From Command and Control to Serve and Support, with Marisol Bello

What It Covers

Marisol Bello, executive director of the Housing Narrative Lab and Coaching for Leaders Academy graduate, describes her shift from command-and-control leadership to a serve-and-support model, detailing the specific practices she used to change how her team experienced her presence and communication.

Key Questions Answered

• •Leader power asymmetry: A leader's casual brainstorm or offhand suggestion registers as a directive to team members. Marisol discovered her team treated her exploratory ideas as confirmed orders, causing confusion when she pivoted. Naming the mode explicitly — saying "let's brainstorm" before riffing — signals to the team that no decision has been made yet.
• •Stop-Breathe-Listen practice: Marisol used a physical Post-it note on her desk with three words — stop, breathe, listen — as a daily behavioral anchor. The goal was to pause before speaking in every conversation. Achieving this 50–60% of the time produced measurable culture change, demonstrating that partial consistency still drives meaningful leadership improvement.
• •Psychological safety signal: A reliable indicator that serve-and-support culture has taken hold is when team members openly push back on the leader's ideas. Marisol treats it as a success metric when a direct report responds to her suggestion with a counter-proposal, signaling that her team no longer treats her voice as an automatic override.
• •Inflection point awareness: Leadership behavior shifts are most necessary — and most difficult — at career inflection points: taking on a new executive role, inheriting a new team, or receiving critical feedback. Patterns that drove individual achievement actively undermine team leadership. Identifying the specific inflection point clarifies which behaviors need to change and why.
• •Brainstorm context management: Leaders who enjoy creative ideation should restructure how and where they brainstorm. Marisol moved high-energy idea generation to smaller subgroups rather than full-team settings, reducing the authority distortion that occurs when a senior leader free-associates in front of the whole organization, which otherwise shuts down others' contributions prematurely.