UNSCRIPTED — EPISODE 368 • LEADERSHIP
Dr. Lisa Ann Ferlita — VP of Service, Americas at Oxford Instruments and author of The Weight of Leadership: Leading Without Losing Yourself — joins Sarah Nicastro for a raw, honest conversation about what it really costs to lead, and how to do it without losing who you are in the process.
What if the path to greater leadership impact starts with looking in the mirror? That is the premise of Dr. Lisa Ann Ferlita’s new book — and the thread running through every part of this conversation.
Lisa has worked across 129 countries, served ten years in the Air Force, and built a career through resilience, adaptability, and a willingness to reflect that most leaders never quite find the time for. Her book, The Weight of Leadership: Leading Without Losing Yourself, is the result: raw, honest, and grounded in lived experience rather than corporate theory. This isn’t a book about what worked at Google or Amazon. It’s about what it actually feels like to lead — and what it costs.
Becoming: Leadership Starts With Survival
The book is structured around four sections — Becoming, Leading, Rebuilding, and Legacy — and Lisa walks Sarah through a key insight from each.
Becoming starts at the beginning. Lisa grew up with a single mother working hard at IBM in an era when most women held administrative roles. Her brother, her school, the adults around her — everyone was carrying weight. And so, early on, she learned to carry her own. Leadership, for Lisa, didn’t come from being born with certain traits. It came from survival.
What she discovered through years of working across cultures — particularly the contrast between the fast-paced decisiveness of American business culture and the more human, relationship-centred approach she encountered elsewhere — shaped her view that becoming a leader is, at its core, about becoming human.
Becoming a leader is really about becoming human.” — Dr. Lisa Ann Ferlita
Leading: The Weight You Don’t Expect
In the Leading section, Lisa reflects on a phase many service leaders will recognise — stepping into a role and immediately trying to perform a version of leadership you think is expected of you. Controlling the journey. Measuring the outputs. Always being on.
She describes the loneliness of leadership, the constant self-questioning, and the slow realisation that the things she thought defined great leadership — authority, titles, metrics — were actually getting in the way. Her three pillars of leadership emerged from that reckoning: empowering people, making sure they are heard, and creating genuine inclusion. Not because they’re the right things to say, but because she had lived the cost of the alternative.
Rebuilding: When Your Body Starts to Talk
The Rebuilding section is, by Lisa’s own account, the most emotional and most raw part of the book. She describes a moment at a conference — surrounded by energy, struggling to take another step, legs heavy, exhausted in a way that went beyond tiredness — where her body simply said enough.
She had been sleeping three to four hours a night. Travelling constantly. Always on. And at some point, she looked in a hotel mirror and didn’t recognise herself.
Rebuilding is about what came next. Not a dramatic reinvention, but a gradual, difficult process of asking what strength actually means — physically, mentally, and in the way you show up for others. Her insight here is quietly powerful: why carry the weight of leadership alone when spreading it helps others grow and develop?
Titles mean nothing if you’re losing yourself.” — Dr. Lisa Ann Ferlita
Legacy: What Kind of Leader Do You Want to Leave Behind?
The final section asks a question that doesn’t come up often enough in leadership conversations: what do you actually want to leave behind?
For Lisa, the answer has nothing to do with titles or accolades. When people used to tell her they wanted to be just like her, her response was: you don’t. Not because her journey wasn’t worth it, but because she now understands what it cost — and she wants something different for the people coming up behind her.
Her vision of legacy is simple: leaders who are seen, heard, and don’t have to lose themselves to succeed. Leaders who tell their team members that their weekends matter. Leaders who give people the space to be human at work, not just productive.
What Next-Generation Leadership Actually Looks Like
Sarah and Lisa also explore what leadership transformation looks like in practice — and where most leaders go wrong. Lisa’s answer: reverse engineering. Too many leaders start with the KPIs and work backward to the people. She argues it needs to go the other way. Build the relationships. Create the psychological safety. Leave your door open. And then the metrics will follow.
She points to a timeless principle from Total Quality Management that she still lives by today: do what you say, say what you did, and prove it. In an era of constant change and evolving expectations, the leaders who earn trust are the ones who follow through — and who say so honestly when they can’t.
The book, The Weight of Leadership: Leading Without Losing Yourself, is available now on Amazon in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback. Connect with Dr. Lisa Ann Ferlita at drlisaferlita.com.
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