On advice, counsel, and the question I keep carrying:
This week, the news broke that Fawn Weaver was terminated from Uncle Nearest, the whiskey brand she co-founded and grew into one of the most celebrated Black owned companies in the country.
The details are still unfolding, and they are more tangled than the headlines suggest. Like many others who have been following the updates throughout the year, I was often confused with what was being reported. Wednesday’s news stopped me, because it stirred a question I’ve been sitting with for a long time.
I don't know what conversations happened behind closed doors. Nor who was in the room, what counsel was offered, or what pressures she was carrying.
None of us fully do.
And I want to be honest about my intent here. This case is genuinely complex, and it is still unfolding. I am not adding my voice to the ones critiquing her leadership, or questioning her as a woman. There are more than enough of those already.
My intention is to reach for something underneath the headline. Something that belongs to all of us who lead in our communities, homes, and organizations.
Who tells leaders the truth before a difficult decision becomes a public consequence?
As someone who has spent more than two decades inside organizations, I've learned that most leadership failures begin long before the headline drops.
They begin quietly with avoidance of a hard conversation or decision that never happens, an unspoken that lingers much too long, and a genuine concern that isn’t voiced.
Even a leader carrying too much privately for too long usually due to a trust factor.
I can’t say I don’t understand it. The higher someone rises, the more people tend to protect the leader from discomfort instead of protecting the organization, family, or community with honesty. It becomes unsafe to tell the truth.
What Visibility Asks of Us
For the women who lead out loud, the visibility multiplies everything - especially reach and risk.
There is very little privacy once a woman has built the thing no one believed could be done. Even more so if they’re the first or the only. Sustaining success comes with seasons of being stretched to capacity, self doubt, and an invisible load. For most of us, that season stays behind the door. For a visible woman, it can become a story other people tell.
The more visible a woman becomes, the more people desire to surround her, and the fewer of them have truly earned the right to challenge her.
Advice and Counsel Are Not the Same
I've been thinking about the difference.
Advice tells us what to do.
Counsel asks better questions.
Counsel slows us down long enough to examine our assumptions, motivations, the people who will be affected by our decisions, and the kind of leader we are becoming in the process.
I've also been wondering if we've underestimated how much leadership itself needs care.
A communal type of care where leaders can think out loud without performing certainty. Where someone can say, here's what I'm seeing, or here's the risk you're not naming, before a decision hardens into a consequence.
The more I observe leaders, the less I believe they need people who simply validate them.
I think they need people who will tell them the truth with enough wisdom that they can actually hear it.
And maybe that is one of the quiet responsibilities of leadership itself. To intentionally build relationships with people who have earned the right to challenge us. Not just for the sake of diminishing our leadership, but because they want to strengthen it.
This responsibility is not limited to the leader with a large public platform. Wherever you’re called to lead, and the people you’re called to impact will feel the depth of the honesty you’re willing to sharpen or even guide you.
Who has permission to tell you the truth before the world tells it to you?
Sit with that one this week. And if the honest answer is no one, let that be the first thing you build.
She builds differently. From the inside out. Surrender the rest.
With love, Keandra