Lesson 2: Your “weakness” might actually be your advantage
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I sat through enough executive team meetings to watch the same scene play out: a brilliant woman, technically sharper than her peers, passed over for a man with half her results and overconfidence to spare. I’ve heard her called “not quite ready.” Too reserved. Too in the weeds. Too slow to decide. Too quick to soften a hard message. I saw something else entirely. Here’s what that looks like. She reads a room before she speaks, asks a single precise question that exposes the real problem, then watches someone louder take credit for it twenty minutes later. The room rewards noise. She doesn’t make any. She puts people at ease in a way that allows them to do their best work, and gets filed under “good with people” instead of recognized for the influence she’s actually leveraging. She delivers the same excellent work quarter after quarter and gets handed more responsibility without ever getting handed more authority. Consistency, mistaken for a ceiling she’s already working beyond. She raises the same risk in three meetings before anyone listens, then gets labeled difficult for it. Three months later, the thing she predicted happens exactly as she said it would. Four women. Four different advantages. All overlooked because none of them fit the expected mold of command and control style leadership. Here’s what none of them had done: named the specific pattern behind their own results. You have to see the mechanism clearly before you can translate it, so the people deciding your next promotion can see it too. Most people never think to look. You have to name it and show them the value they haven’t been trained to see. Nobody promotes what they can’t picture. Recall the last piece of feedback that stung. “Too cautious.” “Overthinks it.” “Takes things personally.” Ask what that trait protects or picks up on. That’s usually where the advantage sits. Here’s to the edge you’ve been apologizing for, Denée PS: What’s the “weakness” you’ve been managing that might actually be your leadership advantage? Hit reply and tell me. Denée Choice, MD, MMM |