3 Signs You Are In A Leadership Environment Bottleneck

**From my notebook dated January 21, 2025

Here’s what I mean by a leadership environment bottleneck:

Sign #1: You have aspirations to ‘move up’ in responsibility, impact, and position, yet the path to get there is narrow, riddled with obstacles, or might even appear nonexistent.

Sign #2: You know you can offer more at work, but you are held back by less-than-ideal interpersonal dynamics, a boss that is minimally supportive, and/or a schedule that demands so much of your energy that there is not much left to give.

Sign #3: You know, deep down, that your authentic self would inhibit the opportunities you receive because of the implicit biases floating in the air, yet that authentic self is what would allow you to bring your best work

For career-driven professionals, navigating constrained environments occurs more often than not. Upward trajectories can be overreliant on ‘who you know’ and whether or not you have an ‘in’ with key decision-makers. The constraints can be even more pronounced for historically underrepresented professionals because *insert unchecked implicit bias here.*

If any of this resonates, here is our approach at Untapped Leaders to wiggle through any professional bottleneck you may be facing. It may feel impossible while you’re in it, but there is a strategy when you leverage what we call Contextual Agility.

Contextual agility is the ability to dynamically understand and adapt leadership strategies to effectively navigate and respond to diverse and shifting circumstances while maintaining alignment with overarching goals and values​​.

In a past role directing a newly combined department at a university, I was in the thick of a leadership environment bottleneck. Sign #2 rang loud and clear as I tip-toed through communication not to land myself on my boss’s bad side, all the while carrying a workload crushing my potential for anything other than juggling. It was not a psychologically safe space nor one that really acknowledged work/life balance (I was a new mom just-trying-to-make-it.) I didn’t realize it at the time, but to actually, in fact, make it, I leaned on contextual agility to navigate the landmines, stay committed to my purpose of supporting students, and not completely lose my mind and my integrity in the midst of it all. 

Ok, but how do we build our ability to be contextually agile? What is it exactly?

We build our Contextual Agility through 5 Steps:

Step One: Understanding Yourself

Check in on your internal narrative if you’re experiencing a career bottleneck. Leadership environment bottlenecks are famous for “it’s not me, it’s you” vibes, fooling you into thinking you don’t have what it takes or aren’t doing enough, when the reality is, the environment is not conducive for success. Be discerning in how you internalize the challenge, ensuring it doesn’t shift you towards inaction.

In my previous leadership bottleneck environment, I’d catch myself re-reading the most basic emails about 100 times before hitting send because I wasn’t sure how it would be received by my boss or others in her inner circle. I became highly skilled at second-guessing. It was a low-trust environment that prevented me from trusting myself.

But self-awareness is a friend. Examining yourself objectively allows for a glimmer of clarity amidst a foggy environment. I’ll admit it didn’t stop me from second-guessing everything. But understanding myself made me get clear on WHY I was second-guessing. It wasn’t me, it was them. I’m a thoughtful communicator (mainly in that, before I say something, I think…A LOT). Rather than thinking my hesitation was caused by my inability to communicate effectively, I started to see my hesitation being sourced from the low-trust environment.

Step Two: Make Connections to Historical Context

We want to be clear on how history informs our current reality because we can always thread connections. We want to look at this through a personal lens via lived experience and through a systemic lens via your company’s history or even the societal contexts that serve as the foundation for your current challenge. 

In my scenario, when I looked historically, I saw an organization that went through reorgs like clockwork, usually for reasons unbeknownst to those experiencing it. It was an environment where the rug could be pulled out from under you at any moment. That historical reality can make the air real stuffy. I also looked at my default reactions to stress, conflict, and interpersonal challenges. I don’t thrive in unproductive conflict (who does?), but beyond not thriving, I shrink. I am not the one to initiate debates or get energy from exerting power moves. In my youth and early part of my career, I’d easily classify myself as conflict-avoidant. 

Step Three: Analyze the System

A constrained leadership environment is almost always a systemic issue. Even if it feels like the issue is on an individual level, let’s say you have an unsupportive boss, for example, there’s a system behind that individual scenario. Who holds formal and informal power in your environment? How is the tone set for what is valued or devalued in leadership? What behaviors are celebrated, and are those behaviors perceived similarly across everyone? (For example, being direct and commanding can be perceived positively for men and negatively for women.) When you analyze the power dynamics and influences in the system surrounding you, you better understand how and when to make moves. I can assure you that your leadership journey will be peppered with moments of taking risks and other moments of mitigating risks. You want to get good at knowing when to deploy the right strategy.

Continuing with my example, many systemic power influences were happening. Toxic behaviors ran unchecked. No one was held accountable. If you produced at a high level, your poor behavior was excused. This was an organization that would send annual Civility in the Workplace memos from HR because it was that bad. Still, the accountability didn’t go beyond expecting recipients to read the memo if they happened to see it in their inbox, maybe. When examining the system, I knew I was up against something much bigger than me.

Step Four: Vision with Optimistic Imagination

If we’re not clear about where we are headed, we’ll get swept up in the limitations a bottleneck leadership environment will provide us. If we’re not careful, our visions will narrow alongside the shape of a literal bottle’s neck. You do not want to be anchored into your current reality because, again, you know you are capable of so much more. Where do you want to be? And why? What surrounds you in your ideal environment? Describe, in detail, your vision. It may indeed *feel* impossible and distant today, but you’ll find that you’ll find small shifts and changes that can happen now that could move you closer to that vision.

Here, I humbly admit that this is easier to say than do in the moment. In my leadership bottleneck environment, my trusted colleagues and I would admit we were wearing “golden handcuffs.” The benefits were good, there was relative stability to the employment, and you never know what mess is out there if you leave. So my limited vision for much of that time was to merely make those golden handcuffs as shiny as possible— be thankful I had a job and good health insurance to support my newly growing family, and I’d be able to leverage my skills and awareness from steps 1-3 to make do. But, as I was dying on the inside a little every day ‘making do,’ I began to refuse my limited vision for myself. The little voice saying, “This can’t really be it,” got louder to the point that I knew deeply this type of environment would limit my potential and my trajectory for the rest of my career. I had to get out.

Step Five: Integrate the context from steps 1-4 to inform everything you do in real time.

This is where the challenge begins. As a career-driven professional, especially if you’re navigating spaces as an underrepresented leader, you’ll need to harness all of this contextual awareness in every decision and approach you implement. Sometimes, you’ll have the benefit of time to make your moves; most times, you won’t, and you have to make thoughtful decisions instantly. The key here is building in the reflective practice and habit of focusing on the context that emerges in those first steps and leveraging tools to help you understand context more deeply. What are you learning? What questions come up? Don’t underestimate the power of beginning your day with questions to orient your awareness and reflections at the end of the day to answer those questions.

For my journey, and what I imagine is a truth you’ve experienced, finding another job is just not that easy. It took a year and a half to move on from my leadership bottleneck environment (and many years even beyond that to recover from it). To navigate through that time, I had to bridge connections between 1) my tendency for conflict avoidance, 2) my understanding of who had formal and informal power over my work, and 3) my penchant for self-reflection and awareness to understand that my best strategy to navigate and even lead in a constrained environment was through relationship-building with difficult players to protect my team, fulfill our purpose, and make the road to my envisioned exit as smooth as possible. 

Understanding my unique context + being agile within that context got me through.

Look, the hope is that no one with interest and talent throws their hands up in defeat due to a limiting workplace environment.

I’ll be honest, the responsibility of the work sits within these workplace systems to notice and remedy the practices, culture, and policies that create bottlenecks for overlooked talent, but that is long-term work that we can only collectively chip away at if we’re clear that our limiting current reality does not need to predict our future. 

Interested in solutions to widen your organizational bottlenecks?