Beyond the B: When Values Become Vibes and Leadership Loses Its Edge
A few years ago, many of my clients were founders and entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest, and their orgs were women-led, purpose-driven, deeply mission-aligned. B Corp certification was everywhere, not just on pitch decks and packaging, but in bios, intros, and even social identities. It was the badge of belonging to something bigger: a business that does good. Conscious capitalism. A new way forward.
But as I sat with these leaders in private sessions, I started to notice a pattern; something quieter, more tender, and harder to talk about.
For all the language around purpose, values, and impact, many of these founders weren’t actually leading from a place of internal alignment. Their strategies were careful. Their voices were polished. Their decisions often echoed what they thought a “good” leader should do, not what their intuition was screaming for. And when they did have a deeper knowing about what needed to shift? They muted it, softened it, or saved it for later.
There’s a gap, a meaningful one, between signaling purpose and embodying leadership. And B Corp culture, for all its good intentions, often widens that gap instead of closing it.
This piece isn’t about calling out. It’s about calling forward.
Because we’re in a moment politically, culturally, emotionally, where safe leadership won’t cut it. And if the next era of business is truly going to be different, we need to talk about what intuitive leadership really looks like. Not just in branding, but in the boardroom. Not just when it’s easy, but especially when it’s not.
The B Corp Illusion: Values vs. Practice
Let’s be honest: B Corp status sounds good.
It tells the world, “We care. We’re different. We’re doing it right.” It’s a sleek container for values that are clean, certifiable, and safe to sell. And for a while, it felt radical. A counterpoint to extractive capitalism. A framework for integrating ethics into business at a structural level.
But over time, I started to feel into the performance of it all.
Because for many founders, especially those socialized to be “good,” agreeable, or impact-driven, B Corp status became less of a compass and more performative. A way to say, “I’m not like the others,” while still playing by rules that center on compliance, not creativity.
I’ve worked with brilliant leaders who checked every values box, ran DEI workshops, donated to mutual aid, and hit sustainability benchmarks, but when it came to their actual leadership presence, something was missing.
The decisions were data-safe, not soul-led.
The communication was inclusive, but often indirect.
And the strategy — despite the rhetoric — felt like a remix of the same systems they claimed to be transforming.
They weren’t being dishonest.
They were being careful.
Because when your leadership is tied to public perception, to community credibility, to being the “right kind” of founder, it’s hard to hear your intuition over the noise of expectations.
The B Corp illusion is this: that certification = transformation.
But values don’t live on paper. They live in your nervous system, your hiring process, your boundaries, your boardroom, and your breath.
And those spaces? They don’t always look as progressive as the website copy suggests.
We’ve mistaken structure for soul, and branding for bravery. And the businesses that claim to lead the new paradigm are often the ones most resistant to embodying it.
The Intuition Gap: When Language Outpaces Leadership
“Heart-centered.”
“Intuitive.”
“Soul-led.”
These aren’t just buzzwords anymore; they’re branding tools. Strategic language choices. A kind of verbal talisman founders use to signal that they’re not part of the old leadership model, that they’re doing things differently.
Especially in the B Corp world, these terms get thrown around with increasing frequency. But here’s the problem:
Much of what’s being called intuitive leadership… isn’t.
It’s rebranded business-as-usual, dressed up in the language of emotional intelligence and spirituality, without any fundamental shift in practice or presence. Founders say they trust their gut, but when decisions become complex, they often default to data, strategy decks, and consulting firms.
They say they lead with soul, but their teams are still exhausted, unseen, and burnt out.
They say they’re guided by intuition, but they’re still chasing scalability timelines that gut their nervous systems.
What’s happening is more than performative; it’s dilution.
And it’s coming from the very leaders who claim to be doing it differently.
By casually adopting the language of intuition without investing in the reality of it, B Corp founders, social impact entrepreneurs, and conscious business leaders are unintentionally watering down the power and potential of what intuitive leadership actually is.
And that matters.
Because intuitive leadership, when it’s real, isn’t just a vibe.
It’s a fundamentally different operating system.
It changes how decisions get made.
It changes how product rollouts are paced, with emotional timing, not just market timing.
It changes how leaders offer support to their teams, their communities, and themselves, especially in high-stakes political and social climates like the one we’re in now.
Authentic intuitive leadership asks:
What’s the felt sense in the room, not just the roadmap?
What needs to slow down, soften, or shift before we scale?
Are we emotionally resourced to carry this message right now, or are we pushing it out to stay relevant?
These questions are not “woo.”
They’re strategic. Somatic. Political.
They shift the tone of leadership, not just its look.
And they’re urgently needed, now more than ever.
So when founders lean on intuitive language without doing the internal work, without building the emotional bandwidth, without deprogramming from urgency and optics… they don’t just misrepresent the work. They make it excruciatingly harder for those who are actually practicing it to be seen, trusted, and supported.
And that, for a movement built on values, is its own kind of contradiction.
The Quiet Ones And the Support B Corp Leaders Keep Rejecting
Let’s tell the truth:
The founders and teams who most need intuitive support, the ones navigating emotional exhaustion, leadership dissonance, cultural friction, and post-2020 clarity fatigue, often don’t know what intuitive coaching really is, or what it’s for.
They’ve heard the words.
They say they want “emotional intelligence,” “safe spaces,” and “empowered teams.”
But when intuitive coaching is offered, the kind that actually interrupts the cycle, that goes beneath the performance—they flinch.
Real intuitive coaching doesn’t just teach you how to regulate during your launch or use “I” statements during a tough review cycle. It shows you where your story, your survival pattern, your perfectionism, your silence, your deep fear of not belonging, is still running the show. It rewrites how you think about power, purpose, and voice. And it does that not with a worksheet or another values exercise, but by reconnecting you to your own clarity, in a world that constantly asks you to outsource it.
In 2020, I co-founded an Empath Accelerator, designed not for executives trying to “optimize” their leadership, but for women of color who were being asked to hold everything: the role, the team, the community care, the grief, the performance, the silence.
What we saw was heartbreaking, but not surprising.
These women were disconnected. From their roles. From their worth. From any sense of safety, they were honest about how burnt out they were. Therapy didn’t always land. Executive coaching often flattened BIWOC into “use cases” or “communication styles.” What they needed was a space for emotional clarity and narrative re-authoring, not productivity hacks or more breathwork during Zoom calls.
So that’s what we offered.
Clarity sessions. Narrative coaching.
Not as “self-care,” but as radical reclamation, so these women could stop shape-shifting for roles they were already overqualified to lead, and start anchoring in purpose, not just performance.
And here’s the part that still gets me:
When we pitched this to women-led orgs and B Corps post-pandemic — companies that claimed to be “heart-centered” and “equity-focused” — most of them balked They worried it would stir too much. That if these women got too clear, they’d quit. That intuitive coaching would plant seeds that disrupt, rather than nurture, the existing structures.
And they were right.
It would disrupt. It should disrupt.
But it wouldn’t have hollowed out the organization; it would have helped it grow. What I saw in that resistance was a fear of emotional truth. A misunderstanding of what real intuition does. It doesn’t burn the house down; it opens the windows. It doesn’t steal your team; it gives them back to themselves.
What these companies were calling “heart-centered” was really just heart-contained — boxed, branded, and deeply afraid of the very alchemy that might have changed everything.
What Intuitive Leadership Could Actually Look Like Right Now
We don’t need more frameworks.
We don’t need more self-proclaimed “heart-centered” businesses afraid of their own emotional capacity.
We don’t need another company claiming to be intuitive while outsourcing every critical decision to a third-party strategy consultant with a 3-week “values sprint” and a scalable workshop.
We need leaders who are willing to be with the complexity, not just narrate it.
We need leaders who can feel first, not just forecast.
We need leaders who understand that real intuition isn’t a nice-to-have... It’s a political, emotional, and strategic imperative in times like these.
Because the world is not waiting for your next OKR cycle.
You’re leading in a time of:
disinformation and emotional collapse
re-traumatization across every layer of the workforce
climate anxiety
political uncertainty
deep, unspoken grief
You can’t solve that with performance reviews and curated company culture statements.
You lead through that by becoming someone who can hold more than what’s visible.
Someone who can trust what’s not linear.
Someone who can feel what’s off before it breaks.
That’s not “woo.” That’s wisdom.
So what does intuitive leadership look like in practice?
It’s not always glamorous, and it rarely fits inside a pitch deck.
But it looks like:
Slowing down launches when your team is in emotional collapse, not just when engagement is low
Pausing decisions when your gut says no, even if the board says yes
Tending to emotional ruptures with as much focus as revenue goals
Bringing in actual intuitive coaching (not sanitized “empathy training”) to support your leadership team through real-time transformation
Letting yourself be seen in moments of uncertainty, not just clarity
Discerning between urgency and truth
Most of all? It looks like unhooking from the idea that your identity as a “good leader” will save you.
It won’t.
Your presence might.
Your emotional clarity might.
Your willingness to hear and respond to the quiet truth underneath the loud noise.... that might.
A Call-In, Not a Call-Out
I’m not here to shame leaders who are doing their best in systems that have taught them to be efficient, self-sacrificing, and performance-driven. But I am here to say: your intuition is not a marketing tool. It’s a way of being. And if you’re going to invoke its language, you have to be willing to live its frequency. That means investing in the kinds of support that actually hold you, and your team, at the level (energetic) where real change happens: below the surface, inside the body, and beyond the script.
Because the future of leadership is already here.
It’s just quieter than you expected.
It’s more emotionally honest than you planned for.
And it’s waiting for the ones who are brave enough to lead from something more profound than optics.
And if you’re one of them?
Start now.
I work with founders, creatives, and B Corp leaders ready to lead from a deeper center: intuitive, emotionally resourced, and clear. If that’s you, or if you’re curious what it looks like in your leadership: book a discovery consult here.