When Your Star Employee Undermines You: A Woman Leader's Response Playbook
Every coach, regardless of their sport, is eventually tested by their most talented player. You know the one — the top scorer, the one who mentors the new team members… but it’s also the one calling their own plays and rolling their eyes at the directions during halftime. They think they could run the show better than the coach.
It’s a defining moment for most coaches. Cave in and you lose the control and authority you’ve worked for. Cut the player, and you not only lose your best shot at winning, but the ones who took their side lose all trust in you. The best coaches find a third option.
The challenge is the same in the office as it is on the field or in the locker room. The top performer might start eroding your authority by talking over you in meetings, going around you to your boss, or rolling their eyes when you give them a task. Your instinct probably says “protect the talent” — because an empathetic leader is a good one. But if you’re a woman running the room, there’s a second layer under the first one: you’re not just managing an employee flying too close to the sun. You’re managing them while your own authority is already under more scrutiny than a man’s would be in the same role.
Let’s go over how to read the situation with clarity and respond like the good leader you already are.
Why this looks different for women in charge
The data backs up what you already feel in your body. Women currently hold 31% of senior leadership roles in the U.S. — down from 34% in 2025 and 35% in 2024, according to Grant Thornton's Women in Business research. That's not a typo: the number is moving the wrong way, which means fewer women are sitting where you're sitting, with less room for error for the ones who are.
Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly found that women in leadership face more scrutiny and more informal, unpaid obligations than their male peers hold in equivalent roles — the invisible tax of having to prove, and re-prove, that you belong at the table. So when one employee starts testing your authority, it rarely stays contained to that one relationship. Other people are watching how you handle it, and consciously or not, they're using it to decide whether your leadership is durable.
That's not a reason to react quickly or emotionally. It's a reason to respond deliberately instead of reactively.
What drives the behavior
Before you react, pause. It helps to understand the environment creating the situation, because even though it may feel personal, it rarely is.
Only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, and that’s the lowest level since 2020. In the US, manager engagement is down to 22%, a drop from 27% just one year before. Managers used to say they had an “engagement premium” over the people they led, but now that premium is disappearing. In practice, that means fewer of your star performer's past managers — the ones who shaped their expectations of what leadership looks like — were modeling steady, confident authority. Somewhere along the way, this person likely learned that testing a leader gets rewarded, or at least ignored. That's not a pattern you created. It's one you're now the one positioned to break.
SHRM has research that points to the same gap, but from another angle. Nearly a third of people managers rate their own management skills as merely average. Management development now ranks as a top priority for 1 in 5 workers. Undermining behavior from your star player isn’t a failure; it could be a sign of an ambitious person who has never gotten a way to channel their confidence, in a workplace that hasn’t equipped anyone, including you, with the tools to use it as a force for positive change.
None of this is an excuse for undermining employees, nor does it make it “okay.” But it does tell you where to aim your energy: not at proving your worth or even punishing them, but rather at resetting the dynamic.
The Playbook
Identify it early, privately, and specifically. Don’t wait for a pattern to form, especially not in front of the whole team. Specify the behavior: “Yesterday, you redirected the team’s next steps after I’d already assigned tasks. That undermines the plan we agreed on.” Giving vague feedback like “keep an eye on your attitude” offers nothing concrete for them to actually change, and leaves room for them to reframe it as a personal misalignment rather than a performance and leadership issue.
Keep the talent and the behavior separate. First, highlight that their contributions matter and then that their behavior is a separate, non-negotiable issue. This does two things: it keeps the conversation from feeling punitive (which can trigger defensiveness), and it removes their ability to claim you’re threatened by their competence. You’re not taking away autonomy or controlling their talent. You’re managing their conduct on the team.
Reset the story in public, but without a public confrontation. A lot of authority comes from perception. If the undermining, eyerolling, and redirecting have been in front of the team, your correction needs to be done in front of the team as well, but strategically. Reaffirm your decision, redirect the conversation to yourself in the moment, or simply follow up one-on-one with a consistent, confident follow-through in the next team meeting. You’re not staging a takedown or trying to make them look bad. You’re restoring the plot line you laid for the whole team.
Decide the consequence before you need it — then follow through. Get specific with yourself, before the next incident, about what continued undermining will actually cost them: a role change, a lost project, a documented conversation. Vague threats erode your credibility faster than no threat at all. Then, if it happens again, follow through exactly as planned. Women leaders are often penalized for being "too soft" and "too harsh" in the same breath; the way out of that trap isn't picking a side, it's being predictable. Consistency reads as strength, regardless of the double standard projected onto it.
Get support that’s more than just venting. Getting to air out your feelings can be helpful for your mood, but it’s not helpful for the team. This is where a coach or peer group can make a difference - it gives you someone to pressure-test your read on the situation, catch your blind spots, and help you separate “this is hard” from “this is happening because I’m not equipped.” You are equipped. Sometimes you just need a second set of eyes to help you see it.
The Bottom Line
A star employee who undermines you isn't a sign your leadership is failing — it's a test of it. The data shows this generation of leaders is navigating a workplace with less managerial support, more scrutiny if you're a woman, and no shortage of ambitious people looking for a leader worth following. Handle it with clarity and consistency, and you aren’t just neutralizing the problem. You’re showing your whole team — including the person who tested you — exactly what steady leadership looks like, and that the success of the team isn’t a threat to your own success.
If you're in the middle of this challenge right now, you’re not alone. Step five of this playbook is the one leaders skip most — and the one that makes the other four work. This is exactly the skillset we build in the Townsend Leadership Program: proven methods for handling conflict, the judgment to discern what's really going on, the ability to hold your authority steady, and the skills to lead people who are testing you — with someone in your corner who's seen the play before. If you're ready to stop white knuckling these moments with gritted teeth and start leading them with purpose, I'd love to talk about whether it's the right fit.
