The Pulse - The variable every leadership plan has missed
She has chaired this meeting for six years. Reads the room before anyone else speaks. Holds the numbers, the politics and the people in the same clear view, at the same time, without visible effort.
For the last eight months, something has changed about what that costs her.
She has not said anything. There is no reason to. Nothing has gone wrong. The results are still there. The meeting still runs on time.
But the version of her walking out of that room is not quite the version who walked in eight months ago, and until she has language for it, neither is anyone else in that room.
Menopause usually happens between the ages of 45 and 55, but it can happen earlier. Perimenopause is the time leading up to menopause, when symptoms can start years before periods stop and can continue for several years. It is, almost exactly, the period of a woman’s career when many are carrying significant responsibility, accumulated expertise and increasing leadership expectations.[1]
What 18 October will and will not tell you
18 October, workplaces across the country will mark World Menopause Day. Most of what gets said will be about symptoms, support and awareness.[2]
Useful, as far as it goes.
It will not, on its own, answer the question a leadership team actually needs to consider:
What happens to organisational capacity when experienced decision makers are moving through a significant physiological transition that is rarely visible in the data used to plan their work?
Research from the Fawcett Society has already put a number on part of this. Its research found that one in ten women who had worked during the menopause had left a job because of their symptoms. Fourteen per cent had reduced their hours, and another fourteen per cent had moved to part time work.[3]
CIPD’s more recent research makes the workplace impact harder to dismiss. In its 2023 survey of 2,185 employed women aged 40 to 60, 67% of women who had experienced menopausal symptoms said those symptoms had had a mostly negative effect on them at work. Among those reporting a negative effect, 79% said they felt less able to concentrate, while 27% said menopause had negatively affected their career progression.[4]
None of that is framed as a leadership capacity problem.
It is largely framed as an HR, health or workplace support issue.
Those are not the same question.
And treating them as the same one is exactly how the organisational implications remain invisible at the level where they matter most.
A succession plan that assumes capacity remains constant across a woman’s forties and fifties is making an assumption nobody has tested, at precisely the point the organisation may be depending on her most.
Why this one stays hidden longer than most
The domains this newsletter has been naming since June explain exactly why.
Sleep as a performance variable.
The body carrying information long before the mind has language for it.
The gap between how someone appears and how she actually feels, held alone, for months, because there is no forum in which to say it without it becoming the whole conversation about her.
Perimenopause can touch several of these domains at once: sleep, mood, concentration, energy, confidence and physical symptoms can all be affected, and symptoms can fluctuate considerably between individuals.
And the woman experiencing them may still be performing exactly as expected.
She knows how to perform composure.
She has been doing it her whole career.
That skill is precisely what can keep the change invisible to everyone around her, and sometimes to herself.
What would actually tell you something
Not another awareness campaign that runs for a week and changes nothing about how the next five years of succession planning get built.
Something more useful:
A structured way of seeing the human factors underneath capacity, rather than assuming they are constant because the output still looks acceptable.
That is the thinking behind the OHFB, our organisational level assessment of the human factors that sit beneath performance.
And for the individual leader, The Unseen Load: A nervous system map for women in leadership, offers a quieter starting point.
It does not diagnose menopause.
It does not ask a woman to declare that something is wrong.
And it is not another symptom checklist.
Instead, it asks five questions about what is actually happening beneath the performance:
Your Nervous System
How your system is responding to the demands around you.
Demand and Recovery
What is being asked of you, and what you actually have available to meet it. Sleep as Performance
The recovery that cannot simply be negotiated away.
The Load You Carry Alone
What happens when the person everyone relies on has very few places to put down what she is carrying.
Your Body as Data
The information your body may be registering before you have found the words for it.
These questions are not about how you think you should feel.
They are about what is actually happening in your body.
And that distinction matters.
Because if we want to understand sustainable leadership capacity, we need to look beyond what the organisation can already see.
PAUSE AND NOTICE
If you lead a team:
Think of the most experienced woman on it.
Not the one who has raised a concern.
The one still delivering. Still composed. Still entirely credible in every meeting you have with her.
What do you actually know about what the last two years have cost her, physiologically, not just in output?
If this describes you:
When did you last separate what you are managing from what you are carrying?
They are not the same question.
Most women in leadership have never been asked either one.
The performance you cannot measure is still shaping the performance you can.
Eighteen October will come and go, and much of what is said about menopause will have evaporated by lunchtime. What does not evaporate is the leadership capacity, experience and expertise that organisations are depending on, and the assumptions built around them.
If this has named something you have been circling, we would welcome a conversation.
If it named you, The Unseen Load is a quieter place to start.
EVIDENCE & SOURCES [1] NHS — What are menopause and perimenopause? [2] International Menopause Society — World Menopause Day [3] Fawcett Society — Menopause and the Workplace [4] CIPD — Menopause in the workplace: Employee experiences in 2023