What she thought was the end of her career, and what came after

Call her Dana, for the sake of this piece. She is a composite drawn from several stories, not a member or client of this Milwaukee chapter. Picture a 55-year-old chief operating officer, roughly forty minutes into a board session that has already turned sour, when her voice breaks on the word "layoffs" and tears rise in her eyes.

It was never the layoffs that pulled her under. Those eleven months weigh on her: a father in hospice, up at 4 a.m. in a small apartment in Greenfield. Across the conference table sat a director who, for the third time, wanted to know if operations "has a grip on this." Her grip is still there, though it has held on so long that her fingers throb.

SHORT Twelve colleagues are looking on. She has perhaps four seconds before someone offers a kind word, which will make things worse. The real decision lies in the four seconds that follow.

Path one is to say sorry and keep going.

Across those seconds she murmurs "sorry, one moment," takes a sip of water, and returns her attention to the slide. The trade-off is that the apology recasts the tears as something shameful, and the room is now free to read them that way. For the next week she keeps asking herself what the chairman makes of it, since she apologized before she had even worked out what she felt.

Path two is to pause for ten minutes.

Lydia says "let's take ten" and walks out of the room. A pause requested by the very person who was crying is one everyone grasps the purpose of, yet she comes back to a room that has spent those minutes discussing her. The upside is genuine. She returns collected and wraps up the meeting on her own footing.

Path three is to name what happened and carry on.

In a steady voice she says, "This has been a brutal year for this team, and it shows. We are going to keep moving." There is no apology and no justification, just one plain statement of fact. The trade-off is that a few directors may remember that single line for longer than they remember the figures. The benefit is that she has defined the moment everyone witnessed before anyone else got the chance to.

SHORT Seasoned leaders advise

Seasoned women who have chaired boards for years react to this far less anxiously than Lydia does. In their experience, crying is seldom what derails a meeting; the apology is. People in a room take their cue from whoever experienced the moment. Describe it as a crisis and everyone around you will react as though it is one. Handle it like a passing storm, and most people around you will do the same. These veterans also raise a harder point: the bar is not applied evenly. When a man gets emotional over layoffs, people call him "human," but a woman doing the same is called "emotional," and research on likability has again and again shown that identical behavior earns different labels depending on who displays it. That is not a reason to hide. It is a reason to control the frame.

Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women in Southeast Wisconsin and beyond found that 29% rate their own mental health as poor. Nobody in that Milwaukee boardroom is shielded from those numbers. Some have been Lydia.

SHORT Her decision

In the composite account, Lydia chooses path three. Afterward the chairman tells the full room, "That was the most candid update this board has received in a year," and asks the questioning director to submit his concerns in writing. It surprised her. It should not have. Most board chairs have endured far rougher sessions, and what they tend to recall is who kept moving forward.

Much of it comes down to whether you can state the sentence without any apology woven into it. If you can, say it. If you are not there yet, call the break.

Vote

Pick A, B or C: which path would you have taken in her place? Post your answer to your chapter, and next month we will share how the room divided. If you have been Lydia, we would like to hear from you, whether you are working in Milwaukee, Waukesha or anywhere else in Southeast Wisconsin.