How to Know Which Path Is Right for You

"I'll get promoted by next year."
"I'll land the job by end of year."

The biggest source of stress I see in my clients isn't the goal. It's that the goal is a decision someone else gets to make.

You can do everything right. You can be exactly the person who deserves it. And a budget freeze, a reorg, or one person's opinion can still take it off the table.

You already know the advice here. Focus on what you can control. That part is easy to say. The hard part is that it doesn't tell you what to actually do.

Because there are so many paths in front of you. Get the certification. Deliver the big project. Build your network. Each one sounds reasonable. So which is the right one?

Most people turn it into a probability game. If I get this credential, my odds go up. If I nail this project, I'll stand out. That's not wrong. But it keeps your whole sense of whether you chose well tied to an outcome you still don't control.

So I ask something different.

What if you do all of it, and you still don't get what you wanted? How would you feel?

The answer isn't the same for every path. And that difference is the whole thing.

For some paths, the honest answer is that it was wasted. I didn't want another certification. I wanted the job. I gave up my evenings, my weekends, time with my family, my own health, and it bought me nothing.

For other paths, the answer is different. Even without the outcome, I'd have grown. I'd be a sharper professional and a bigger person. I'd have elevated my own ground, so the options I can't even see yet would open up. And it was fun. I did my best. I have no regret.

That second kind of path is the right one for you.

Not the one with the best odds. The one you'd still be glad you walked, even if it never pays off the way you hoped.

I found my own version of this question a long time ago.

As a kid, I thought hard about what I wanted to be, and I narrowed it down to two. One was archaeologist. Digging up evidence of ancient civilizations felt thrilling. The other was physicist. Understanding how the whole universe works sounded incredible. I went back and forth for a long time.

Then one day I asked myself a strange question. If I never became the archaeologist or the physicist, if I just cleaned their research buildings, would I still be happy?

My gut answered before I could think it through.

For archaeology, cleaning the building felt like nothing. But for physics, sweeping the floors of that building still felt like being part of it. Still contributing, in some small way, to how humans come to understand the universe. That still meant something to me.

So I chose physics.

I spent about twenty years there. Undergrad, graduate school, a postdoc. And then I left.

I still don't have any regret. I had fun. I learned more than I can measure. I met my husband there, and made friends I still have. Physics is how I found my way into data science, which became my career. And it's why I get to sit here now and tell you this story, and hopefully help you find your own answer.

None of that was the outcome I set out for. And all of it was worth it.

That's the test. Not "which path gives me the best shot at the thing I want?" It's "which path would I still choose if the thing I want never comes?"

The paths that only pay off when you win leave you fragile. The one that pays off either way is where your real ground is.

If you never got the outcome you're chasing, which path would you still be glad you walked?

I Ran 21 Miles I Was Not Ready For

A year before the race, I signed up for something I could not do.

The Big Sur 21 miler has a six hour cutoff. When I registered, the math felt generous. Six hours seemed like enough time to finish even if I walked the whole way. And the image in my head was lovely. Highway 1 on foot. A road most people only ever see through a windshield, closed to cars, mine to move down slowly with the ocean on my right.

That was the whole reason I signed up. Not a time goal. Not a personal record. I wanted to be on that road.

Then I started training, and the math fell apart.

Walking the entire course would not fit inside six hours. Not at my pace. I would have to mix walking and running, which meant I could no longer show up and see what happened. I needed a strategy. If I ran too much early, I would not have the legs to even walk at the end.

So I went looking for a plan, and I could not find one.

Every strategy I found was written for a different person. Runners chasing a finish time. Experienced marathoners managing their fifth or tenth race. Plans that assumed you could already cover the distance and were now optimizing. There was nothing for someone whose actual goal was to finish under a cutoff by combining walking and running.

I have felt this exact thing in my career, and I suspect you have too. You look for the roadmap and every version you find was built for someone with more experience, more runway, more of something you do not have yet. The advice is not wrong. It is calibrated to a different person's situation.

At some point you accept that nobody wrote the plan for your circumstances, and you build it yourself.

What I Came Up With

Mine had three parts.

Walk every uphill. Run the flats. Take time back on the downhills.

That last one goes against standard advice. Running fast downhill beats up your legs and most coaches will tell you to hold back. But I was not preserving my legs for a strong finish. I was banking minutes against a cutoff, and the downhills were the only place minutes were available to me.

Second, real food. The typical energy gels made me gag, so I tested different options on training runs until I found things my body would accept while moving, and I planned to eat every few kilometers. Six hours on the road is a long time to be running on nothing.

Third, and this turned out to matter most, I decided in advance that I would only look at two numbers on my watch. Pace and heart rate. Not the clock.

I practiced the walk-run pattern several times at around 25 kilometers. I wanted to reach 30 at least once. I never got there. Twenty one miles is about 34 kilometers, which means I arrived at the start line having never come within 9 kilometers of the distance.

I knew that. I stood there knowing my longest run was well short of what the day required, holding a strategy I had built over months and never fully tested.

So I made one more decision before the gun went off. If I had to stop somewhere in the middle, fine. Oh well. But I was not going to abandon my plan while I was still moving. Falling short was allowed. Panicking and improvising was not.

The Math I Never Did

I finished in five hours and fifty minutes.

I want to be honest about why, because there is a version of this story where I take all the credit and it would not be true. The weather that day was cloudy, cool, slightly rainy. Excellent conditions for running. If it had been hot, my strategy would not have saved me. I do not think I would have finished.

Conditions get a vote. They always do, in races and in careers. The market, the timing, the hiring freeze, the reorg, the person on the other side of the table who is having a hard week. You do not control any of it.

But here is the part I do think I earned.

I never thought about the time.

I knew where I was on the course. There were mile flags, so distance was not a mystery. What I never did was the math. This much time gone, this much course left, here is the pace I would need to hold to make the cutoff, and can legs that have never gone this far actually hold it.

Not once, over five hours and fifty minutes.

And I am fairly certain that if I had run those numbers, I would have quit. Somewhere around mile twelve the arithmetic would have added up to too much. Good weather and a working strategy and all, I still believe that calculation could have ended my race.

Pace and heart rate asked me a different question. Am I doing my job in this mile. That was a question I could answer, and answer again, and answer two hundred more times.

Three Things I Keep Coming Back To

You will move before you are ready, and that is normal.

I signed up a year out, when I was significantly less capable than the race required. That commitment is what created the training. If I had waited until I could already run the distance, I never would have registered, because I could never run the distance.

The interview you take before you feel qualified. The application you send while the gap is still open. The reach out to someone whose work intimidates you a little. Those moments are not reckless. They are how you become the person who can do the thing.

The plan has to be built for your actual situation.

Not the situation of the person whose advice you found. If a networking approach was designed by someone who loves working a room and you do not, it is the wrong plan for you no matter how well it worked for them. If a preparation method assumes you already have two offers in hand, it is built for a level of pressure you are not under.

Borrowing a strategy built for a different person and different stakes is one of the most common reasons capable people underperform in the moments that matter most to them.

Watch the strategy, not the clock.

This is the one I want to leave you with.

The clock in a career is that running calculation about whether you are going to make it. Is this going to turn into an offer. Is this relationship going anywhere. Am I behind where I thought I would be by now. How much time do I have left to make this work.

The strategy is a different question entirely. In an interview, it is whether you are answering the question you were actually asked and telling the story you prepared. In networking, it is whether you reached out to the people you said you would reach out to.

The clock is real, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But running that math in the middle of the effort mostly produces one conclusion, which is that there is too much left and not enough of you. Meanwhile the strategy sits right there, answerable in the current mile, entirely inside your control.

None of this means never change your plan. It means the unit of commitment is one attempt, not forever.

You will rarely have a tested strategy going in. Usually you have a few options and a hunch about which one fits your situation best. Choose that one, then hold it through the thing itself, the actual interview, the actual conversation, the actual six hours on the road. The middle is when you have the least information and the most fear, and the changes people make there are almost always panic rather than strategy.

When it is over, that is when you think. What worked. What did not. What was the weather. Change what needs changing, and hold the new version through the next attempt.

Commit, execute, review, adjust. The mistake is not sticking with an imperfect plan. The mistake is rewriting it mid-effort, or finishing and never reviewing it at all.

What I Took Home

I crossed that line 9 kilometers past anything I had ever done, with ten minutes to spare, on a road I had wanted to walk down for a year.

Not because I was ready. I was not ready. I was undertrained, holding an untested plan I had cobbled together because nobody had written one for me, prepared to fall short and doing it anyway.

You do not need certainty to start. You need a strategy you believe in and the discipline to stay with it while the outcome is still unknown.

The finish line does not need your attention right now.

This mile does.

How to Make Networking Actually Work for Your Career

You already kno;w you're supposed to network. It's the advice in every career conversation, and it's true: opportunities come through people, not applications.

And yet most of the accomplished professionals I work with quietly resist it, and many who push through feel like it doesn't work. The resistance usually sounds like:

• "I'm not job searching, so I don't need it."
• "My manager already knows what I'm doing."
• "Asking people for things feels transactional."

Every one makes sense. Underneath them is a single belief: that networking is a tool you pick up to land a big result, a job or a promotion, and ideally soon.

That's why it disappoints. Networking is slow. Trust takes time to ripen. Reach out only when you need the big thing and you're already too late, and you can hear the transaction in your own voice. So can they.

Even a promotion isn't something your manager hands you alone. One unconvinced person in the calibration room can block it. What moves it is a room that already knows your value, and that's built long before the decision.

What the long game looks like

My first industry job came after I left academia. Not a fresh grad, but with zero industry experience to draw on. The company was tiny, which I loved: I could pitch an idea Monday and ship it Friday.

But I kept wondering about what I couldn't see. How were bigger companies solving problems I'd never met? So I started reaching out to people at larger companies, not to find a job, just to learn.

One of those conversations led to a role at LinkedIn.

I didn't network to get hired. I was curious, with a specific question. The job came much later: a door I didn't know existed, opened by a relationship I'd built for another reason entirely. The payoff rarely comes from the conversation you have today. It comes from the trust that conversation starts.

So what are you networking for?

If the goal isn't "land something now," what is it? It depends where you are:

• New to a team or org: Learn the work, the challenges, the culture, where you fit. Meet the people you'll work with closely.
• Already ramped up: Understand how the parts connect to the bigger goal, so you can spot the best moves. Meet a few people on each team, even ones you don't work with.
• A senior leader: See how other orgs handle what you're facing, and bring better options back. Meet peers in similar roles elsewhere.
• Carrying a vision: Get it in front of enough people that the ones who resonate can find you. Share widely.

Network this way and you start to:

• See the bigger picture and bring sharper ideas.
• Read each team's real needs and align them.
• Spread the ideas you believe in.
• Become known as a leader.

That reputation opens doors later: the promotion, the recruiter, the role you want. In short, you become indispensable.

How to make it feel lighter

Here's where the dread lifts. What makes networking feel like aimless small talk, or worse, like begging, is walking in without knowing what you want from it.

The fix isn't to need less. It's to get specific. Not "land me a job," but one small, concrete thing from this single conversation: a piece of context, their take on a problem, an introduction. That clarity is what makes the time worth it, for you and for them. You leave with something real, and so do they.

Before you reach out, work through four questions.

The four-part plan

1. Purpose: why. What do you want from this? Information, influence, a decision? Think past this quarter to the relationship you want a year out.

2. People: who. Map widening circles:

• Inner org: teammates, your manager.
• Wider org: cross-functional partners and leaders, at your level and one up. (E.g. An analytics director should know the directors and VPs in product, marketing, sales, engineering, finance, legal, HR.)
• Industry: peers elsewhere, communities, people you admire, alumni.
• Adjacent: clients, vendors, former colleagues.

3. Message: what you say. Usually one of four:

• Inform: share your vision, goal, or win.
• Input: ask for their thinking.
• Information: ask for something you don't have, like context or an intro.
• Action: ask for a specific action, like make a decision.

4. Offer: what you give. Keep it two-sided. What's their challenge, and how can you help? Even small counts: useful info, an intro. Not sure what they need? Make finding out your task.

Then take one real step

A plan in your head is a wish. Close the loop: one person, one date. Not twelve. One name, one date. That's the line between thinking about relationships and building them.

If you want a space to build your plan with other accomplished professionals, and a nudge to send that first message, the Women Leaders Club is made for exactly this.

One last reframe

Your resistance isn't a flaw. It's a sign you don't want to use people, and that instinct is worth keeping. The good news: the networking that actually works asks the opposite of you. Build genuine relationships, before you need them, with people you'd want to know anyway.

You already do meaningful work. Now let the right people know you, so that when the door opens, they already see you on the other side.

Where could one curious conversation take you, if you started it before you needed anything?

The McKinsey 7-S Framework: A Simple Guide to Aligning Your Organization

Most strategies don't fail because they're wrong. They fail because the rest of the organization isn't built to support them.

You can have a brilliant plan, but if your structure, systems, and people aren't aligned with it, the plan stays on paper. This is the problem the McKinsey 7-S Framework was designed to solve.

Developed in the late 1970s by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman at McKinsey & Company, the 7-S Framework identifies seven internal elements that need to work together for an organization to succeed. It has outlasted decades of management trends because it answers a question that never goes out of style: why isn't this working the way we thought it would?

It's also a powerful way to share your vision and influence leadership. Whether you're making the case for change in your current role or walking into a job interview, the 7-S Framework gives you a structured way to demonstrate strategic thinking — to show how you see the whole organization, not just your piece of it.

What the 7-S Framework Is

The model maps seven interconnected elements of an organization. Change one, and the others feel it. The seven elements are grouped into two categories:

Hard elements (easier to identify, easier for leadership to influence directly):

• Strategy — your plan for competing and winning
• Structure — how the organization is arranged (reporting lines, departments, hierarchy)
• Systems — the daily processes and tools that get work done

Soft elements (harder to pin down, shaped by culture):

• Shared Values — the core beliefs at the center of the organization
• Style — how leadership shows up and operates
• Staff — the people and their general capabilities
• Skills — the specific competencies the organization has

Shared Values sit at the center of the model. Every other element depends on them. When values are clear and lived, the rest of the system has something to organize around. When they're not, the other six elements drift.

Breaking Down the Seven Elements

1. Strategy

Your strategy is how you plan to build and maintain a competitive advantage. It answers:

• What are we trying to achieve?
• How will we respond to competition and shifts in the market?
• How does our strategy adapt to changing customer needs?

Strategy only works when the rest of the organization is built to execute it.

2. Structure

Structure is the architecture of your organization: who reports to whom, how teams are divided, where decisions are made.

• Is decision-making centralized or decentralized?
• How do departments coordinate?
• Where are the formal and informal lines of communication?

A structure that worked at 10 people often breaks at 50. A structure that supports innovation can be the wrong fit for scale.

3. Systems

Systems are the processes and tools that keep daily work moving — financial systems, HR processes, communication platforms, project management workflows, decision protocols.

• What systems do we rely on most?
• How are they monitored?
• Where are the bottlenecks?

Outdated systems quietly drain energy from every other part of the organization.

4. Shared Values

Shared Values are the core beliefs and standards that guide behavior. Not the values posted on the website — the ones actually lived day to day.

• What do we genuinely stand for?
• What does our culture reward and tolerate?
• How strong and consistent are these values across the organization?

When shared values are vague or contradicted by behavior, every other element gets harder to align.

5. Style

Style refers to leadership and management approach. It includes how leaders communicate, make decisions, and handle conflict.

• Is leadership collaborative or directive?
• Do teams actually function as teams, or are they groups in name only?
• How effective is leadership at modeling what's expected?

Style shapes culture more than any mission statement.

6. Staff

Staff is about the people in the organization — who's there, what roles exist, and where the gaps are.

• What roles and specializations do we have?
• What positions are missing?
• How are we developing the people we have?

Staff decisions shape what the organization is capable of becoming.

7. Skills

Skills are the specific capabilities the organization is known for — what it actually does well.

• What are our strongest competencies?
• Where are the skill gaps?
• How do we monitor and grow skills over time?

Skills and Staff sound similar but answer different questions. Staff is who you have. Skills is what they can do.

When to Use the 7-S Framework

The framework is useful any time you need to understand how the pieces of an organization fit — or why they don't. Common applications:

• Improving performance in a team or company that feels stuck
• Implementing a new strategy
• Navigating a merger, acquisition, or major restructure
• Onboarding new leadership
• Diagnosing why change efforts keep stalling
• Aligning a fast-growing team that's outgrown its original setup
• Making the case for change to senior leadership in a structured, credible way
• Preparing for a leadership interview, where you want to demonstrate strategic thinking about the organization you're hoping to join

It works at the organization level, but also at the level of a department, team, or project.

How to Apply It

Here's a practical sequence:

Step 1: Start with Shared Values. Are they clear? Are they consistent with your current strategy, structure, and systems? If not, name the gap.

Step 2: Examine the hard elements. Look at Strategy, Structure, and Systems together. Do they reinforce each other, or are they pulling in different directions? A growth strategy paired with a structure built for stability is a common mismatch.

Step 3: Examine the soft elements. Style, Staff, and Skills. Do they support what the hard elements are trying to do? A strategy that requires bold decision-making won't work under a leadership style that punishes risk.

Step 4: Identify the misalignments. Where are the contradictions? Where is one element undermining another?

Step 5: Adjust and reassess. Change one element, and the others shift. This is iterative, not linear. Expect to circle back.

A simple way to track alignment: list the seven elements in a grid and check whether each pair supports the other. Mismatches are where the work is.

A Quick Example

Imagine a small company of five people. The founder's values shape everything. Strategy is clear. Structure is informal but functional. Systems are off-the-shelf and adequate. Everything aligns because it's small.

Now imagine that company at 30 people, selling into new markets. The original strategy has evolved, but the structure hasn't. New hires don't fully understand the founding values. Systems built for five people are buckling. The skills that made the early team successful aren't the skills needed now.

Nothing is broken on its own. But the pieces no longer align. A 7-S analysis surfaces this — not as a list of problems, but as a pattern. From there, the leader can make targeted changes: clarify values for new hires, evolve the structure, upgrade systems, build the missing skills.

That's the value of the framework. It turns a vague sense that something is off into a specific, addressable picture.

A Few Honest Limitations

The 7-S Framework is a diagnostic tool, not a prescription. It tells you where things are out of alignment. It doesn't tell you what to do about it. Two organizations with the same misalignments may need very different solutions depending on context, history, and people.

It's also a snapshot. Organizations are dynamic, and alignment is never permanent. The framework is most useful when revisited periodically — especially during growth, change, or strategic shifts.

Final Thought

The 7-S Framework endures because it reflects something true about organizations: success isn't about getting one thing right. It's about getting many things to work together.

When strategy, structure, systems, values, style, staff, and skills reinforce each other, performance follows. When they contradict each other, no amount of effort in one area will fix what's misaligned across the others.

This is also why the 7-S Framework is such a useful tool when you're trying to influence others. Walking into a leadership meeting — or an interview — with a 7-S lens shows you understand how organizations actually work. You're not just pitching an idea. You're showing how the pieces fit.

If something in your organization feels stuck, the 7-S Framework is a good place to start asking why.