recruit, hire, onboard, retrain, rebuild institutional knowledge, repair relationships, and restore credibility with the employees who remain.
The financial cost matters.
The cultural cost may be greater.
Every departure communicates something to the workforce that remains. When departures become a pattern, employees create their own explanations for what is happening—especially when organizational transparency and trust are already weak.
That is why retention is not simply an HR problem. It is a leadership signal.
Look Beyond the Words on the Wall
If your organization says it values empowerment, ask what that value actually looks like in practice.
Do your managers know what decisions they own?
Can employees challenge an existing process without becoming labeled as difficult?
Can emerging leaders make reasonable mistakes without losing organizational trust?
When leaders delegate responsibility, do they also delegate meaningful authority?
When talented people bring forward ideas, are senior leaders genuinely curious, or immediately defensive?
And perhaps most importantly:
Are your leaders developing other leaders, or simply creating more people who need their permission?
Empowerment does not mean leaders surrender responsibility.
It means they use their authority differently.
They create clarity.
They build competence.
They cultivate trust.
They establish boundaries.
They communicate intent.
And then they allow talented people to lead.
Because when empowerment exists only in a strategic plan, employees eventually recognize the difference.
The writing on the wall begins to fade.
And sometimes, your best people walk out the door with it.
The Leader Within
The Leader Within explores the organizational conditions that allow people—and the leaders responsible for them—to thrive.
At Lady Boss Leadership, we provide leadership development programs, customized training, workshops, and coaching designed to strengthen leaders and the organizations they serve.
Whether you are developing emerging leaders, new supervisors, or experienced executives, our programs are designed to create practical, lasting leadership capability.
Ready to invest in your people?
Gwen Opel
Lady Boss Leadership
ladybossleadership.com
About Lady Boss Leadership
At Lady Boss Leadership, we believe intentional leadership begins within. We partner with organizations to develop confident, capable leaders through coaching, leadership development programs, workshops, and customized training solutions designed to strengthen culture, build trust, and prepare the next generation of leaders.
This article is provided for educational and professional development purposes. The views expressed are personal and do not represent the official positions or policies of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, Department of War, or any current or former employer. Examples are shared to illustrate leadership principles and are not intended to disclose privileged, confidential, or organizationally sensitive information.
Discover how transparent communication from leaders builds trust, transforms employees into mission partners, and creates the commitment needed to align teams around a shared vision.
The Leader Within Series
How Transparent Communication Creates the Foundation for Organizational Trust and Team Commitment
The Leader Within Series
Transparency Builds Trust
One of the greatest disconnects in organizations isn't capability; it's communication.
Employees often experience decisions long before they understand them. A new policy appears. Priorities shift. Budgets change. Reorganizations happen. Without context, people naturally fill in the blanks-and rarely with the most positive assumptions.
Great leaders understand that transparency isn't about sharing everything. It's about sharing enough.
Reasonable transparency means helping people understand:
- Where the organization is going.
- Why decisions are being made.
- How their work contributes to the mission.
- What success looks like.
The most trusted leaders don't show up once a year at the holiday luncheon. They are visible. They engage. They listen. They connect strategy to the daily work of individual contributors.
When employees understand the why, they become more than task completers; they become partners in the mission.
Transparency communicates respect.
Respect builds trust.
Trust creates commitment.
And commitment is what transforms a group of employees into a team working toward a shared vision.
Leadership Challenge
Think about a recent change in your organization.
Did you simply hear what was changing, or did your leaders help you understand why it mattered?
As you grow as a leader, remember this:
People don't need every answer. But they do deserve every reasonable effort to understand the mission they're being asked to support.
Junior Leader's Forum Call to Action
See: Notice where a lack of information is creating confusion, assumptions, or resistance.
Understand: Transparency isn't about revealing everything; it's about providing enough context for people to understand the mission, priorities, and purpose behind decisions.
Act: During your next interaction with your team, don't just communicate what is changing. Explain why it matters and how each person's work contributes to the bigger picture.
About Lady Boss Leadership
At Lady Boss Leadership, we believe intentional leadership begins within. We partner with organizations to develop confident, capable leaders through coaching, leadership development programs, workshops, and customized training solutions designed to strengthen culture, build trust, and prepare the next generation of leaders.
Whether you're developing emerging leaders, new supervisors, or experienced executives, our programs are built to create practical, lasting leadership capability.
Ready to invest in your people?
www.ladybossleadership.com
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and are intended for educational and professional development purposes. They do not represent the official positions or policies of the U.S. Army, the Department of War, or any current or former employer. Examples are shared to illustrate leadership principles and are not intended to disclose privileged, confidential, or organizationally sensitive information.
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.