The Manager I Lost Because I Was Too Busy to Fight for Her

A few years ago, one of my best managers came to me and said she wanted to be considered for Senior Manager. She'd earned it. Her team hit their numbers, her people trusted her, and she'd stepped up more than once when things got hard.

I told her I'd advocate for her. And I meant it.

But that quarter, I was buried. We were short-staffed, deadlines were stacking up, and I was spending most of my energy just keeping the operation upright. The promotion conversation needed real work behind the scenes. It needed me pushing in calibration meetings, building the business case, and following up when the process went quiet. Instead, it became one more thing on a list that was already too long, and it kept sliding to the bottom.

The promotion cycle itself didn't help. It was murky in the way these things often are at the director level. Budget wasn't guaranteed. The criteria shifted depending on who you talked to. There was no clear owner making sure deserving people didn't fall through the cracks, so it fell on directors like me to chase it down ourselves. And chasing it down took time and energy I didn't have to spare.

She waited. She followed up. I told her I was working on it, and some weeks that was even true. But mostly I was in survival mode, and survival mode doesn't leave much room for anything that isn't on fire.

Eventually she stopped waiting. She left for a Senior Manager role somewhere else, one that came with the clarity and the budget I couldn't give her. I don't blame her for a second. She wanted more, and we simply couldn't provide it in the timeframe she needed.

What that cost the team was real. We lost someone who already understood our people, our history, our way of working. We lost the trust she'd built with her direct reports over years, in a single transition. And I lost the chance to be the kind of leader who shows up for her people when it actually matters, not just when it's convenient.

Here's what I've come to understand since then. Being a grounded leader isn't about staying calm during the chaos, although that matters too. It's about staying present enough, even in the chaos, to have real conversations instead of transactional ones. A transactional conversation is "I'll advocate for you" said in passing between two fires. A real conversation is sitting down and saying, "here's exactly where this stands, here's what I'm doing about it, and here's what I need from you in the meantime." She deserved the second conversation. I kept giving her the first.

This is the heart of the Noticed stage in my IGNITE Framework. It's not about grand emotional gestures. It's built on the inner work that comes before it, the grounding that lets a leader quiet their own noise long enough to actually read the room, regulate themselves under pressure, and see what a person genuinely needs instead of what's easiest to offer them in the moment. Leaders who've done that inner work stop defaulting to transactional conversations, because they're no longer so consumed by their own urgency that it crowds everything else out.

If you're leading through a season that feels like constant triage right now, I'd ask you the question I wish I'd asked myself back then. Which relationship on your team is quietly becoming transactional because you're too deep in survival mode to notice?

This is one of the things I help leaders build. If it resonates, drop a comment. I'd love to hear what comes up for you.

And if you want a clearer read on where this might be showing up on your own team, I built a free diagnostic for exactly that. You can take it here: fernandabrasileiro.com/diagnostic

Fernanda Brasileiro

People Development Consultant & Strategist

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