65. Servant Leader or Total Pushover? How Sara Protected Her Bandwidth & Built Leadership Backbone Without Abandoning Her Values or her Team

🚨 RESILIENT enrollment is open. Final cohort of 2025. Secure your spot: https://melodywilding.com/resilient In this episode, I sit down with Sara, a team leader who grew up in a military family and carried that "stand at attention" mentality straight into the corporate world. Sara shares how she went from automatically deferring to anyone with authority while simultaneously babysitting her team through every decision, to building the backbone needed to challenge up, set boundaries, and actually develop her people. If you've ever found yourself nodding along in meetings when you have something valuable to add, saying "yes sir" when you should be pushing back, or constantly rescuing your team from problems they should solve themselves, this conversation will resonate deeply.What You’ll Discover: How Sara went from silent observer to strategic contributor in executive meetings – and why her boss started specifically asking for her inputThe childhood programming that made Sara cower around authority and how she broke free without losing respectHow she learned to redirect out-of-scope requests diplomatically while actually helping people get better solutionsThe fix that freed up hours of Sara’s week that she could reinvest in more important work https://melodywilding.com/summitConnect with Melody:FREE NEWSLETTER: Psychology at Work WeeklyGet on the Waitlist for Speak Like a Senior Leader™Get on the Waitlist for Lead from WithinGet Melody's new book, Managing Up