FIONA MCKAY EXECUTIVE COACH, MENOPAUSE INFLUENCER, MENOPAUSE KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND PROFESSIONAL MENOPAUSE COACH — Fiona McKay, CEO of Lightbulb Leadership Solutions studio interview on PWM Tea Break on The Financial Times.

When I joined Yuri Bender in the Financial Times studio for the latest PWM Tea Break, we spoke openly about governance, gender, and growth, but also about the unseen risks and real opportunities that sit beneath today’s most powerful boardroom transitions.

The full interview available here on PWM opened up a space that’s long been missing from mainstream finance media: what really happens when women step into power during the most profound transfer of wealth and leadership in modern history?

Spoiler: it’s not smooth.

Because while we’re watching headlines about family dynasties, ESG bashing, and capital consolidation, we’re not talking enough about the human and cultural infrastructure required to lead through it.

You can watch the full interview below.

What the FT Got Right: This Moment Belongs to Women

The numbers speak for themselves:

Women are set to control over $30 trillion in the coming years
Female-founded funds and businesses are delivering outperforming returns
ESG is rising again and women are its sharpest strategic architects

But most governance, succession, and executive support systems still assume male models of leadership transition.

At Lightbulb Leadership, we work across value creation for PE/VC investors, leadership due diligence, and hyper-growth company advisory. And what we see time and time again is this:

You can’t separate growth from governance. You can’t separate value wealth creation from the voice of women.

And you can’t lead a modern transfer of power using legacy mindsets that don’t account for the psychological, hormonal, and strategic complexity women leaders face today.

Why Governance Needs to Get Personal

What we unpacked in the FT interview is now showing up across our advisory work with founders, boards, and family offices:

Women inheriting leadership roles are seeking strategic clarity not just legacy stewardship and want active influence on their deployed capital and investments
Women inheriting leadership of family dynasties require modern leadership advisors that understand the legacies they want to create
Boards are underestimating the impact of leadership chemistry and culture on value creation
Founders in growth phases are navigating both investor demand and internal realignment

We support clients to align their executive teams and transition pathways with real-time growth conditions, not assumptions. Because if you’re not designing governance frameworks that flex with the human realities of leadership today, you’re already leaking value.

Yuri Bender, Editor of Private Wealth Management at The Financial Times interviewing Fiona McKay, CEO at Lightbulb Leadership Solutions

The Overlooked TRANSITION FEMALE Factor

What I often speak about as invisible erosion, this is the silent performance threat no one wants to name.

In the FT interview, I touched on a piece we specialise in at Lightbulb: the performance friction experienced by women navigating high-stakes transitions of command, control and capital while managing unseen internal transitions, including menopause.

That’s why our sister company, The Menopause Maze, works in tandem with Lightbulb to support midlife top 1% women leaders in realigning strategy and capacity, before growth becomes grind.

Because governance today is not just about what you acquire, but about who will lead it.

So we built the world’s only personalised diagnostic for UHNW & HNW women leaders showing them exactly what menopause is costing their careers and companies.

You can take the scorecard at the button below.