J Franco, MBA, MCM

When Kate Wyler stood up and resigned during the Season 4 finale of The Diplomat, I nearly jumped out of my seat... and my jaw is still on the floor!

Watching President Grace Penn punish someone for expressing dissent, only to have members of her own administration withdraw their support, was a powerful reminder of something I have experienced firsthand.

You can learn a lot about a leader by watching how she responds when someone tells her no.

But there was another leadership lesson I couldn't stop thinking about.

Women are taught to fear being perceived as mean so much that they sometimes tolerate behavior they would never defend as leaders.

And I think we need to have a serious conversation about that.

When Disagreement Becomes Disloyalty

We spend so much time encouraging women to find their voices, advocate for themselves, challenge authority, and take their rightful seats at the table.

But what happens when the woman sitting across that table disagrees with us?

Suddenly, the language changes.

She is no longer challenging a decision. She is being difficult.

She is no longer questioning a process. She is creating drama.

She is no longer holding someone accountable. She is being unsupportive.

And if she establishes a boundary? Well, now she is a mean girl.

I have witnessed this dynamic in professional organizations and leadership spaces. I have also experienced what it feels like to have my intentions questioned when making decisions I believed were necessary to protect the organization I was entrusted to lead.

Those experiences have taught me that we need to stop confusing disagreement with disloyalty and accountability with cruelty.

Women supporting women cannot mean women agreeing with women.

Otherwise, we are not building a culture of support. We are building a culture of compliance.

The Price of Being the Nice Girl

There is an expectation placed on women in leadership that I find particularly troubling.

We are expected to lead decisively but remain endlessly accommodating.

Hold people accountable but never make anyone uncomfortable.

Establish standards but make exceptions when enforcing them might hurt someone's feelings.

Protect the organization but never risk being perceived as unkind.

And when someone repeatedly crosses a boundary, we are encouraged to extend more grace, offer another opportunity, and keep the peace.

But at whose expense?

What happens to the other women in the room who are following the rules?

What happens to the members, employees, and colleagues who are counting on leadership to protect the integrity of the organization?

What happens to their trust when leadership refuses to act?

I have learned that sometimes keeping the peace is simply another way of avoiding the responsibility of leadership.

And the people who pay the price are often the very people we were supposed to protect.

A Boundary Is Not Bullying

Let me make something clear.

Not every disagreement warrants a consequence. Healthy organizations need people who are willing to challenge decisions, ask difficult questions, and speak up when something is wrong.

That is not a threat to leadership. That is an essential part of it.

But dissent and disruptive behavior are not interchangeable.

There is a difference between questioning authority and attempting to exercise authority you do not have.

There is a difference between raising legitimate concerns and repeatedly undermining an established process.

And there is a difference between excluding someone out of personal resentment and enforcing a reasonable, consistently applied organizational boundary.

A boundary is not bullying simply because the person on the other side of it does not like the consequence.

We need to stop automatically labeling women as cruel simply because someone is unhappy with a decision they made.

Of course, leaders must examine their motives. Boundaries should be fair, transparent, and grounded in legitimate standards rather than personal grievances.

But women should not have to surrender their authority simply to preserve their reputation for being nice.

The Real Test of a Woman's Leadership

I believe there are two questions every woman in leadership should ask herself.

How do I respond when someone challenges my authority?

And equally important:

How do I respond when someone crosses a boundary I am responsible for protecting?

The first reveals whether we can handle dissent without retaliating.

The second reveals whether we can enforce accountability without apologizing for doing our jobs.

Strong leadership requires both.

I think about Kate standing up in that final scene of The Diplomat. Grace Penn still held the highest office in the room, but one by one, the people around her withdrew their confidence.

She had authority. What she was losing was trust.

And that is something every leader should remember.

Your title may give you the right to make decisions, but it does not guarantee that people will continue to believe in your leadership.

I want to see more women rise into positions of influence. I want to see us lead companies, organizations, communities, and institutions.

But I also want us to become women who can hear no without retaliating, say no without feeling guilty, and recognize the difference between protecting our egos and protecting the people we serve.

Because the goal of leadership was never to be the most liked woman in the room.

It was to become the kind of woman people can trust with power.

And sometimes that means having the courage to be misunderstood while doing what is right.

Last December, I chose one word for 2026.

Uncomfortable.

At the time, I thought I was choosing a word that would challenge me.

I imagined bigger rooms. Harder decisions. Greater visibility. More courage. More willingness to do the things I had been avoiding because they felt unfamiliar.

I did not realize I was choosing the thesis for my entire year.

Because 2026 has asked me, repeatedly, to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

In my business.

In leadership.

In visibility.

In the way people see me.

And perhaps most importantly, in the way I see myself.

This year, I became the 2026 American Business Woman.

That recognition came with a level of visibility and responsibility I had never occupied before.

It placed me in rooms where I was no longer being recognized only for what I had built as a marketer or business owner.

People were responding to something bigger.

Leadership.

Influence.

Ambition.

Voice.

The ability to move people.

That should have felt natural after years of leading businesses, teams, clients, organizations, and communities.

But it did not. Not immediately.

Because sometimes people recognize who you have become before you do.

The identities we outgrow

For years, I knew exactly how to describe myself.

I was the marketing woman.

The social media strategist.

The agency owner.

The person people called when their content was not working.

That identity was earned. It was familiar. And because it was familiar, it was comfortable.

Then my speaking started changing.

I was still being asked to talk about marketing, but increasingly, I was being invited into conversations about leadership, influence, ambition, confidence, identity, and becoming.

At first, I treated that shift almost like a departure from my expertise.

Then I had to confront something uncomfortable.

I had already been doing the work of a leader for years. I just had not fully claimed the identity.

That realization taught me something I believe many accomplished women eventually face.

We can become so loyal to the version of ourselves that built the career that we struggle to make room for the woman we have become because of it.

The title that once fit perfectly can become too small. The audience that once understood us may need time to catch up. Sometimes we do, too.

Growth is not always about becoming more qualified. Sometimes it is about finally acknowledging that you already are.

Then the visible proof disappeared

Just as I was beginning to more fully occupy this expanded version of myself, another part of my professional identity was stripped down almost overnight.

In September, I lost the social media platforms I had spent years building. More than 20,000 followers across personal accounts, business accounts, and other profiles disappeared.

Years of content.

Years of engagement.

Years of visible social proof.

Gone.

I have spent 15 years working in social media. And suddenly, I was a social media expert rebuilding an Instagram account with 130 followers.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about being highly experienced while publicly looking inexperienced.

Before the loss, someone could visit my profile and immediately see evidence.

The audience.

The engagement.

The years of content.

The awards.

The speaking clips.

The work.

The community.

The number beside my name was not my expertise, but it helped communicate it before I ever had to explain myself.

Then that disappeared.

And I was left with a question far bigger than social media.

Who are you when the proof people used to validate you is no longer immediately visible?

When achievement becomes part of the mirror

Women are often encouraged to achieve more.

Build more.

Lead more.

Earn more.

Speak more.

Become more visible.

And I believe in ambition. Wholeheartedly. I am unapologetically ambitious.

I do not believe women need to apologize for wanting success, influence, money, recognition, leadership, or a bigger life.

But there is a line worth paying attention to.

Achievement can be something we are proud of without becoming the thing that tells us who we are.

That distinction is easy to understand when everything is going well. It becomes much harder when something disappears.

A title changes.

A company struggles.

A marriage ends.

A promotion goes to someone else.

A business closes.

An audience disappears.

An opportunity falls through.

A room stops applauding.

Suddenly, the woman who knew exactly who she was when the evidence was everywhere has to answer the question again without it.

That is where identity gets tested.

The expert before the numbers

The line I keep coming back to in this season is simple:

Be the expert before the numbers make you look like one.

That applies far beyond social media.

Can you know you are capable before the promotion proves it?

Can you know you are a leader before the title catches up?

Can you know your voice matters before the room applauds?

Can you know you are qualified before the recognition arrives?

Can you trust your experience when other people cannot immediately see the receipts?

That is the work.

Because the danger of external validation is not that it feels good. It should.

Recognition feels good.

Winning feels good.

Being seen feels good.

Being celebrated feels good.

The danger is when we become so accustomed to using external proof as a mirror that we no longer know how to see ourselves without it.

I did not lose what built the proof

Losing my social platforms did not erase 15 years of experience.

It did not erase my education.

It did not erase the businesses I have helped.

It did not erase the campaigns I built, the strategies I developed, the teams I led, the organizations I served, or the stages I stood on.

It did not erase the woman who had earned the proof.

It erased the place where much of the proof was displayed.

Those are not the same thing.

That distinction changed the way I began approaching the rebuild.

I stopped treating the small number as evidence that I had somehow become smaller.

I began treating it as a temporary mismatch between the visible proof and the actual body of work.

The proof would catch back up. My responsibility was to keep showing up as the woman who had already done the work.

Leadership begins before the room agrees

This year has also forced me to think differently about leadership.

For a long time, I thought leadership became real once other people recognized it.

The title.

The position.

The award.

The invitation.

The stage.

I do not believe that anymore.

Leadership begins before the room agrees.

It begins in the decisions no one applauds.

In the boundaries people do not understand.

In the willingness to disappoint people who preferred the version of you that required less from them.

In trusting your judgment before consensus arrives.

In taking responsibility when there is nobody else to blame.

And sometimes, leadership looks like standing firmly in who you are while the evidence around you temporarily suggests otherwise.

That requires a different kind of confidence. Not performative confidence. Not arrogance. Not pretending you never doubt yourself.

It requires a grounded relationship with your own body of work.

You know what you have survived.

You know what you have built.

You know what you have learned.

You know what you have earned.

You know what it cost you.

That knowledge has to matter even when other people do not have all the context yet.

Faith changed the way I understood the loss

My faith is central to how I understand my life, my ambition, and my leadership.

So eventually, the question became spiritual, too.

Did I believe God had equipped me for the work?

Did I believe He had ordered my steps?

Did I believe He had opened certain doors, developed certain gifts, and placed me in certain rooms?

If the answer was yes, then I could not suddenly decide that a social media account had the authority to invalidate what God had already cultivated in me.

That realization was humbling.

Because it forced me to acknowledge how easy it is to say we trust God while quietly asking the world to provide confirmation.

The followers.

The applause.

The recognition.

The awards.

The opportunities.

Those things can affirm the work. They cannot define the calling.

I had to trust what God had already equipped me with while the visible proof rebuilt around it.

Sometimes becoming means remembering

At the beginning of the year, I believed Uncomfortable would be about becoming a stronger version of myself. In many ways, it has been.

But some of the most important moments have not required me to become someone new. They have required me to remember who I already am.

The strategist when the following was small.

The leader before the recognition.

The woman before the award.

The voice before the audience.

The ambition before anyone else understood it.

The faith before the proof.

That may be one of the hardest parts of becoming.

We think growth will always feel like addition.

More skills.

More accomplishments.

More opportunities.

More confidence.

Sometimes growth is subtraction.

Something disappears.

Something changes.

Something stops validating you.

And you are left with yourself.

That can feel uncomfortable. It can also be clarifying.

I still want the whole damn thing

None of this has made me less ambitious. Quite the opposite.

I still want the growth.

I still want the rooms.

I still want the impact.

I still want the stages.

I still want the company to grow.

I still want the audience to grow.

I still want the whole damn thing.

The difference is that I do not want any of those things to become responsible for telling me who I am.

I want them to be evidence of the work, not the source of my worth.

I want recognition without dependence on recognition.

Visibility without confusing visibility with identity.

Ambition without apology.

Leadership without waiting for permission.

And faith strong enough to trust that what God has built in me remains mine even when the external evidence temporarily disappears.

Last December, I chose Uncomfortable because I wanted a word that would challenge me.

I did not know I was choosing a word that would ask me, again and again, to separate who I am from everything I had become accustomed to pointing toward as proof.

Maybe that is why I needed it.

Because eventually, every influential woman has to know who she is before the room tells her.