Nobody Told Me It Would Be This Hard.

Getting into leadership is one thing. Figuring out how to actually do it is something else entirely.

I've wanted to tell this story for a long time.

My first leadership role was nothing like I expected. I had wanted to lead for years — I'd been clear about it with my managers, had watched enough bad leadership to know exactly what I didn't want to do, and had worked harder than almost anyone around me to get to the point where the opportunity was there.

And then I got the job. And I was completely unprepared for what it actually asked of me.

The hardest part wasn't the strategy. It wasn't the revenue targets or the business results — I had been hitting numbers my whole career and I knew how to do that. It was the people. Managing someone who used to be my peer, who I had eaten lunch with and complained to and who now had a different relationship with me whether either of us wanted it to or not. Managing the former leader who had been demoted because of team performance. Talk about hard. Having a performance conversation with a rep who was struggling and who I genuinely liked. Making calls with incomplete information and no one to check with, because I was the one who was supposed to know.

I remember sitting in my car after a particularly hard week in those first months, wondering whether I had made the right decision. Whether I was actually cut out for this. Whether the instinct that told me I wanted to lead had known something my current experience seemed to be contradicting.

Leadership is more difficult and more rewarding than I ever imagined. Both of those things are true at the same time. Nobody warns you about that.

The thing about bad managers

I had a lot of bad managers early in my career. Not bad people — bad managers. People who were, in some cases, genuinely talented at the individual contributor work and genuinely poor at the work of leading. One of them spent a full day in the field with me without going into a single sales call. He stayed in the car. I don't know what he was doing in that car, but he was not developing me as a sales professional. I was on my own.

Another one, when I told her I was interested in moving into leadership, actively discouraged me. Not because she thought I wasn't capable. Because I was her top performer and she didn't want to lose me. She sat across from me and told me I should think carefully about whether leadership was really what I wanted — and what she meant was: I need your number and I don't want to deal with the problem of replacing you.

These experiences shaped how I thought about leadership before I had ever actually led anyone. I knew what I didn't want to be. I had a vivid, specific picture of the kind of manager who used their team rather than developed them — who saw talent as a resource to be extracted, not a responsibility to be honored.

What I didn't have was a picture of what I did want to be. And it turned out that knowing what bad leadership looks like does almost nothing to prepare you for the actual work of leading.

What first leadership actually requires

Here's what I've come to believe, after thirty years on both sides of this:

The skills that make someone excellent at individual contributor work are almost completely different from the skills that make someone excellent at leading. The instincts that serve a great sales rep — personal ownership, direct accountability, the ability to move quickly and trust your own judgment — can actively work against you when you're responsible for ten people whose success depends on your ability to develop them rather than do it yourself.

The transition from contributor to leader is genuinely one of the hardest professional transitions there is. Not because the people making it aren't capable, they almost always are. But because it requires unlearning the habits and instincts that got you here, and replacing them with a completely different set, while also continuing to perform, while also managing relationships that have shifted in complicated ways, while also figuring out the organizational and political dynamics of a new level of responsibility.

Almost nobody gets real support through this transition. And women in revenue get less support than most.

Why I built this

I built Her Revenue because I was that woman in the car, questioning herself. Because I watched hundreds of women navigate that transition without the support they deserved, figuring it out alone, at cost, in ways that left marks. Because when I created a Women in Sales group at one of my VP roles, what I saw happen, what became possible for those women simply from having a room where they could be honest — told me that this work mattered in a way that went beyond my own career.

The Built To Lead series (coming soon) is about the real experience of stepping into leadership as a woman in revenue. Not the curated version. Not the highlight reel. The actual experience: what's hard, what's harder than you expected, what helps, and what I've learned from thirty years of being inside these organizations and watching what makes the difference.

I'll be sharing what I've seen and lived over the next six weeks. Not confidence content. The real stuff. Starting with something that most leadership development programs will never tell you: asking for help is not a weakness. It is the job.

-Elisa