The Nine Lives Series - The Professional

The Professional: You Are Not Overlooked Because You Are Not Ready

By Dana L. Cox | Executive Coach, TEDx Speaker, Author

You find out about the promotion in a meeting. Not a conversation. Not a courtesy call from HR. A meeting. They are already congratulating someone else when you walk in. So you do what professionals do. You smile. You clap. You say the right thing. But inside, something is trying to make sense of what just happened. Because you trained him.

You stayed late finishing the analysis that made the quarter look good. You handled the client call when things went sideways and nobody else wanted to pick up the phone. You were the one they pulled in when the team was falling apart. And yet when leadership decided who was ready to move up, your name never entered the conversation. So you do the only thing you know how to do. You go back to work.

You tell yourself the story that keeps high-achieving women going.

Maybe I need to work a little harder. Maybe the next project will make them see me. Maybe if I just keep delivering, it will finally be obvious.

It feels logical. It is also the trap.

What is happening is that you have built your entire professional reputation around being the person who gets things done. You are the fixer. The one who jumps in when something is broken. The one who stays late, carries the extra load, saves the project, makes the numbers work, holds the team together when things are falling apart. Organizations love this woman. They depend on her. They trust her.

But they do not position her.

They see her as indispensable to execution. Not as the person who should be setting direction. She is not positioned as a leader. She is positioned as the person who executes leadership.

The Lie You Were Raised On

Work hard. Deliver results. Keep your head down. Your work will speak for itself. Most of us were raised on this. It worked in school. You studied, you performed, you were rewarded. The system was designed to recognize effort. The workplace is not school. Results do not speak. People do.

Here is how this usually shows up. You become the person leadership trusts when something is complicated. The presentation needs to be fixed. The client relationship is falling apart. The numbers do not make sense. The team is struggling to execute. Your name is the one that comes up. At first it feels like recognition. You are the one they rely on. What you do not realize is that the room has quietly decided something else about you. You are the person who will always fix the work. Not the person who will lead it.

And if you never step out of that role, the organization will happily keep you there. Not out of malice. Out of convenience. Because you make everyone else’s job easier and no one has any incentive to disrupt that arrangement. Organizations depend on the woman who fixes everything. But they rarely promote her. Because the person who fixes everything becomes the infrastructure of the organization. And infrastructure does not get promoted.

What I Tell Women When They Are Sitting Across From Me

You are not being overlooked because you are not good enough. You are being overlooked because you have trained the room to see you as the person who fixes the work. Organizations protect that person. They rely on her. They trust her. They build entire teams around the fact that when something goes wrong, she will step in and make it right. But they do not move her. Because the moment you move the person who fixes everything, the system stops working.

Are you willing to stop being the person who saves the project so you can become the person who leads it?

The problem was never your capability. It was the role the room assigned you.

About the Author

Dana L. Cox is an executive coach, TEDx speaker, and author of From Burnout to Badass. She is the founder of FIX Coaching & Consulting and creator of the Positioned to Paid™ framework, which helps high-achieving women move from invisible to unstoppable in their careers and lives. Learn more at danalcox.com.