Transcript (edited for clarity)

Traci: Welcome to Chemical Processing's Distilled podcast. This episode and its transcript are available at chemicalprocessing.com. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of Chemical Processing, and joining me today is Heather Quigley, Ph.D. Heather is a chemical engineer with 23 years of experience, including five years in people leadership roles spanning R&D, product development and corporate innovation. She is the founder of Signal + Flow, where she helps women in STEM make the leap from technical expert to leader by making the unwritten rules of technical leadership visible and workable. Welcome, Heather.

Heather: Thank you so much, Traci. I'm excited to be here with you today.

Traci: Well, I am very excited to learn more about you and how you came to this role — and maybe pick up a few things I can apply to my own work. So let's get started. Can you tell me more about your background, your work and the move into leadership? What led you to start Signal + Flow?

Heather: I'd be happy to share more. Like you said in your kind introduction, I'm a chemical engineer by training. I got my Ph.D. from Virginia Tech, and shortly after, I was awarded a fellowship with NASA at the Kennedy Space Center. It was a postdoctoral fellowship, and I worked there for a year — such a wonderful experience. The work was interesting: I applied a technology I'd developed in graduate school to an aerospace cleaning process NASA was trying to make more sustainable and greener. It was also just exciting to be in that environment, right next to the launch pads. Sometimes we'd watch a rocket launch on our lunch break. That was pretty unique.

After that year at Kennedy Space Center, I moved to an R&D role at Eastman Chemical, where I worked for about 12 years in R&D, innovation and leadership. I moved from individual technical contributor into people leadership and experienced firsthand how disorienting that transition can be. About a year ago, I founded Signal and Flow to make the invisible rules of leadership more explicit for women in STEM — to help close the gap that opens up when you move from individual contributor to leader for the first time. I'd say the common thread in my career is that I like understanding how complex systems work. Eventually I realized leadership is another one of those complex systems, and I didn't see a good solution for mapping it clearly, especially for women. That's how I got to where I am now.

From Contributor to Leader

Traci: What a fascinating career. Being at NASA is a dream for many people, and you lived it — and getting to watch a rocket launch on your lunch hour isn't bad, either. You've lived this experience: You went from individual contributor to leader, so you understand it from the inside out. Why is that transition — from excelling in a technical, contributor role to leading — so disorienting for people?

Heather: I think the bottom line is that it's a completely different job, and we don't really treat it that way. We almost treat it like a promotion — from individual contributor to now leading other individual contributors. But because it's a different job, the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor aren't the skills that make leadership work.

Technical work rewards expertise, deep analysis, precision and problem-solving, and getting to — if not the right answer, at least a right answer. There's usually some correctness to whatever conclusion you arrive at. Leadership, on the other hand, requires good judgment under often extreme ambiguity: influence without full authority — even with the leadership title, you might not have full authority over the outcomes you're trying to influence — making decisions with incomplete information, and navigating people, politics and competing priorities.

I think one of the secrets to navigating all of this effectively, especially for women, is knowing which parts of those leadership requirements are yours to hold and which aren't. I'd like to share a personal story about a situation I found disorienting when I entered leadership. Within the first few weeks, there was an intense conflict between three team members. I'd had years of technical training and had interviewed and been selected for this leadership position, but I'd never received any training on how to mediate a complex interpersonal conflict — one that was affecting both the work product of those three people and the morale of the whole team. I leaned on mentors for advice on how they'd handled similar situations, but disproportionately, I had to rely on my own empathy and judgment, figuring it out live. I felt pretty unprepared to navigate it. It went well, but it was something I'd never had to face as an individual contributor. Within the first few weeks, it was like a bomb dropped on me: OK, here's the new terrain.

Traci: That is very disorienting — and uncomfortable.

Heather: Absolutely.

What Are The Unwritten Rules?

Traci: We're talking about unwritten rules, and dealing with conflict and helping team members work through issues with each other could be one of them. Can you give us examples of other unwritten rules people might encounter?

Heather: Yes. The rule I like to start with, in the program I teach, is that ambiguity is the job — it's the name of the game once you're in leadership. Along the same lines as what I mentioned earlier, technical contributors are used to working

Under more certain conditions, and they can interpret uncertainty as a sign that something is wrong or broken. But in complex organizations, it's common for priorities to shift, for decision rights to be fuzzy, and for information to be incomplete. Getting used to that as the new terrain of your job as a leader is part of the disorientation that comes with entering leadership. The most common mistake a leader can make with ambiguity is waiting for perfect clarity before moving forward, because it won't come.

You can end up waiting a long time, and then be perceived as incompetent or as not driving toward results. The real leadership skill I teach is how to stay grounded enough in ambiguity to make the next move, because your body can interpret ambiguity as a threat, which can trigger nervous-system dysregulation. The reframe I offer, especially for women who tend to internalize this kind of struggle, is that ambiguity isn't evidence that leadership has gone wrong — it's the terrain of leadership. New leaders figure that out pretty quickly, mainly through the discomfort of experiencing uncertainty in a new role. The unlock is understanding how much of that ambiguity is yours to hold; many women tend to hold more than their fair share. In the program, I share a framework for moving through ambiguity: regulate your nervous system so you're operating from a grounded place, decode what's actually yours to hold — what's your responsibility — and then decide on just the next right step. It doesn't have to be a huge strategic rollout, just the one grounded next step you can take in that ambiguous situation. Practicing that daily lets you keep taking that next right step.

Traci: You're alluding to this, but I want your thoughts on why these unwritten rules land differently for women moving into leadership. You said women tend to hold on to ambiguity more than we should. What are your thoughts?

Heather: Yes, and this is really at the heart of what I do and why it's important to me. Men, when they go into leadership — and of course there's a spectrum of personal experience, so I'm generalizing a bit — are often learning one system: how to lead. Women are often learning two: how to lead, and how to manage other people's reactions to a woman leading.

In the program, I address this by framing our responses around the double binds women face at work. Some of these are pieces of advice a lot of us have heard: Be confident, but don't be threatening. Be warm, but not soft. Be visible, but not self-promotional. Be direct, but not abrasive. Throughout the program, the double binds relevant to each topic are called out and addressed in every weekly module. Instead of trying to find the impossible line between the binds — which doesn't exist, because it moves depending on who's in the room and what's at stake — there is no correct path through them. So instead of always pushing ourselves harder to prove we belong or be more visible, we find an authentic way for each woman to operate without trying to perfectly navigate it. An example tied to the "ambiguity is the job" rule: The double bind is acting without full information versus risking being seen as reckless. Another is waiting for certainty and risking being seen as indecisive.

It's Not Performance Problems

Traci: It's so true that managing how other people respond to women in leadership is, in itself, a full-time job. You've said there's a pattern where self-doubt during the transition gets misdiagnosed as a performance problem. Can you unpack that — why it's so easy for both the person and their manager to get that diagnosis wrong?

Heather: This is a great question because it's multifaceted: It's about the woman's experience and about leadership's perception of her performance. If you don't have a map of the system you're navigating, you can tend, as a woman, to explain the friction you're experiencing by blaming yourself. We tend to internalize a lot of the struggle. That can feel like: I must not be strategic enough. Maybe I'm not ready for this role. Why can't I handle this better?

What could actually be underneath that includes unclear decision rights in the environment, missing stakeholder alignment, low visibility for the woman or her team, conflicting expectations, bias, overfunctioning, and just normal ambiguity. This can manifest in ways that look like disengagement, which then gets read as a performance problem rather than an onboarding or systems problem.

Coming back to ambiguity: Common patterns women fall into when faced with it include withdrawing, delaying or taking control. Withdrawing and delaying can be mistakenly perceived as disengagement, because you're pulling back and not taking visible action. What helps is seeing the system clearly, recognizing the patterns you fall into individually, and using the framework to move forward despite those default patterns. There's significant work the individual can do in the leadership role — but there's also significant work organizations can do to prevent what I see as an all-too-common misdiagnosis of a performance issue.

How To Retain Talent

Traci: If women don't get past that bump in the road and make the leap, it's hard to move forward. A lot of companies treat the diversity gap as a pipeline problem — not enough women coming up through the ranks. You're arguing the bigger loss happens later, right at that leap into leadership. What should organizations be doing differently to hang on to the women they've already invested in?

Heather: This is a really important piece of the puzzle, because there's been a lot of training and conversation around fixing the woman — and that's completely contrary to what I'm trying to teach. I want to help women navigate the current system, but my ultimate goal is to help organizations change the system from within so it's more accommodating to everyone entering it.

The data show that women enter leadership at parity with their representation in the field — into that first, frontline leader position — and then it starts to fall off precipitously after that first role, continuing to decline as you ascend into the C-suite. McKinsey's Women in the Workplace report calls this the "broken rung": the drop-off from that first frontline leadership role to the next manager role.

So what's actually happening, and what can organizations do differently to retain women from that first level of leadership onward? High-level leadership training should help women navigate the current system, but organizations also have a responsibility to change the system. The pipeline isn't only about who enters leadership — it's about whether women look at leadership and conclude the cost is worth it.

To make leadership worth it for women, organizations should, first, stop treating the transition into leadership like a title change or a promotion, and start treating it like the genuine role change it is. They can do this by explicitly teaching the unwritten parts of leadership, with better onboarding and coaching around real situations rather than generic training. They can address the double binds and biased interpretations, rather than just telling women to be more confident or otherwise trying to "fix the woman." I saw great momentum building in this space before DEI initiatives were largely deprioritized, and I think those programs can be effective at making this kind of change.

Organizations can also start meaningfully recognizing the invisible work women tend to do exceedingly well in leadership roles — leading with empathy and creating psychological safety. Those two areas alone account for so much of the invisible labor women disproportionately take on at work: mediating conflict, team building through celebration and community gathering, recognizing team members, and making accommodations for life challenges team members face.

And last but certainly not least is sponsorship of women into important roles. That's not the same as mentoring — it's identifying women with high leadership potential and grooming them specifically for those roles. We see this happen much more commonly for men than for women, and that's something that would move the needle meaningfully.

Helping Women in STEM Navigate Leadership

Traci: You've laid out a lot of clear paths, and clarity is clearly your strong suit — congratulations on that. Your LinkedIn header reads, "Helping women in STEM navigate their first move into leadership." For the women listening right now who are standing at that edge, what's the one piece of advice you'd want them to walk away with?

Heather: What I want women to understand — and feel — deeply is this: Stop interpreting every difficult leadership moment as evidence that you're not ready. You likely already have more credentials and qualifications than you'll need for that first leadership role, and you don't need to know everything your team knows, or everything about leadership, to lead well. But you do need a way to read what's actually happening around you, and to choose the next move.

Traci: Heather, thank you for helping us fix — or try to fix — those broken rungs for women in leadership. I appreciate your insight and the time you've given us on this podcast. If you want to stay on top of best practices in the chemical industry, subscribe to this free podcast on your favorite platform, and visit chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources to help you succeed. On behalf of Heather Quigley, I'm Traci Purdum, and this has been Chemical Processing's Distilled podcast. Thanks for listening, and thanks again, Heather.

Heather: Thanks, Traci.