For the leader who looks capable from the outside and knows the old way has stopped working, from an operator who spent twenty-five years making decisions work after the meeting ended.
In one organization Sandy Davis has described, an administrative team supported multiple offices and a large group of revenue-producing professionals. Delays and inconsistent service were read, at first, as execution problems. Then the pattern underneath came into view. Requests were arriving through multiple channels. Priorities shifted depending on who was asking. Leaders regularly bypassed the processes that had been established, and team members were given responsibility without the authority to make decisions. “The team was being held accountable for an environment leadership had not clearly structured,” she says.
So the real issue was never whether people were working hard enough. It was leadership alignment, decision-making, communication and accountability. What changed was how work entered the team, who held decision-making authority, what service expectations looked like and when an issue should be escalated. Once the leadership patterns changed, the operational work became more predictable, and the team no longer had to rely on constant urgency and heroics. “A process cannot solve a leadership habit that continues to undermine it,” Sandy says.
That reading of a situation is what she now offers privately, through Leadership Advisory by Elevate Within, to leaders, owners and decision-makers navigating difficult leadership situations. It rests on more than twenty-five years running operations inside commercial real estate and professional services firms, including CBRE, Colliers and SRS Real Estate Partners. And it’s written for one reader in particular.
“The one reader I most want to reach is the person carrying too much alone. They may be dealing with underperformance, accountability, delegation, conflict, burnout, a difficult client relationship, or a decision they cannot seem to resolve. From the outside, they may appear successful and capable. Internally, they know the way they have always led is no longer working.”
Sandy Davis, Creator and Host of Elevate Within with Sandy Davis, Founder of Elevate Operations Advisory, and Creator of Leadership Advisory by Elevate Within.
That reader is not rare. In Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 report, 45 percent of managers said they had experienced a lot of stress the previous day, against 39 percent of individual contributors, and managers also reported more anger and more loneliness. What Sandy wants that reader to recognize is that they are not broken. “They may have simply outgrown the leadership patterns that helped them succeed up to this point,” she says.
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What Problem Are We Actually Trying to Solve?
That is the question Sandy asks first, every time. “I always ask, ‘What problem are we actually trying to solve?’” she says, and it shapes what happens when someone brings her a difficult leadership situation. She doesn’t begin by handing over another generic strategy. She slows the situation down and looks for the pattern underneath it.
The questions are concrete. What happened. What has already been tried. Where the situation keeps repeating. What the leader is carrying. What conversations are being avoided. How the leader’s own habits may be reinforcing the problem.
From there the work follows her Founder Within Framework™, which moves through four stages: Identify, Map, Redesign and Reinforce. The result is a Leadership Operating Blueprint that helps the leader understand what is driving the situation, what needs to change and what they will do differently moving forward. Before any of that, she offers a complimentary 30-minute pattern discovery call, so that what may be happening beneath the presenting issue can be identified first.
She learned to see those patterns from inside the organizations that produced them.
Twenty-Five Years After the Meeting Ends
“I know what it feels like to be responsible for making decisions work after the meeting ends,” Sandy says. She has spent more than twenty-five years in that seat. At CBRE, from 2017 to 2021, she was Capital Markets Senior Operations Manager in Newport Beach, managing operational administration for a $20 million Capital Markets team, designing workflows and performance tracking systems, and training new hires. At Colliers, from 2021 to 2025, she was Regional Operations Manager, leading operations across as many as four offices in the Greater Los Angeles region while supporting administrative teams and approximately 90 commercial real estate professionals. In 2025 she joined SRS Real Estate Partners as Regional Operations Manager, directing multi-site operations for Capital Markets teams and co-leading organizational change initiatives during a company restructuring.
The record has numbers. At Colliers she identified more than $300,000 in annual cost savings, helped redesign standard operating procedures and onboarding practices that improved efficiency by approximately 25 percent, and introduced communication and engagement practices that contributed to an approximately 15 percent improvement in employee engagement. Across her career she has led five office relocations without operational downtime. “Those outcomes did not come from implementing systems in isolation,” she says. “They came from understanding how leadership decisions, communication, employee experience, accountability, and operations affected one another.”
What she watches is the informal system. She notices who is waiting for permission, who is quietly carrying work outside their role, where leaders are unintentionally reversing delegation, and which exceptions are slowly eroding the process.
“A pure adviser may see the organizational chart or workflow. I see the informal system: who people trust, what they are afraid to say, where accountability disappears, and how much of the business depends on one person continuing to overfunction.”
Sandy Davis, Creator and Host of Elevate Within with Sandy Davis, Founder of Elevate Operations Advisory, and Creator of Leadership Advisory by Elevate Within.
“Every operational challenge ultimately involves people,” she says, “but not every people problem is solved by asking employees to work harder.” Some of that she learned by being the person who carried everything.
The Messy Middle, Twice
The messy middle is Sandy’s phrase for the space between who a woman was and who she is becoming. She knows the old way of living, working, or defining success no longer fits, but she has not fully stepped into what comes next. In leadership and business, that same tension appears when an organization has evolved but the leader’s habits, structures, and ways of working have not caught up.
Elevate Within with Sandy Davis is the broader conversation and learning platform: a podcast and Substack, plus workshops, webinars, facilitated conversations and custom programs she offers with Claudia J. Cuevas, LMFT. Together they help women explore burnout, anxiety, survival mode, grief, identity, leadership and reinvention, connecting what they experience personally with how it affects their wellbeing, work, relationships and leadership. This summer’s series, The Architecture of Reinvention: The Art of Unbecoming, closed on grief and the many forms it can take. “And it’s not reserved for losing a person,” she wrote. “It’s the title you no longer hold. The team that isn’t yours anymore.”
After losing both of her parents 37 days apart, Sandy found herself navigating grief, burnout, anxiety, identity changes, and the realization that the life she had built no longer fit. Creating Elevate Within gave her a reason to keep going, helped her find her “Why”, and became part of her own healing.
“After years of being the person who could carry everything, I reached a point where achievement no longer protected me from burnout, loss, or an identity built around being needed. I had to stop surviving long enough to decide who I was becoming.”
Sandy Davis, Creator and Host of Elevate Within with Sandy Davis, Founder of Elevate Operations Advisory, and Creator of Leadership Advisory by Elevate Within.
The person behind how she works is her mother. “She taught me how to survive and keep moving,” Sandy says. “My own journey later taught me that strength must also include receiving support and not carrying everything alone.” That is why the three parts of her work come in the order they do.
A Business That Grows Without Consuming the Person Leading It
“My work begins with the person carrying the weight of leadership, expands into the experiences affecting women’s wellbeing, work, relationships, and leadership, and then addresses the operational systems surrounding them,” Sandy says. The third part is Elevate Operations Advisory, which she founded in December 2025. It helps founder-led businesses strengthen their operations, teams and leadership so the organization can grow without consuming the person leading it. The firms are typically commercial real estate and professional services businesses of 10 to 75 employees, and what she provides is fractional operations leadership rather than a full-time hire.
On her profile she is plain about why those founders come to her. “Founders don’t hire me because they need better processes. They hire me because they’re carrying too much and they need someone who can recognize the patterns they’re too close to see.” Businesses, she writes there, rarely struggle because of one catastrophic event. “They struggle because small operational cracks go unnoticed until they become expensive problems.” And on what the engagement looks like: “I don’t hand you a slide deck and disappear.” She steps into the business, assesses what is happening beneath the surface, and builds the systems, structure, leadership rhythms and accountability that let it grow without depending on the founder for every answer.
Where Sandy Is Now
Sandy is based in Lake Forest, California. Over the next twelve months, Leadership Advisory by Elevate Within comes first: the private work with leaders, owners and decision-makers who could benefit from someone recognizing the patterns they are too close to see. She would also like Elevate Within with Sandy Davis to reach women’s networks, employee communities and professional organizations looking for workshops and facilitated conversations, and Elevate Operations Advisory to keep supporting founder-led businesses that need stronger operations, teams and leadership infrastructure. The way in is the complimentary 30-minute pattern discovery call.
Outside the work, there is Rocco. “My dog, Rocco, keeps me grounded,” she says. “Our walks give me space to think, reset, and return to what matters.”
What she is building next, she puts in one sentence. “I am building work that helps women and leaders recognize the patterns shaping how they lead and live, then choose what they want to create next.”
Five Reflections from Sandy
What problem are we actually trying to solve? The question Sandy asks before anything else, in every situation.
Where does it keep repeating? A difficult situation is slowed down and read for the pattern underneath it, not answered with another generic strategy.
What conversation is being avoided? One of the things she asks a leader to name, alongside what they are carrying and what has already been tried.
Which habit is undermining the process? A process cannot solve a leadership habit that continues to undermine it.
Who is carrying everything? Strength must also include receiving support and not carrying everything alone.
From the Diary of Sandy Davis
Sandy Davis is a Lake Forest, California-based leadership advisor, the Creator and Host of Elevate Within with Sandy Davis and the Founder of Elevate Operations Advisory.
| Role | Creator and Host of Elevate Within with Sandy Davis, Founder of Elevate Operations Advisory, and Creator of Leadership Advisory by Elevate Within |
| Based in | Lake Forest, California, United States |
| Previously with | Colliers (2021 to 2025), CBRE (2017 to 2021), SRS Real Estate Partners (2025) |
| Also | Host, Elevate Within with Sandy Davis (podcast and Substack) |
“Leaders aren’t broken. They have outgrown the way they learned to lead.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Sandy Davis because her argument about leadership problems comes with a record of running the operations those problems land on. She has spent more than twenty-five years inside commercial real estate and professional services firms, and the case she describes, of a team held accountable for an environment leadership had not structured, is the kind of thing that is seen from inside. The editors are also interested in the order she insists on: the person first, then the experiences shaping her, then the operational systems around them. That order is the feature.
Executives Diary, Editorial
