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Highmark
Enterprise strategy from inside the work.
My roles expanded across operations, operational excellence, enterprise strategy, and the Office of the President, where I served as Chief of Staff to President Deb Rice-Johnson.
About Nayli Russo
I did not arrive at this work from theory.
I am a Venezuelan-American operator, researcher, advisor, and speaker. My work has taken me from music and healthcare to enterprise strategy and executive leadership. Across those experiences, I kept seeing the same thing: leadership could not be understood by looking only at the person doing the leading.
One of the first rooms I remember
I was six when someone decided what my nervousness meant.
I stood beside my aunt Flor in a small room, sang the song I had prepared, and left. Later, my mother told me why I had not been chosen for the television show: they thought I was too shy. If I was that nervous in a room that small, they could not imagine what I would do on a national stage.
I remember being angry. I knew I had been nervous. I also knew I had stood up and sung anyway.
Years would pass before I had language for the difference between what I brought into a room and what a room decided that meant.
Los Teques, Venezuela
Music came first.
I had been making music for as long as I can remember. I started as a singer, spent years in choirs, and at fourteen decided I wanted to play an instrument instead of only studying musical theory and singing.
There was no oboe available. So I made one out of a stick and Play-Doh and kept showing up for a full year until they gave me an instrument.
I became part of El Sistema, played professionally with the Miranda Symphony, and later toured five South American countries with the CAF Symphony as one of thirty-two musicians selected for the tour.
And then I left.
Not because music had stopped mattering to me. I was afraid it would not become a life I could sustain. The symphony had gone months without paying us. People around me told me music was not a real career. My friends were going to university and building lives that looked more stable.
Eventually, all of those voices became louder than the one telling me what I actually wanted.
I went to study pharmacy.
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Starting again
I came to the United States already trained as a pharmacist.
That did not mean I could practice as one here. I had to rebuild the standing my degree had given me somewhere else.
01
I worked as a pharmacy technician at Rite Aid.
02
I completed the required internship hours at an independent pharmacy, even though I was already a pharmacist in Venezuela.
03
Then I failed the NAPLEX.
04
I waited, took it again, passed, and became a pharmacist in the United States.
The rooms got bigger
Clinical practice became operations, strategy, and executive leadership.
The work changed as my responsibility changed. I moved from pharmacy into operations and enterprise strategy, then into executive leadership where business decisions, resources, people, and execution had to be held in the same frame.
Pittsburgh Pirates
More authority did not make judgment automatic.
I served as Senior Director of Strategy, Vice President of Strategy, and Vice President of People and Strategy. In one stretch, I was taken out of operational meetings because my instinct to discern had turned into attention to minutiae the work no longer needed from me. That experience reminded me that not every difficult leadership moment is evidence that the conditions are constraining you. Sometimes your own way of operating is part of what the environment is responding to.
PharmD · Executive MBA, Jack Welch Management Institute
Then my place in the room changed
Eventually, I became part of the conditions other people had to navigate.
I was no longer only the person trying to understand what a room would permit. I became an executive. A founder. A CEO. Someone whose decisions, reactions, preferences, and silences could shape what other people believed was possible.
Authority changed the question. It asked me to examine not only how I moved through a room, but what my presence taught other people to expect from it.
What does my leadership make possible for someone else?
The question that changed my work
Why I stopped examining the leader alone.
I had done the leadership-model work myself. I could name the leader I wanted to be. Then I watched leaders in my practice do the same work and return to familiar behavior.
I examined the program, my facilitation, their skill, and their commitment. But I could not keep examining the leader as if the leader were the only variable.
So I went and asked other leaders what had happened to them. Those interviews became the research I continue today. They have helped me build and challenge an emerging framework, but they have not established a universal answer. The work remains something I test rather than something I ask people to accept on faith.
Leadership cannot be understood by examining the leader alone.
Explore the research →The name I carry
My name is part of the story too.
My parents created Nayli from their names: Nancy, Lino, and the Spanish y, meaning “and.” Years later, when I became a U.S. citizen, I chose Russo, my mother’s family name, as part of the name I would carry forward.
For years after immigrating, I had made even my own name easier for other people to pronounce. Saying it correctly again became a small decision with a much larger meaning underneath it.
I went all the way back to go all the way forward.
Read “Why Do We Make Ourselves Smaller Before Anyone Asks?” →
The work today
The work now has several expressions.
Each gives me a different way to examine the person, the conditions, and what becomes possible between them.
01
Speaking
I bring these questions into conversations with leadership audiences, executives, and leaders working across different environments.
02
Research
I study leaders’ accounts of what happens when they try to use their judgment, voice, and range, and what those accounts reveal about Authorship, Permission, Terrain, and Reception.
03
Writing
Insights holds the longer explorations: essays that follow a question far enough to examine what it means, complicates, or leaves unresolved.
04
Organizational work
Through Russo Leadership, I work with organizations on leadership capability, how teams work together, and the conditions needed for execution.
Still working the question
I am less interested in arriving at certainty than in getting more precise about what is actually happening.
The research, writing, speaking, and organizational work all give me different ways to keep testing the same central belief against real people, real work, and real conditions.
Let’s talk about the room you’re bringing me into.
Tell me about your audience and what they are navigating.