Leading Women in Tech Podcast

When everything is shifting — a restructure, a board crisis, a project on the edge of collapse, or just the relentless uncertainty of leading a team through sustained change — the expectation is that you hold it together. You stay steady. You have the answers.
But nobody tells you how.
In this episode of Leading Women in Tech, Toni Collis builds out the adaptive leadership toolkit every senior leader needs for navigating a genuine crisis — not the kind of crisis leadership that sounds good in a conference keynote, but the practical, honest, unglamorous work of staying grounded when everything around you is shifting.
This is not about eliminating the pressure. It is about developing the specific capabilities that let you remain clear, present, and effective within it.
What's covered:
Why crisis leadership is a trainable capability, not a personality trait — and why the unruffled leader you're comparing yourself to is a fiction
The team-speed problem: why your team is not where you are emotionally, and what it actually means to meet people where they are
Crisis communication as a leadership skill — not just a PR function. The specific language that calms, orients, and aligns your team when they're in crisis mode. And why you need to say it far more times than you think
The internal dimension: staying grounded in yourself before you can hold space for anyone else
Protecting decision quality when the stakes are highest — the difference between genuine urgency and anxiety-driven urgency
The blame game, why a crisis is never the time to play it, and the story from early in Toni's career that has stayed with her ever since
The isolation of senior leadership in a crisis — and the structural responses that make it manageable
 Related episodes: 
Episode 170 - Does it have to be lonely at the top? Drawing the line between being a boss and a friend
Episode 243 - Struggling to Be Heard? Master Leadership Communication Strategies and Coach Upwards
Episode 248 - Recognizing the Signs: Identifying Early Indicators of Burnout
Episode 250 — Leading Through Change
Episode 274 - How to Stop Overthinking at Work: Tools for Clear, Confident Leadership Decisions.
Episode 278 - When No One Listens — How to Lead When Your Voice Isn't Heard
Episode 294 — Burnout-Proof Leadership 
Episode 298 - When the Stakes Are High, Does Your Voice Go Quiet? How to Communicate With Clarity Under Pressure 
Ready to work through a genuinely difficult period with support? Book a strategy call: tonicollis.com/lets-chat

What does it actually take to become an industry leader when you never planned to be one?
Charli Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Botify, joins Toni for a conversation that covers the full arc of her leadership journey — from an accidental start in tech to leading customer success teams of 150-200 people across multiple continents, to taking her first CCO seat at a company sitting right at the intersection of search, AI discoverability, and the future of how brands get found.
This conversation covers all things great leadership from quiet confidence, allyship in executive teams, what holding space for women in a boardroom actually looks like in practice, and the language shift — "and" versus "but" — that Charli teaches every woman she mentors.
Charli also gets honest about the biggest challenge she's navigating right now: how do you lead an AI-forward customer experience function while keeping the team delivering, changing everything about how you operate, and nobody really knows what the next two years look like?
If you're figuring out what kind of leader you want to be, how to back yourself at the next level, or how to build allies in rooms that weren't always built for you — this is the episode.
What we cover:
◾ The serendipitous career path from accidental tech foray to Chief Customer Officer
◾ Why Charli put her hand up for people leadership before she felt ready — and what happened next
◾ Quiet confidence: what it really looks like at the executive level and why it's different from the performative kind
◾ The "and" vs "but" language shift and why words matter more than most leaders realize
vAllyship in the exec room — what it looks like when it becomes second nature rather than a conscious act
◾ Holding space for women in a male-dominated executive team: practical, not theoretical
◾ AI in customer experience — leading an AI-forward function while the team keeps delivering today
◾ Building a virtual board of directors and why network investment is a long-term leadership strategy
◾ The worst piece of advice Charli was ever given: "dial it down, Charli"
◾ Confidence plus capacity: why both are non-negotiable and how to know when it's time to speak up
 
**Useful links**
◾ Connect with today's guest and sponsor, Charli Rogers and Botify:
          ◾ Charli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlirogers/ 
          ◾ Botify: https://www.botify.com/ 
 
This episode was sponsored by our guest, Charli Rogers at Botify. Thank you Charli for helping to bring Leading Women in Tech to this community!

Are you brilliant at your job — but starting to wonder if this is really it?
One of the most common and least-talked-about challenges facing senior women in tech is the moment when something needs to change, but you don't know exactly what, and the fear of getting it wrong is keeping you exactly where you are.
This is not a "how to find a new job" episode. It is an episode about how to think clearly and strategically about career pivots — before you make a reactive decision you spend the next two years recovering from.
Whether you're bored and feeling guilty about it, you know you need to leave but can't see where to go, or you're ready to pivot but don't know where to start — this episode is for you.
Keep listening to learn more about: 
Why the restlessness you're feeling is not a character flaw — it's a signal worth taking seriously
The four types of "something needs to change" — and why getting the diagnosis right is what separates a strategic pivot from a reactive one
The full range of options available to you — including internal pivots, functional moves, smaller organisations, fractional leadership, and entrepreneurship
A five-step framework for thinking through a career pivot strategically without making a decision from your most exhausted place
What's really underneath the fear — and why the identity question is the thing that keeps most women stuck
What a good career pivot actually looks like — and the one first step to take this week
Whether you're actively planning a change or just starting to sit with the question, this episode will help you think more clearly about what you actually want next.

What if the brain that made you feel like you never quite fit — the one that means you always carry 5 jobs even though technically you only have one,  the brain that got bored the moment something stopped being challenging, and that saw the whole system when everyone else wanted you to stay in your lane — turned out to be exactly what the AI era needs?
That's not a hypothetical. That's Noe Ramos. And it might just be you too. 
Noe is Vice President of AI Operations at Agiloft, where she leads the kind of AI transformation that actually works — not the kind that chases efficiency and calls it progress, but the kind that asks what humans need to thrive in a world increasingly shaped by these tools. Noe has spent 23 years being, in her own words, excellent at jobs that were never quite designed for her brain. And it wasn't until she found the right environment, understood her neurodivergence, and stopped filtering out the parts of herself that made her different that everything clicked.
In this episode we talk self-awareness as a leadership tool, what it means to build a culture of genuine psychological safety, and why AI transformation is only as good as the humans at the center of it.
What we cover:
⏹  23 years being excellent at jobs never designed for her brain — and what changed
⏹  Systems thinking: what it really means, why women are discouraged from doing it, and how to keep doing it anyway
⏹  Finding the right environment — how Noe figured out what she actually needed and how to diagnose it in a company
⏹  Neurodivergence as a leadership superpower in the AI era
⏹  What authentic leadership really looks like when you've spent a career masking
⏹  Psychological safety: how showing up humanly as a leader creates a ripple effect through your whole team
⏹  Agiloft's human-first AI transformation approach — upskilling people existentially, not just technically
⏹  Role-based vs function-based thinking: why the shift matters for AI adoption
⏹  Visibility vs indispensability — and why being essential at the wrong level is a career trap
⏹  The worst piece of advice Noe was ever given — and the subtlety inside it
⏹  AI as a mirror: what are you bringing to the tool?
**Useful links**
Connect with today's guest and sponsor, Noe Ramos at Agiloft:
⏹  LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/noeramos 
⏹  Agiloft: agiloft.com
 
Book a strategy call with Toni: tonicollis.com/lets-chat/ 
 
This episode was sponsored by our guest, Noe Ramos. Thank you Noe and Agiloft for helping to bring Leading Women in Tech to this community!

Three hundred episodes. Approaching 1500 women coached across corporate tech, startups, and academia. And a long list of things I used to believe that I no longer do.
Episode 300 of Leading Women in Tech is different from any episode I've made before. This is not a tips episode. It is not a framework. It is my honest account of what seven years of conversations and nearly 1500 coaching relationships has actually taught me about women in leadership — including the places where the conventional wisdom is wrong, the advice I've heard given to women again and again that has caused real damage, and what I would say now that I would not have said at Episode 1.
In this episode I cover:
Why leaning in was the wrong answer — not because the system is unfair, but because it asks women to lean into a male model that was never designed for them
Why getting a seat at the table was never the whole answer — and what the goal actually is
The real problem with "just speak up more" and "just be more confident" — and why telling women to be more confident before they've had the chance to build it is one of the most common ways we set them up to fail
Why "you can have it all, just not at the same time" does so much quiet damage — and what to say instead
The zone of genius trap that nobody warns you about — and why staying in it is the goal, but only if you notice when it has changed
Why you need a mentor, a coach, and a sponsor — and why most senior men in tech have all three while most women have only one
What working harder actually costs women — and what to invest in instead
Why we are more individual than society would have us believe, and what happens when women stop performing someone else's model of leadership
And why, despite everything, I am genuinely optimistic.
This episode is for the women who have been listening since the beginning, and for the women who are finding this podcast for the first time. It is my most honest episode yet.