Stop Giving Me the Shopping List

Twice in one week. Two different women. Both exceptional, genuinely exceptional. Degrees, deep expertise, track records most executives would envy. Both doing work their organisations quietly depend on.

And neither of them could tell me, in under a minute, what value they actually create.

Not because they're not creating it. Because when I asked, I got the shopping list. The projects. The process. The seventeen workstreams and the stakeholder map and the thing that happened in March. Detail, layered on detail, layered on more detail until somewhere in the middle of it, the value disappeared entirely. Buried alive under its own evidence.

My amazing co-founder, Kelli Hayes and I got talking about it this week and we were both genuinely angry. Not at the women. At the pattern. Because we have seen it too many times now to call it a one-off, and it keeps ending the same way.

The board doesn't hear what you do. It hears how you talk about it.

One of these leaders has a board that has decided she isn't strategic. Not because her work isn't strategic, it is, profoundly. But because every time she gets in front of them, she talks operationally. She gives them the machinery instead of the meaning. She explains instead of frames.

So the board draws the only conclusion available to them: capable operator, safe pair of hands, not one of the people we can't make decisions without.

And here is the part that should make you furious. Her organisation is only now, after the restructure decisions have been made, after the message has been delivered, working out how much heavy lifting she was actually doing. The value was real. It just never had a voice. They found out what she was worth the way you find out what a load-bearing wall was doing: after you've knocked it out.

That's not a development gap. That's a tragedy.

We can't help ourselves

Here's what makes this so maddening. These are not women who haven't done the work. They've been coached. They've been through programs. They know, intellectually, exactly what they should do in the room.

And then the room arrives, the board meeting, the CEO conversation, the moment that actually determines their career, and they revert straight back to detail. Straight back to over-explaining. Straight back to proving they've done the work instead of demonstrating they know what it means and what the impact is.

Why? Honestly, Kelli and I aren't sure we fully have the answer yet. But here's what I keep coming back to: I don't think they've ever been taught the language of true value and impact. Nobody sat them down, at any point in twenty-five years of career, and showed them how to translate what they do into what it's worth.

What they have been taught, relentlessly, from their first performance review onwards, is that doing gets celebrated. Every promotion, every bonus, every "she's a machine" said admiringly in a talent review was a reward for output. Volume of work. Complexity handled. Fires put out. The whole system trained them to lead with the doing, because for two decades the doing was exactly what got applauded.

So when they arrive in a boardroom and reach for language, the only language there is the one they've spent a career being rewarded for. Activity. Effort. Evidence. Nobody ever handed them the other vocabulary,  the one that speaks in consequence rather than contribution, in what changed rather than what was done. We shouldn't be surprised they don't speak a language no one taught them. But we should be furious that no one taught it.

Delivery gets you kept busy. Judgement gets you kept.

This is the distinction underneath all of it. Organisations don't cut people they can't make decisions without. They cut people whose value they never understood, however enormous that value actually was.

Being known for delivery makes you useful. Being trusted for judgement makes you necessary. And the terrible truth is that no one else does that translation for you. Your work does not speak for itself. It never has. The leaders who are seen as strategic are not smarter than you. Somewhere along the way, they simply acquired a second language, usually because someone taught it to them, a sponsor or a boss or a room they were lucky enough to sit in. They learned to speak in consequence, not contribution. The whole game turns on whether you can answer one brutal question in that language:

What is the thing I do that this organisation cannot afford to lose?

Not the projects. Not the process. The thing.

So here's my ask

If you are a senior woman reading this and some part of it is landing uncomfortably close, I am begging you to do whatever it takes to get to your headline. Take a day. Take a walk along the beach if that's what it needs. Sit with someone who'll interrupt you every time you drift into minutiae (I do this to people I coach, and yes, it's confronting, and yes, it works).

Get to the point where you can say, with absolute clarity and no shopping list, what you do and why it matters. One line. Two at most. The kind of line a board member repeats to another board member when you're not in the room.

Because you may well be a strategic weapon for your organisation. Many of you are. But a weapon nobody can see protects no one, least of all you.

Don't make them work it out after you've gone.

If this is the work you know you need to do, this is exactly what we are focused on in our forthcoming Leadership Briefing on July 29. Join me for The Impact Formula here.