In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, Kris Plachy takes us on a journey through the stages of leadership and what it means to become a Sage—a woman who transforms an idea into a thriving entity and puts it out into the world. Sages are recognized as experts in their field and are known for what they do. With her heart-centered philosophy and deep coaching experience, Kris asks the thought-provoking question: How do you develop the leaders who will lead your business without you?

Kris begins by exploring the first stage of leadership, where many of us ask ourselves, “How am I going to do this?” This is the phase of figuring things out on your own, navigating the complexities of entrepreneurship, and learning to trust yourself through trial and error. It’s a challenging but essential part of building a foundation.

As leaders grow, the question shifts to, “How are we going to do this?” In this stage, the focus moves to building a team. Kris highlights the importance of collaboration, recognizing that success isn’t achieved alone. It requires others to contribute their hearts, minds, and hands to support your vision and help drive progress.

Finally, leaders reach the Sage stage, where the critical question becomes, “How are they going to do this?” This stage is about stepping back and empowering others to lead. Kris introduces her Sage Pathway program, which focuses on developing leaders within your business who can thrive and drive success without your constant involvement. Kris passionately emphasizes the power of women in leadership, saying, “When a woman can lead, when a woman knows how to leverage the hearts, minds, and hands of others, she can build something beyond herself.”

If you’re ready to embrace your role as a well-resourced leader and empower others to thrive, this episode will inspire and guide you. Tune in to Leadership is Feminine and discover how to take the next step in your leadership journey.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. Stages of Leadership Evolution: Leadership progresses through three stages: figuring it out alone, building a team, and empowering others to lead.

2. Developing Future Leaders: The Sage Pathway focuses on mentoring and developing leaders who can run the business independently.

3. The Risks of Dependency: A business reliant on the founder for all major decisions cannot sustain long-term growth.

4. Leadership as a Path to Wealth and Opportunity: Women who learn to lead effectively can build wealth, create opportunities, and expand their impact beyond themselves.

5. Teaching Leadership Skills: Kris emphasizes the need for female founders to embrace and develop leadership frameworks to avoid abdicating their role.

Contact Information and Recommended Resources

Discover the power of belief to achieve your biggest goals with TheVisionary.CEO's transformative 5-week group coaching experience starting January 2, 2025—visit www.thevisionary.ceo/believe to join now!

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Transcript

Kris Plachy:
Hello there, fabulous people. How are you? I'm Kris Plachy. Welcome to Leadership Is Feminine. I have so much I want to talk to you about. I have had an absolutely fantastic start to the year, starting with a really amazing writer's retreat conducted by Alexandra Franzen on the big island of Hawaii. I didn't, like, write a book, but I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. And I'm going to tell you a little bit more about what I worked on as a part of sort of the evolution of this, where we're going in my business and those kinds of things.

Kris Plachy:
But it was dreamy to attend my own retreat as a human. I have never really done that in the way that this was conducted, and it was just wonderful. And the big island of Hawaii is just so beautiful. If you haven't been and you can go, I would recommend putting it on your list. And I'm recording this today in Turtle Bay, which is where I conduct my retreats. I have one coming up in about a week, actually about four or five days from now with 10 women who are coming here into town, and I cannot wait for that. I've, as you know, been doing retreats here in Hawaii for going on 13 years. And anyway, it's all magic and beautiful and wonderful, and there's always something that comes out of the experience that is a game changer for my clients and also for me. Right. Watching them make so much magic in their lives.

Kris Plachy:
So, as we've been thinking about this coming year and what I would like to see happen, I have a few directions that we're going in, and I want to make sure you're really clear about the context of this podcast, because many of you will be podcast listeners forever. And I love that, and I love to meet all of those women that I keep meeting who've been binging it. So, hi to you. If you just started listening or have been sort of slowly but surely making your way through, basically, we've cultivated really the path for women who we work with. And it's also, to me, the path that is rooted in what I am trying to create with women who either, you know, I interact with personally or also just to invite you to think about as yourself.

Kris Plachy:
As many of you know, if you've been podcast listeners and if you are a client, you know that several years ago, I think about three now, I created a program called the Sage CEO, which is now called the Sage Advisory. The reason that I call it Sage is because, through the evolution of watching so many female founders and entrepreneurs who launch into the world with an idea and then culminate that idea into an entity which then serves at a higher level for their customer and for their employees. These are the women that are known for what they do. They are recognized in their industry, in their space, as being experts and also being mentors and advisors to other people and other women in the world that they're in.And I think that there's a lot of women who are on the journey of a Sage, journey to become, whether you want to call yourself an expert or the wisdom keeper or the knower, you know, elevating your knowledge, your presence, your wisdom in whatever it is that you do. And even if that's not in a job, even if it's not in a business that you have, but it's through the work that you do, through the relationships that you build, you cultivate the knowing of a Sage. And I actually just saw, incidentally, like, probably because of the algorithms that I follow, this woman talking about when she turned like 52, 53, that she had a croning ceremony.

Kris Plachy:
And a croning ceremony is really celebrating women once they're in their 50s. It's an actual ceremony, right, that celebrates their wisdom, that kind of acknowledges that you are now in that crone phase, right? You've stepped out of being kind of in that maternal raising children phase and moved into this crone phase. And I know a lot of people don't love that word, but I love the idea of a ceremony acknowledging us as we age and achieve knowing and understanding and wisdom that can never be taken from us. So that's why sage exists. That's where sage came from. And what my mission is to prove the power of one thriving woman, right? That is the vision that I have is to help women become so well resourced in the key areas of resources that you're going to hear me talk about on a future podcast. But the evolution of that, it begins in my world with you, starting here. You are introduced to this work through the podcast, and as I've mentioned, there'll be many of you who, this is your journey with me, the podcast, and that's as far as it will ever go. And that's okay.

Kris Plachy:
And then what I have found- so the podcast really entertains and focuses on women in all sorts of different phases of life and of leadership. There are really three steps to the evolution of who we are as leaders. This is my sort of thesis that I'm working with. The first step when we begin our business is that we are answering the question: How am I going to figure this out? How am I going to get this done? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do this?

Kris Plachy:
Some people call this solopreneuring. Some people call this consulting. Some people call this just the day you open the door and you're running the shop and you're all by yourself. How am I going to do this? How? How am I going to do this? And all of the physical, mental, emotional energy of producing a result for your business comes from you. You are the one who was answering that question. How am I going to do this? You're figuring it out, right?And so the parallel to that is when you are just getting started, there's so many advisors on this planet who will help you figure that out. Who will help you figure out how to organize your business, how to market your business, how to sell to people so people buy what you are selling, how to build relationships in your business, what kind of technology you should have in your business, right? But what's happening is this is all you doing it, right? So this is sort of that solopreneur space. So as, again, as I walk people and I help, I think about the, the journey that they're on, that version of where you might be, where you're trying to figure out, how do I get people to buy from me to enlist my services?

Kris Plachy:
I don't physically work with those women to support them because that's not my area of expertise. Have I built my own business? Yes. Do I know what works for me? Of course. But there are advisors and resources on the planet that are so much better. So we don't do a lot of that. We don't do that here.

Kris Plachy:
We meet women in the second question, which is how are we going to do this? Right. How am I going to do this, Is you and people that you might enlist to help you. How are we going to do this? Is when you start realizing, "I have to build a team. I have to enlist the hearts, minds and hands of other people to get it done." And we meet those women who are asking that question in the Lead program, Lead for Women, which currently we are offering as an evergreen kind of self-study program that you can invest in, has the videos, it has the reflective guides, and we're also going to be offering some office hours and answering questions for our clients as they're going through the Lead program. Because the building blocks of your first team or getting that team put together is essential for the growth of your business. How are we going to do this? You can't do it alone, you know that. But now how do I leverage other people? So when we think about though, the journey of the Sage, and this is why Sage was created, is my clients who joined Sage are at another level. They are answering another question, and that question is, how are they going to do this? And it's the next piece of the work that I want to do with my clients, which is, how do you develop the leaders who will lead your business without you? How do you mentor them, advise them and coach them and even recognize them? How do you even know who they are? The people that will lift the business up, up to a whole new level and not be dependent on you, no longer dependent on your brain, no longer dependent on your decision, no longer dependent.

Kris Plachy:
There's a difference between you being engaged and participating and them being dependent. And that does ask of us to step into a version of our Sage wisdom, which is why we're calling this program the Sage Pathway. Because how you get to that next level is by investing in the leaders in your business. And I've met a lot of women who are leading businesses who are running at $3, $5, $10, $12, $20 million. And they do have managers they've hired, they do have directors, they do have vice president. I mean, everybody calls everybody something different, but how you picked them, how you lead them, how you manage them, how you hold them accountable, how you develop them in a lot of these cases is not designed on purpose. And what I want to do is help you, if that's you, learn how to capture your wisdom as a leader in a way that we can actually duplicate, replicate your leadership philosophy, your leadership wisdom, your leadership tactics without you doing it. And the way we're going to do that is to develop the leaders who work for you. And that's what Sage Pathway is.

Kris Plachy:
So when we think about the journey that we take our clients on, it's the podcast, it's Lead for Women, it's the Sage Pathway, which is what I've just described. And then it's ultimately Sage Advisory, Sage Pathway. We're going to be starting in March and we currently do have a wait list beginning for that. If you go to thevisionary.CEO, you'll find the information to join that wait list.So if you lead a business and you have leaders in your business that you're not really sure, are they the right people? If I need to hire leaders, how do I know? I actually have an opt in on the web, on our website about the next step, which is about developing people to lead your business. And it's free. So if you want to check that out, I encourage you to go to the website.

Kris Plachy:
And then if you have these people in place, how do you lead them? How do you develop them? Because what happens for a lot of us when we're running our companies is we do hire leaders. We sometimes we put people into leadership who've been working for us for a long time. They don't have any leadership skill, they haven't been trained, and you're not really sure how to do that. That's what I'm going to walk you through. It's a 12 week program. It's two days a week with me. It's immersive. I'm going to teach you and I'm going to coach you.

Kris Plachy:
I'm so incredibly excited about this program and I really am calling it that. I don't love that word because it sounds heavy. But I can promise you, if you are struggling with getting work, you paying leaders, you're paying people the salary to be leaders in your company and they're not leading. We have to fix that because the business won't grow on top of that. If you're still making all of the major decisions, the business cannot sustain that. You're going to crumble. The business will crumble. Something's going to happen. Anyway, so I wanted to come on here for this new year to make sure you're really clear. This is, this is where we go podcast, Lead for Women, Sage Pathway, Sage.

Kris Plachy:
Sage is a container where my clients work with me, where we're solving those higher level, more complex challenges that we are facing as our businesses are expanding and growing and what that means to us. The women in Sage are answering questions like, "What do I do now that my business is operating at this level? Who am I? What do I want to do next?" Right. And so we have our gathers, we get together. It's, it's an incredible group of brilliant, talented, lovely, heart centered, smart as hell people. And I'm very, very thoughtful about who comes into Sage. So it's, it's small. There's only 25 people in there. But that is the evolution of this work.

Kris Plachy:
So I'm going to leave you with a story. When I was at the writing retreat, we started writing and I wrote this one story and I'm not going to read it. I'm going to tell you it. I'll probably publish it at some point, but I haven't figured out yet. But I wrote about when I was seven, watching my mother throw my shoes at my dad as he drove away in our red VW Beetle Bug, I think we called it then, with a suitcase and my dog. My parents were getting divorced, and even though at 7 I didn't really understand what that meant, I knew how horrible it was and I was terribly sad. And my dad left and my mom had to figure it out. My mom at the time had a job, but she was a home economics major.

Kris Plachy:
She didn't have a good education. She was a nutritionist. But this is in the 70s where women were not highly regarded for, you know, jobs that would sustain a family. And my dad was not going to pay child support. So I didn't really know, and I still don't know all of the backstory of things. I know we ended up in a two bedroom apartment. I know I got the master bedroom. My mom slept in like this makeshift den. And she hired someone to come live with us from Ecuador in exchange for free rent. She had to take care of me. So she was pretty resourceful.

Kris Plachy:
But what happened is my mom got a job based on her education and probably her relationships, in a position of leadership. Because my mom could lead people, she was able to make a life for us. She was able to be a resourced woman. There's a lot of women who don't know how to lead.

Kris Plachy:
She had had the opportunity of leading in her previous life, like in a college kitchen. She was managing, feeding kids, and so she was sort of in charge there. And so she learned leadership. And a lot of people don't have that opportunity. And so a lot of women, even to this day, when they don't know how to lead people, they work, they work very hard. But you can't work yourself into the opportunity that my mom was able to create because she could lead.

Kris Plachy:
And she kept getting leadership roles and building teams of other leaders. And these are people who are still in her life. My mom's 86. These are still people she knows. She stopped working 30 years ago. I learned a lot without knowing what I was learning. I learned that when a woman can lead, when a woman knows how to leverage the hearts and minds and hands of others, she can build something beyond herself and she can build wealth and opportunity and create a bigger life for herself. And for me, because she did what she did and because she could lead, she raised a daughter who not only watched that, but never, ever questioned her ability to lead.

Kris Plachy:
I never doubted that would be my trajectory. I was able to have a really lovely life. Raised by a single mom at a time where women were not granted frickin credit cards without a dude signing for it. So I'm very passionate about why I believe women must learn how to lead. It's like of me. And when I watch my clients and other women I talk to abdicate leadership, insult themselves about leaders, stay uninformed about the frameworks in their abilities to lead, stay emotionally triggered so they are manipulated by the behaviors of others so they can't lead. When I see that, I know there's a better way.

Kris Plachy:
Leadership is boring as hell as a topic. Can we just say that it's boring? Who the frick wants to talk about leadership? Especially right now when quote unquote leaders are acting like heathens. Right, but that's not what I'm teaching. I am teaching you how to have agency over yourself and the business you built by learning how to leverage the hearts and minds and hands of other people. And by doing so with integrity within your value system, with agreements that everybody makes, you have built a queendom. And the invitations you extend to people that come into your life and your business are up to you. And I believe you get to set the terms. And so my belief is I'm here to share this voice and to have this message.

Kris Plachy:
And unbeknownst to me, until I wrote that story two weeks ago from a writing prompt, it's like amazing. One prompt released that from me. Now I see. Because I've asked myself for years, why leadership? Who cares, right? Why am I so passionate about this? Ah, now I see. When you are able to lead, you are resourced as a woman. And never ever, ever underestimate the power of a well resourced woman. So no more struggling, being triggered, being furious, being upset, wanting to quit, putting your head in your hands before you are willing to invest in what it means to stand as a woman who builds, how will we do it? And to stand as the woman who builds, how will they do it? Because you do not have to do it anymore alone.

Kris Plachy:
Go to thevisionary.CEO and let's get you into whatever makes the most sense for you this year. Isn't it time? You ready? Let's go. Love.