3 Signs You Have a Leadership Environment Bottleneck

**Before we get to it, welcome to the 2025 reboot of the Untapped Leadership newsletter. It's been a while, and in that while, there has been A LOT. This newsletter reboot is intended to be a vehicle for leadership exploration focused on overlooked, divergent, and future-focused approaches to field. Expanded versions of these explorations will live on my blog. I hope the ideas are thought-provoking, the perspectives are fresh, the conventional approaches are challenged, and the dialogue is multi-directional.

Thanks for being here.**

Signs You Have a Leadership Environment Bottleneck (and Why It Costs You More Than You Think)

Ever feel like your leadership potential is being stifled? Not by your abilities but by the environment you’re working in?

It’s frustrating. It’s draining. And if you’ve ever found yourself stuck in one of these situations, you know it’s about more than just ambition. It’s about wanting to contribute more, lead more, and be more, yet being held back by dynamics outside your control.

I call this a leadership environment bottleneck.

Here’s what I mean:

3 Signs You’re Facing a Leadership Bottleneck

1. The Path to Growth Feels Nonexistent: You aspire to move up in responsibility and impact, but the path ahead feels narrow, riddled with obstacles, or might not even exist.
2. Interpersonal Dynamics stifle Your Potential: You know you can offer more, but less-than-ideal workplace relationships, an unsupportive boss, or a schedule that demands so much energy you barely have any left to give holds you back.
3. You’re Questioning Whether You Can Be Authentic: Deep down, you know your authentic self might limit your opportunities because of implicit bias in the environment, but you also know that showing up authentically is the only way to bring your best work forward.

For career-driven professionals, these bottlenecks happen more often than we’d like to admit. Upward trajectories are often over-reliant on who you know or whether you have an “in” with key decision-makers.

And for historically underrepresented professionals, these bottlenecks are even more pronounced because implicit bias is often baked into the system.

Does this resonate?

How I Faced My Own Bottleneck

In a past role earlier in my career, I was in the thick of a leadership bottleneck.

• I had a boss who made me second-guess even the most basic emails.
• I was carrying a workload that left me no room to think, let alone thrive.
• I was tiptoeing through a low-trust environment, trying to stay afloat.

It was a psychologically unsafe environment. Work/life balance didn’t exist. I felt like I was walking through a minefield every day, hoping I wouldn’t set something off.

It wasn’t until later that I realized I was leaning on something I now call Contextual Agility to survive that experience.

What Is Contextual Agility?

Contextual agility is the ability to understand and adapt leadership strategies to dynamically navigate shifting environments while staying aligned with your goals and values.

It's deeper than situational awareness.

It’s not about powering through or simply “making do.” It’s about leading in a way that lets you stay true to yourself even amid a system that’s working against you.

Here’s how to build your contextual agility:

5 Steps to Build Contextual Agility

1. Understand Yourself: Start by checking in on your internal narrative. Bottlenecks thrive on “it’s not me, it’s you” vibes that make you second-guess your abilities.
2. Make Connections to Historical Context: Every workplace has a history, and every leader brings their own lived experiences. Understanding these histories helps clarify the present.
3. Analyze the System: Leadership bottlenecks are rarely individual issues. They’re almost always systemic.
4. Vision with Optimistic Imagination Bottlenecks can shrink your vision to match their constraints. Don’t let them.
5. Integrate What You’ve Learned in Real-Time The hardest part of contextual agility is using it in real-time. Sometimes, you’ll have time to plan your next move; other times, you’ll have to act in the moment.

Why Leadership Bottlenecks are Costly

While we can (and should) develop tools to navigate these bottlenecks, the responsibility ultimately lies with organizations. Toxic systems, unchecked biases, and inequitable structures create the conditions that hold people back.

The work of breaking down those barriers is collective and long-term.

But in the meantime, on an individual level, you can refuse to let today’s constraints define your future.

Read the expanded version of this topic on my blog.

If you want to dig deeper into these frameworks and strategies, check out the book, Untapped Leadership.

Thanks for being here,

Jenny Vazquez-Newsum, Ed.D.

P.S. Have you experienced a leadership environment bottleneck? What was the cause? What strategies have worked for you as you navigated?

Hi! I'm Jenny, a leadership strategist, keynote speaker, author of Untapped Leadership, and Founder of Untapped Leaders. I partner with organizations to build inclusive, retained, and engaged leadership pipelines and help underrepresented professionals thrive authentically.

Learn more about my writing and speaking at www.jennyv-n.com.