*Rowena sat across from me, still angry.
She’d just missed out on a promotion she was, by every reasonable measure, ready for. She wanted to understand why, so she made her case to me, the same case she’d have made to the panel if anyone had given her the chance. But she’d been overlooked.
Exceeded every KPI. Developed her people. Delivered results the business had been chasing for years.Was recognised for it.
All true. All impressive. Then I asked her one question.
“Where’s the evidence you’re already operating at the next level?”
She’s sharp, and she’s capable, and she knew immediately what I was pointing at. Everything she’d just listed proved she was brilliant at the job she already had. None of it proved she could influence outside her team, hold her ground with competing agendas, or shape a decision before it had already been made without her in the room.
She’d not considered the difference before. She’d been head down doing the work.
For years we’ve been taught the same rule. Keep your head down. Work hard. Let your results speak for themselves. It’s a rule that builds trust. It built her entire career up to that point.
It’s just not the rule that gets you into the room she was trying to get into.
Performance builds credibility. Positioning creates opportunity. They run on different currencies, and you cannot spend one to buy the other.
Here’s the part most people leave out, and it’s the part that actually matters. Building positioning isn’t something you layer on top of being excellent. It competes with it for your time. Every hour spent on visibility, on relationships outside your patch, on shaping strategy before it’s decided, is an hour not spent being the one who fixes everything.
For a lot of high performing women, that trade feels like loss before it ever feels like growth, because if you’re not the reliable one, the safe pair of hands, the person everyone comes to, some part of you has to work out who you are instead.
That takes longer than a confidence pep talk, and it deserves more honesty than most leadership advice gives it.
If you run your own business, you’ll recognise a version of this even though it rarely shows up as a missed promotion. It shows up as still being the one who does the thing at 11pm because you don’t fully trust it to anyone else yet. Still known as the person who makes the business run, when what you actually want is to be known as the person who decides where it goes.
So here’s what I’d ask you to sit with, properly, not just skim past.
If someone had to make the case for what you’re capable of next, using only what you’ve actually shown people in the last three months rather than what you know is true about yourself, what would they have to work with?
If that answer makes you uncomfortable, that’s information worth having, and what you do with it from here is, as always, a choice.