About Nayli Russo
My work has taken me from music and healthcare to enterprise strategy and executive leadership. Across those settings, I kept returning to the gap between knowing how you want to lead and what it costs to lead that way.
Before the boardroom
I asked for the instrument at fourteen and got it at fifteen. I eventually toured five South American countries in a month with a symphony, selected among thirty-two players.
An orchestra teaches you something about rooms before you have language for it. You own your part. Nobody can play it for you. You also have to listen, respond, and work within a tempo and balance you do not set alone.
My work would take me into very different rooms. The relationship between individual responsibility and the conditions around it kept showing up.
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The work before this
My experience spans clinical practice, operations, strategy, and people leadership. Each setting asked something different of me.
I began as a clinical pharmacist. My work later expanded into operations and enterprise strategy at Highmark, including serving as Chief of Staff in the Office of the President.
I served as Senior Director of Strategy, Vice President of Strategy, and Vice President of People and Strategy. The work brought business decisions, resources, people, and execution into the same conversation.
Today, I lead the firm I founded. We work with organizations to develop leaders, strengthen teams, and design the conditions for execution.
The question that changed my work
I did the leadership-model work myself and could name the leader I wanted to be without knowing what it would cost to lead that way in my room. Then I watched leaders in my practice do the same work and go back to familiar behavior.
I examined the program, my facilitation, their skill, and their commitment. I could not keep leaving the rooms they returned to unexamined.
So I went and asked other leaders what had happened to them. A pattern kept returning: what they brought mattered, and so did the latitude they had and the price of using it.
The interviews helped me develop an argument. They did not establish a universal answer. The research continues, and so does my willingness to revise what I think.
The work today
That question runs through my speaking, research, writing, and organizational work. Each gives it a different place to be examined.
I bring the relationship between the person and the room into conversations with leadership audiences. The talks ask what belongs to you, what belongs to others, and what the conditions make possible or costly.
Explore the talksI examine leaders’ accounts of what happened when they tried to use their judgment and voice. My writing follows the questions those accounts raise, including where my own explanations need to change.
Read about the researchThrough Russo Leadership, I work with organizations on leadership capability, how teams work together, and the conditions needed for execution. A speaking engagement stands on its own. Organizational work has its own scope, and either can be commissioned independently.
Explore Russo LeadershipTell me about your audience and what they are navigating.