She never blended into the boardroom.
While the rest of the table arrived in navy and charcoal, she entered in colour — bold prints that refused to apologise for themselves. Turquoise against dark wood. Ochre against glass and steel. The fabric moved when she did, soft but certain.
She looked people straight in the eye when they spoke. Not the polite executive glance that skims and moves on. A steady, unhurried gaze that made you aware of your own words.
She could never keep a poker face.
If she was amused, the corner of her mouth lifted. If she disagreed, her eyebrows betrayed her long before she spoke. In rooms trained for neutrality, her humanity was visible.
Unless she was angry.
When that happened, the room shifted.
Her voice did not rise, but decisions came fast — precise, unspooling one after another. No grandstanding. No theatre. Just clarity. It was almost always triggered by the same thing: someone attempting to shrink a possibility. A ceiling placed where she saw none. A limitation suggested because someone was “not ready yet”.
I was young in the corporate world when she met me.
She told me I had the rare ability to develop the strategy and then implement it — to “eat the pie in the sky”. I did not yet understand the phrase. I only knew she described rooms I had not imagined walking into.
There was no ceiling in the spaces she envisioned.
When she approved a strategy I had built, she did not hover. She did not dilute it with constant correction. She let me run. When things went wrong — and they did — she stood in front of me, not behind me.
Power, in her hands, felt like shelter.
I was her eyes on the ground in community development. I saw how carefully she weighed competing needs when budgets tightened. One project meant another would wait. She read every brief. Asked about impact. Asked about unintended consequences. Asked who would be left out.
She never pretended the choices were simple.
In a profession that often confuses authority with distance, she remained unmistakably human.
When I think of leadership now, I do not think first of titles or performance metrics. I think of colour in a grey room. Of eye contact that does not look away. Of someone who refused ceilings — for herself, and for those who worked beside her.
Part of 100 Portraits from a Sustainability Career — my ongoing writing project exploring the people and forces that shape our work.
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