The Crime of Initiative™

Organizations say they want innovation. What innovation actually requires is initiative; someone's idea, someone's proactive move, someone's willingness to go first. And too often, that's exactly what gets punished. Some people in the room have had their best ideas treated like a threat. Others have been the one doing the threatening without ever meaning to. Most people have been both.

This session unpacks the emotional, political, and systemic forces that turn initiative into a threat instead of the innovation engine it’s supposed to be, gives the people who've been punished for it a way to take their power back, and gives everyone else the self-awareness to catch themselves before they do the same thing to someone on their own team.

As a chronic high-performer, Rhonda Lea has lived this exact contradiction within multiple organizations. She once said exactly what her boss had asked her to say in a meeting, and immediately watched him backpedal like she had thrown a grenade into the room. Even though she had not acted, her reputation for getting things done made her words feel like a commitment that had never been approved. Other times, she was questioned, tried, and convicted for the same initiative that recovered $7M in lost revenue, doubled client revenue in four months, and expanded team capacity 200%. The Crime of Initiative™ turns that paradox into a framework for anyone whose initiative has been shut down and for the leader who unknowingly was the one shutting it down.

What Attendees Walk Away With

• Recognize the systemic and psychological triggers that get initiative treated as a threat, whether you're the one taking it or the one reacting to it.

• If your initiative keeps getting punished, tell the difference between resistance to what you actually did and resistance to what someone assumes you're capable of, so you stop absorbing blame that was never yours.

• If you catch yourself reacting defensively to other people's initiative, recognize the moment your own fear response starts looking like resistance before it costs you your best people or maybe even your own career.

• Spot the early warning signs of resistance (behavioral, emotional, and structural), whichever side of it you're standing on.

• Use emotionally intelligent language that de-escalates the moment instead of entrenching it.

• Leave with the Initiative Filter™, a simple four-question tool that works two ways. You can run it before you act, to protect your own initiative, or run it the moment someone brings you an idea, to catch your own reflexive fear before it becomes resistance.

Who This Is For

Anyone whose good ideas keep getting read as a threat and the managers and executives who want to make sure they are not the ones doing the punishing.

Executives and business leaders, people managers, change and transformation leaders, operations leaders, project managers, continuous improvement professionals, high performers, emerging leaders, and team members

The Framework

Rhonda's session walks through the three forces that "criminalize" initiative, psychological, systemic, and political, and shows how each one fires the same way whether you're the person taking the initiative or the person reacting to it. Then it hands you emotionally intelligent countermoves for each so you either take your power back, or make sure you're never the reason your organization loses the innovation it says it wants.

"Every decision is an emotional event for someone. Account for that and your initiative becomes your superpower."

Format Options

• Breakout / keynote presentation (45-60 minutes): also booked as a standalone speaking topic.

• Half-day workshop- includes the Initiative Filter™ as a leave-behind tool your team keeps using after the session ends.

Why Rhonda Lea

Certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (LSSBB) and 2025 IAOTP Top Transformation Leader of the Year in Strategic Operations, Rhonda has navigated toxic leadership environments, the subject of her up and coming book, How Dare She?, led enterprise-level transformation, and rebuilt broken systems from the inside across healthcare, manufacturing, nonprofit, finance, and franchise organizations. She teaches this framework because she needed it herself first.