Let’s cast our minds back to Purl, Pixar’s short film about a young woman trying to find her place in a workplace that was not designed with her in mind. What struck me was not simply the story of a woman entering an unfamiliar environment, but what happens when she learns to survive in it. She changes the way she speaks, dresses, and behaves, gradually becoming more like the people around her in order to belong.
But the most powerful part of the story comes later. When another young woman arrives, Purl has a choice: does she reproduce the culture that taught her how to survive, or does she make the workplace different for the woman coming behind her?
She chooses the latter. The younger woman does not have to become someone else to fit in. She can wear pink. She can keep her voice. She can remain herself and still be taken seriously. Because someone before her held the door open.
I think this is an important question for women in leadership today, particularly now that we are asking more senior women to mentor, sponsor, and develop younger women. Many of the women who occupy senior positions today had to develop extraordinary resilience to navigate workplaces that were less flexible, less empathetic, and often designed around a very different model of leadership. We should absolutely pass on the resilience, judgement and stamina that helped us survive. But perhaps our responsibility is not to reproduce the hardship that produced those qualities.
That is where empathy becomes important. Not softness, lowering standards, nor shielding younger women from difficult work, but empathy. Where we say: I want you to develop the resilience I had to develop, but I don’t want you to experience every hardship I experienced.
I will stretch you, but I won’t break you; I will challenge you, but I won’t humiliate you; I will expose you to difficult decisions, but I won’t abandon you in them; I will expect accountability, but I will also give you the support and authority to succeed; and I will teach you how institutions work, but I will not teach you that dysfunction is the price of belonging.
Perhaps that is the tension we need to confront as one generation of women begins to lead and mentor another: what should we preserve from the leadership culture that built us, and what should we have the courage to change?
Resilient leadership is not burnout
Boards and management have a responsibility to create conditions where leaders are stretched by the work, but not systematically depleted by the organisation. There is a subtle but important difference between resilient leadership and burnout: one builds capacity; the other progressively erodes it.
And in our attempt to prevent burnout, we must be careful not to tip the balance too far in the other direction. Every difficult assignment cannot become ‘toxic.’ Every demanding period cannot automatically be labelled ‘burnout.’ We cannot shield people from the very experiences that develop judgement, stamina, adaptability and leadership capacity.
So the question is not whether leadership should be hard. The question is: what kind of hard are we creating? There is healthy pressure: demanding targets, difficult decisions, organisational transformation, crisis response, accountability and being stretched beyond what is comfortable. These are not necessarily signs of a dysfunctional workplace. Sometimes, they are precisely where leadership capacity is built.
Then there is dysfunctional pressure: chronic understaffing, poor systems, unclear authority, unrealistic expectations, persistent crisis management, inadequate succession planning and a culture of permanent availability. This distinction matters because resilience should not become an excuse for organisational dysfunction, just as wellbeing should not become an excuse for avoiding growth.
That, to me, is the real opportunity of women’s intergenerational leadership: to make the systems healthier while still preparing women to be strong leaders.
Redesign the Conditions, Not Just the Women
If we want women to build resilience without burning out, we have to examine the conditions in which leadership happens. Many workplaces were built around an old model of the ideal worker: always available, able to absorb additional responsibilities, comfortable operating under constant pressure, and largely unencumbered by responsibilities. The problem is not that women cannot succeed in such environments. Many have. The question is how many capable women have had to opt out, slow down, or leave because the cost of succeeding became too high. This is why resilience cannot simply mean teaching women to endure more. The organisation itself has to be designed to support sustained performance.
Start with workload and capacity. A demanding organisation is not necessarily a dysfunctional one. But when resilience is being used to compensate for poor organisational design. Boards should be asking whether workloads are matched to resources and whether high performers are being overused. A demanding season may be necessary; a permanently demanding organisation is a design problem.
Match responsibility with authority. If we want women to develop judgement, we have to give them room to exercise it. There is little developmental value in stretching a leader means giving her a difficult problem and allowing her to work through it; it does not mean giving her an impossible problem and calling the resulting exhaustion a resilience test.
Build recovery into the way work is designed. Recovery should not be something leaders access only after they have reached breaking point. Boards and management need to examine leave practices, meeting cultures, after-hours expectations, staffing levels and workload cycles. The objective is not to create a pressure-free workplace. It is to create a workplace where periods of intense pressure are followed by recovery rather than simply becoming the new normal.
Make support compatible with high performance. One of the things we must unlearn is the idea that asking for help signals that a leader is not capable. In reality, knowing when to seek expertise, escalate a problem or ask for additional resources is itself a leadership skill. Women should be given increasingly difficult challenges, but they should also have access to mentorship, sponsorship, feedback and the institutional support required to learn from those challenges.
And this is where intergenerational leadership becomes particularly important. Senior women have an opportunity to pass on the resilience, judgement and stamina they developed without requiring younger women to reproduce every hardship through which they learned them. We can teach younger women how to handle difficult conversations, navigate institutional politics, make unpopular decisions and remain steady in a crisis. But we can also teach them that exhaustion is not a badge of honour, that dysfunction is not the same as high performance, and that asking for help does not diminish their leadership.
That is the redesign we should be aiming for: not workplaces that ask women to become less resilient, but workplaces that stop confusing resilience with endurance. The goal is to develop women who can withstand pressure, make difficult decisions and lead through uncertainty.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps this is where Purl becomes more than a story about women fitting into the workplace. It becomes a story about what happens when someone finally has enough power to make the workplace safer for the person coming behind her.
At the heart of that is psychological safety. A psychologically safe organisation is one where people can say: ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I made a mistake.’ ‘I disagree.’ ‘This isn’t working.’ ‘I need help.’ And still know that saying these things will not diminish their worth, their credibility or their future in the organisation.
For women in particular, this has an important intergenerational dimension. We should not pass down a version of leadership that says, ‘I survived it, so you should too.’ We can pass down the judgement, courage, stamina and institutional wisdom that experience gave us without passing down the dysfunction that once surrounded it.
To prepare the woman coming behind us is not simply for them to survive the workplace we inherited, but to have the resilience to lead, the safety to remain herself, and the opportunity to make the workplace better for the woman who comes after her.