Women in Leadership

Gaby Rossi told everyone she never wanted to lead. Then a 2.3 out of 5 became the most useful thing anyone ever handed her.

What If Harsh Feedback Is the Blueprint to Success?

By Rosie Zilinskas  ·  July 17, 2026  ·  7 min read  ·  Women in Leadership

Have you ever received harsh feedback that made you want to hand the job back? Not the vague kind. The specific kind. Paragraphs of it, spelling out everything you are doing wrong.

Most of us read harsh feedback as a verdict. My guest this week, however, read it as a set of directions. Gaby Rossi is a supply chain leader at Avery Dennison, and her first review as a people leader was a 2.3 out of 5. She wanted to quit leading altogether. Instead, that score became the starting point of the strongest growth of her career.

But the feedback story is only half of it. The other half starts years earlier, with a story Gaby was telling herself.

The Story She Was Telling Herself

Fresh out of college, in her first big job, newly arrived in the United States from Canada, Gaby had already decided she was not leadership material. Her reasoning sounded airtight: I can barely lead myself. How am I supposed to lead other people? And someday I will have a family. I will need to make time for children I do not have yet.

Then Elevate, the women's employee resource group at Avery Dennison, hosted a lunch and learn. The group watched Sheryl Sandberg's TED Talk on why there are too few women leaders. Gaby sat next to her director, and she says it felt like everything else in the room stopped. The talk named exactly what she was doing: quietly quitting on a future that had not even arrived.

In the discussion afterward, the moms in the room said the quiet part out loud. Nobody knows how to do it. You figure it out. Millions of women who were not moms became moms and figured it out. Why couldn't she?

"What kind of narrative am I even creating for myself? This is all made up. None of it is real."

Gaby Rossi

Sit with that for a second. The story keeping her small was not built on a single fact. It was built on fear of a life she had not lived yet. Here is the thing: the story you are telling yourself about what you cannot do is still just a story. And you are allowed to rewrite it.

The Promotion Nobody Told Her About

Before that light bulb moment, Gaby got a new boss. She was surprised. After all, she had been doing the job for years and was the subject matter expert. She did not even know there was an opening. When she asked why nobody told her, the answer stopped her cold: you said you did not want to lead people, so we did not tell you about the opportunity.

She had not just been telling herself the story. She had been broadcasting it. And the organization did exactly what organizations do: it took her at her word.

This is where Gaby's story and mine overlap. I was 40 years old, typing away, watching someone with less experience get promoted, waiting for someone to notice my hard work and tap me on the shoulder. Nobody ever came. When I finally spoke up, I heard the words that changed my life: well, you never said anything.

Tell people what you want, or you will spend your career on someone else's trajectory.

So Gaby said something. She pulled the director of supply chain and several leaders into an office and told them plainly: I am changing my mind. I want to lead a team. They smiled, welcomed her in, and a development plan took shape. About three years later, she got her first team.

And she never stopped saying something. Today she sends her leader a short monthly summary. This is what I have done. This is where we are at. A ping here, a ping there, so that when opportunities come up, she is already on someone's mind. That is not bragging. That is positioning.

"If you do your elevator pitch to a wall, it's not going anywhere."

Gaby Rossi

Then Everything Hit at Once

Gaby's first day leading her new team was the same day Avery Dennison sent everyone home for COVID. March 2020. A tenured, experienced team she had never led, half of whom did jobs she had never done, managed from a living room she was not set up to work in. In April she found out she was expecting her first baby. Then her husband, who worked in talent acquisition, was let go along with most of his field.

She went on maternity leave, came back into brain fog and postpartum anxiety, and found a team that was stuck. Nothing on fire. Nothing sinking. Just standing still. She told her boss it was not working, and he suggested a 360 feedback review.

A 2.3. Below average, with paragraphs of crude, honest detail about micromanaging, unclear communication, and not giving the team room to work. Gaby keeps it in her notebook to this day.

Harsh Feedback Is a Set of Directions

Gaby is a former collegiate diver. In diving, feedback is constant. You do the dive, they tell you exactly what to change, you go back and fix it. She thought she loved feedback. This was different.

"I love feedback. That feedback that came back from the team was harsh. It was very specific and it really caught me off guard."

Gaby Rossi

Her first response was the one so many of us reach for. I am not cut out for this. Put me back as an individual contributor. I tried, I failed, I am out.

Her leader would not let her read it that way. Are you serious? They are telling you exactly what to do. This is the blueprint to success. The team had written paragraphs on everything she was doing wrong, which meant they had also written, in reverse, everything she needed to do right. Together they turned the feedback into an action plan. She presented it to the team, and slowly things started making sense.

"I did not know what my team needed and I did not know how to be a leader for them."

Gaby Rossi

Notice what that is not. It is not a character flaw, and it is not proof she should never lead. It is a skills gap, and skills gaps close. In fact, eighteen months later the same team scored her a 3.6. This is the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. One tennis great blamed the weather and the court every time he lost. Serena Williams, by contrast, studied what she ate, how she slept, and what she could do differently. Gaby chose the Serena route.

Letting Go of the Clicks

The action plan was one thing. The deeper work was a full identity shift. Gaby had done every job on her team. She was praised for years as an excellent individual contributor, and her sense of worth was attached to the doing. Then one day her leader asked her a question that hit like a brick wall: what do you think I do all day?

He was not crunching numbers or building optimization formulas in the system. Instead, he was doing strategic work, supporting people, standing ready for escalations. Gaby has a name for the shift she had to make, and I think every new leader should hear it. She calls it letting go of the clicks. Here is what it took.

"Whenever I was in those meetings, I would just be watching like a hawk to say, who does what and how do they do it?"

Gaby Rossi

Find Your People, Then Reach Out with a Plan

I asked Gaby what she would tell a woman who is stuck in her lane, with no mentor and no map. Her first answer: find your employee resource group, because those are your people. If your company does not have one, try the learning and development team, or HR, or your local chapter of Women in Manufacturing, the organization that connected the two of us. It is a network of like-minded women, now international, with intentional conversations, trainings, plant tours, and events. Some companies will even sponsor your membership.

But do not just reach out to reach out. Come with a plan.

And if you do all of that and the answer is still silence, Gaby has one more piece of advice, and she gives it reluctantly because it is unfortunate and true.

"If you're not getting the support that you want and truly feel you deserve, you might need to look somewhere else."

Gaby Rossi

What I Want You to Take From This

Gaby did not become a leader because someone anointed her. She became a leader the day she noticed the story she was telling herself, said out loud that she wanted something different, and then treated the harshest feedback of her life as directions instead of a verdict. None of it happened in a vacuum. People gave her honest feedback, and people walked with her while she acted on it. That is available to you too, and it starts with saying something.

About Gaby Rossi

Gaby Rossi is a supply chain leader at Avery Dennison, where she has spent nearly fourteen years growing from individual contributor to people leader. Originally from Canada, she took on her first team in March 2020 and has been leading and developing teams ever since. She is an active voice in Elevate, Avery Dennison's women's employee resource group, and a member of Women in Manufacturing, where she spoke at the national summit. A former collegiate diver, Gaby brings an athlete's appetite for feedback to her leadership. She lives with her husband and their two children.

Connect with Gaby on LinkedIn