For more than 30 years, as a physician, a healthcare executive, and now an executive advisor, I’ve watched accomplished women lead by two sets of rules: the ones they were raised on, and the ones others use to judge their leadership. I help them see both clearly so they stop over-explaining decisions they’re qualified to make, hold their position under pushback, and lead with an ease they didn’t have before.
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 |
Choice Leadership Consulting
For more than 30 years, as a physician, a healthcare executive, and now an executive advisor, I’ve watched accomplished women lead by two sets of rules: the ones they were raised on, and the ones others use to judge their leadership. I help them see both clearly so they stop over-explaining decisions they’re qualified to make, hold their position under pushback, and lead with an ease they didn’t have before.
A few days ago, I had a conversation with an accomplished woman physician who was negotiating a new leadership opportunity. She was being recruited to build a program from the ground up. She had the expertise, the experience, and a clear understanding of what it would take to succeed. She also knew what could go wrong. She'd been in a similar situation before, where the promised resources never materialized. This time, she was determined to do things differently. So she did what many highly...
I’ve noticed a pattern in how the women I work with develop over time. It usually doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. They’re still accomplished, thoughtful, and deeply committed to doing excellent work. But they stop leading like they have something left to prove. They start leading from a different place. They trust their judgment more. They spend less time wondering whether they’re ready and more time deciding what they think. They become more discerning about where their time,...
There’s a part of leadership that no one can see. It won’t show up on your résumé. It’s difficult to capture in a performance review. And you probably won’t find it listed among the competencies in your organization’s leadership model. But it shapes nearly everything people experience when they work with you. I think of it as the invisible architecture of leadership. We tend to think about leadership in terms of what we can observe. How you communicate. How you make decisions. How you...