There’s a version of leadership that gets celebrated in tech and the broader workforce: the executive who is always on, always polished, and always three steps ahead. I spent over a decade doing whatever it took to be that person, and I suspect many women in this industry have too. What I didn’t understand then is that chasing that version of yourself doesn’t just exhaust you, it actually gets in the way of doing your best work.

I took the red-eye flights, cut vacations short, and stacked 18-hour days. I sat in rooms where showing any sign of struggle felt like a liability, where vulnerability, emotion and weakness were treated as essentially the same thing. The message, spoken or not, was that polish and control weren’t just professional standards. They were the price of being taken seriously.

The pressure women feel to overperform and overpolish in this industry is real and well documented. Retail and commerce moves fast, the stakes feel perpetually high, and the qualities that get rewarded — decisiveness, confidence, control — are valuable. However, the signal women often receive is that those qualities must be projected at all times, even when the reality is far more complicated. The performance becomes the job.

The pursuit of the “perfect” executive isn’t just exhausting, it’s a chase after something that doesn’t exist. And the higher the stakes, the more that becomes impossible to ignore. At some point, I stopped trying to outrun that reality. What I found on the other side of letting go of perfection was a better leader and, honestly, a better version of the work.

What that looks like in practice is a high degree of autonomy and trust. The expectation isn’t perfection, it’s honesty. When something gets hard, I want to know about it. Not because I need to fix everything, but because some of the most costly mistakes I’ve seen in this industry come not from lack of effort but from lack of clarity; people grinding through moments when their judgment was compromised and no one felt safe enough to say so. That starts with me. Being accountable to my own mistakes, naming what went wrong, and not performing with certainty I don’t have. My job isn’t to extract maximum output in the short term. It’s to keep people doing their best thinking over the long arc of their career. That only works if I’m willing to model it myself.

What that actually looks like day to day is less dramatic than it sounds. Saying out loud when something is harder than expected. Admitting when I don’t have the answer. Letting people see that I’m working through something rather than pretending I’ve already solved it. These aren’t grand gestures; they’re small, consistent signals that tell a team it’s safe to do the same. And that safety is what allows people to bring their clearest thinking to the hardest problems.

This became clear to me in an unexpected place: LinkedIn. The posts that resonated most weren’t the polished career milestones or strategic takes on the industry. They were the ones that were honest about harder moments: showing up imperfectly, admitting uncertainty, dropping the ball. Those posts connected far more deeply than anything perfectly curated. Not because people want to watch leaders struggle, but because they see themselves in it. People aren’t looking for another highlight reel; they’re looking for something that’s real.

There’s also something broader happening that’s worth naming. As artificial intelligence takes on more of the operational and transactional work across our industry, distinctly human capabilities aren’t just valuable, they’re what people are actively craving. Empathy. Judgment. The ability to sit with complexity without shutting down. These aren’t soft skills. They’re increasingly the core of what effective leadership looks like. And they cannot be performed. They have to be real.

Those qualities don’t come from performative confidence. They come from experience, reflection, and honest engagement with challenges.

I’m still unlearning some of the habits I built during the years I believed showing cracks was the worst thing I could do professionally. But the irony is that letting go of that expectation has made me a better leader; more present, more connected, and more effective than I’ve ever been. The women in this industry who are quietly carrying the weight of impossible standards deserve to know that the standard itself is the problem. Leadership is a practice, not a performance. And the best leaders I know have never been the most polished ones in the room.

Abby Borden is vice president of marketing at Vantage, a retail media orchestration platform.