Oakland, CA
I spent the first decade of my career watching organizations reward the wrong signals. I did two years at McKinsey out of Stanford — useful training, particularly in how to structure a problem — then eight years as VP of People Strategy at a B2B SaaS company that went from Series C to IPO. I built the org design, ran the executive development programs, owned the succession planning process. I was told for 18 months I was on track for SVP. They hired externally without telling me until the Slack announcement went out. That was the moment I stopped studying what organizations said they rewarded and started studying what they actually rewarded. Two years as Chief People Officer at a mid-stage fintech. Independent practice since 2022. My PhD work focused on the performance dynamics of high-status groups — specifically how organizations signal legitimacy and how individual actors misread those signals in ways that are structurally predictable and personally costly. That research is the foundation of everything I teach. My book, The Quiet Authority, was published by HarperBusiness in 2024. WSJ bestseller, week one. The practice is called Quiet Authority.
Quiet Authority Cohort — Cohort-based group coaching
The framework I built from eight years of watching why smart, competent, hard-working women get passed over. Most executive development programs treat visibility as a marketing problem — you need to speak up more, network better, manage up harder. That diagnosis is almost always wrong. The actual problem is structural, and it shows up on one of three axes.
She's been told she's 'on track' in language vague enough to mean nothing. She's seen people she respects get passed over. She might have been passed over once herself. She is working extremely hard — probably 55-65 hours a week — and has the uncomfortable suspicion that working harder is not the answer. She has read Dare to Lead. She has read Lean In. She found them useful and also insufficient. She has been to leadership offsites and found them motivating for approximately 11 days. She does not want to be told to 'believe in herself.' She wants a structural diagnosis.
She wants to be in the room where the decision gets made, not brought in after the fact to execute it. She wants her name to be on the short list when her organization thinks 'who's our next SVP' — not because she campaigned for it, but because her work has been visible in the right way to the right people. She wants to stop second-guessing whether she belongs at the level she's targeting.
For senior women in technology who are being recognized as excellent operators but not being advanced as strategic leaders, Quiet Authority is a six-month structured engagement that diagnoses the organizational and behavioral patterns keeping them out of executive rooms — and builds the specific structural changes to fix that. Unlike motivational coaching programs that treat the problem as a confidence issue, Quiet Authority treats it as a systems problem.
Sarah Park — VP of Engineering, Lattice Capital
Over six months, Sarah restructured her org around four senior engineering leads, reducing her direct reports from 47 to 4 and her weekly hours from 70 to approximately 50. Before her own CEO had made a decision about the CTO role, Sarah received and accepted an offer for CTO at a different company.
"I thought I needed to talk more about my work. Maya helped me see I needed to delegate it, so my work was visible without me narrating it."
Priya Anand — VP of Product, unnamed healthtech (Cohort 3, 2023)
Promoted to Chief Product Officer at the same company 9 months after cohort completion. The Axis 1 work — restructuring how her product roadmap decisions were presented to the executive team — was the structural change that preceded the promotion conversation.
"I spent three years trying to get into the right rooms. Maya helped me see I was already in them — I just wasn't speaking the right language when I got there."
Jen Brodsky — Senior Director, Series-D climate-tech company (Cohort 4, 2024)
Received SVP title without changing companies. The axis 3 work — mapping her organization's informal decision architecture and building three relationships that had been structurally absent from her positioning — preceded the title change by approximately 4 months.
"I came in thinking I had a visibility problem. I left knowing I had an org design problem. Those are not the same thing, and knowing the difference changed what I did next."
73% of alumni reported receiving expanded organizational scope within 12 months of cohort completion
61% received a title change or formal promotion within 18 months of completion
88% cited the cohort peer relationships as a primary ongoing professional resource 12+ months post-graduation
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