Episode 310

Why You’re Not Being Seen as the Leader You Want To Be

How to Be a Leader at Work That People Actually Recognize

Knowing how to be a leader at work and being seen as one are two different skills. Most of the advice out there focuses on the first. Today I want to work on the second, because for a lot of you it’s the second one that’s costing you.

Here’s where you likely are. You’re delivering. You’re the person your team relies on, the one who steps up when things get difficult, the one who quietly fixes the problems other people walk past. Your performance reviews are consistently strong. People describe you as invaluable, dependable, a safe pair of hands.

And yet, when the conversations that matter happen, the succession discussions, the stretch assignments, the room where the next senior appointment gets decided, you’re not in them. Someone else, often someone with less experience and less impact, is being talked about as a future leader while you’re being talked about as a great performer.

If that gap between the leadership you’re delivering and the leadership you’re being credited with is something you recognize, this episode is for you. I’ve talked before about why you’re not getting promoted even when you’re overperforming, and today goes underneath that to the thing driving it: perception. Why the picture people hold of you doesn’t match the leader you actually are, and, more importantly, what you can do about it.

Let’s dive in.

Perception Is a System, Not a Verdict

Before we get into the practical work, I need to shift how you think about this problem, because the way most of us hold it makes it unsolvable.

When you’re not being seen as the leader you want to be, there are two stories you probably tell yourself. The first is “I’m doing everything right and the system is broken.” The second is “there must be something wrong with me.” I see both of these constantly in the women I coach, sometimes both in the same week, and here’s the problem: neither story gives you anything to do. One makes it entirely external, so you wait and hope. The other makes it a character flaw, so you shrink.

I want to offer you a third story, which has the advantage of being both more accurate and more useful.

Perception is a system. It has inputs. And you control more of those inputs than you think.

Let me tell you about a client of mine, and I’m sharing this with her details changed, as always. Senior director, engineering, twelve years at the same company. Brilliant. The person who had quietly kept two major products alive through three re-orgs. When we started working together she’d been passed over twice, and her opening line to me was, “they just don’t see me as leadership material, and I don’t know what else I can possibly do.”

Here’s what we found when we actually looked. Her updates were written entirely in the language of delivery. Her most valuable work, the rescues, the mentoring, the risks she’d headed off, was invisible by its nature and she’d never once written it down anywhere a decision-maker would read it. In meetings she was the one taking the actions, not the one framing the problem. And when I asked her what she wanted to be known as the leader of, she went quiet for a full thirty seconds. Twelve years of extraordinary work, and no story attached to any of it.

Nothing about her capability needed to change. Within nine months, having changed her inputs, she was leading the succession conversation instead of being left out of it. I’m not promising you nine months, every situation is different. I’m telling you what became possible the moment she stopped treating perception as a verdict and started treating it as a system.

How people see you at work isn’t a fixed judgment that got made about you at some point and filed away. It’s a picture being continuously assembled from signals: the language you use, the work you’re visibly attached to, the way you show up in rooms, the story that exists about what you do and why it matters. Change the signals consistently and the picture changes. Not overnight, perception has inertia, but reliably.

Now, one thing before we go further, because I don’t want to be misunderstood here. Bias is real. The promotion gap for women in tech is real and well documented. There are environments where women’s signals get systematically discounted, and if you’re in one of the worst of them, the answer may eventually be to take your leadership somewhere it will be valued. I’m not asking you to pretend the playing field is level.

What I am saying is this: you can’t fix the system today, but you can change your inputs to it today. And in my experience of coaching hundreds of women through exactly this, changing your inputs moves the needle far more often, and far further, than most women expect. Doing that work isn’t capitulating to a broken system. It’s strategy.

The Four Perception Gaps Holding You Back

So if perception is a system, where is yours leaking? In my coaching work I see four distinct gaps that keep genuinely capable women from being seen as the leaders they are. Most of you will recognize yourself in at least one. Some of you, and I say this with love, will recognize yourself in all four.

1. The Language Gap: You Talk Like the Doer, Not the Leader

This is the most common one, and the one with the fastest payoff when you fix it.

Listen to how you talk about your work. If you’re describing activity, what you did, how you did it, how much of it there was, you’re speaking the language of execution. Leaders, and more importantly the people who anoint leaders, speak the language of outcomes and implications. Not “we shipped the migration on time,” but “we’ve removed the biggest scaling risk ahead of next year’s growth targets.” Not “I ran the incident response,” but “here’s what that incident told us about where we’re exposed, and here’s what I think we should do about it.”

The difference isn’t spin. It’s altitude. The first version tells people you do good work. The second tells people you think about the business the way its leaders do. And people promote and platform the ones who already sound like they’re operating at the next level.

And here’s the part I really want you to hear: nobody is going to teach you this. The organizations that promote you for sounding strategic almost never tell you that’s what they’re listening for. You find out by noticing who gets platformed, and if you listen carefully to the people above you who are rising, you’ll hear it. They’re not describing tasks. They’re describing what the tasks mean.

So do this deliberately. Take your last written update, and I mean actually go and find it after this episode, and rewrite every activity statement as an outcome statement. What did it change, protect, unlock or reduce for the business? If you can’t answer that for a piece of work, that tells you something important too, and we’ll come to that in the visibility gap.

This is the same shift I talk about in moving from firefighter to strategist, and if you’re someone whose ideas get lost or rephrased by others in meetings, it pairs with the work on being heard when you speak. Make sure you practice this in low-stakes settings first, your weekly update, your one-to-one with your boss, so the strategic register is natural by the time the stakes are high.

2. The Visibility Gap: Your Best Work Has No Name on It

Here’s an uncomfortable pattern I see over and over. The women who are most frustrated about not being seen are very often the ones doing enormous amounts of work that nobody can attribute to them.

The glue work. The mentoring. The crisis you quietly averted, which by definition nobody noticed because it didn’t happen. The project you rescued where the credit landed on whoever presented it. You know you did it. Your team might know. The people who decide your future have no idea.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: if you don’t openly celebrate your achievements, who will? Nobody is coming to excavate your contribution. Making your work visible isn’t bragging, it’s information the organization genuinely needs in order to make good decisions about you.

One of my clients once averted what would have been a genuinely serious client-facing outage. She saw it coming three weeks out, rallied two other teams, fixed the underlying issue, and the launch went out clean. Do you know what her leadership remembered from that quarter? Nothing. Because from where they sat, nothing happened. Meanwhile a peer who firefought a much smaller incident, visibly and noisily, over one dramatic weekend, got named in the all-hands. That’s not a fair outcome, but I need you to see the mechanics of it: drama is visible by default, prevention is invisible by default. If your leadership style is prevention, and for many of the best women leaders I work with it is, then visibility will never happen by accident. You have to build it in on purpose.

Two practical moves here. First, attach your name to outcomes in writing, in the places decision-makers actually look: the update email, the retro summary, the quarterly review. “Here’s what my team delivered and here’s the call I made that got us there” is a factual sentence, not a boast. Second, audit what you’re spending your time on, because busy is not the same as valuable, and if most of your week goes on work that’s structurally invisible, no amount of communication will fix that. Some of that work you should keep doing because it matters. But go in with your eyes open about the trade you’re making.

3. The Signal Gap: You’re Sending Helper Signals, Not Leader Signals

This one is subtle and it stings a little, so stay with me.

Every behavior you repeat at work is a signal about the role you play. And a lot of the behaviors that made you indispensable are, right now, signaling “support function” rather than “leader.” Always being the one who takes the notes, organizes the offsite, smooths the conflict, picks up the dropped ball. Saying yes to everything. Waiting to be invited rather than inviting yourself. Framing your contributions as questions, “would it maybe make sense to…?”, when you actually have a recommendation.

None of these behaviors is wrong in itself. The problem is the pattern. If the picture people are assembling of you is built mostly from helper signals, then when they imagine a leader, they don’t picture you, and it genuinely isn’t malice. It’s pattern matching. You’ve been teaching them what role you play, and they’ve learned the lesson.

I want to give you a real example of how fast this can move, because I know it feels like turning a tanker. A client of mine, a director who had become her VP’s unofficial chief of staff without the title or the pay, made exactly three changes. She stopped volunteering to capture actions in the leadership meeting. She started opening her project updates by framing the decision the group needed to make. And when she was asked, as she always was, to organize the offsite, she said, “I’ll own the agenda and the strategic framing, and I’d suggest rotating the logistics.” Small, almost invisible changes. Within a quarter her VP described her in a calibration meeting, and this got back to her, as “the most strategic person on my team.” Same person. Same capability. Different signals.

So start swapping signals deliberately. Take the stance, “my recommendation is X, and here’s why,” instead of the question. Rotate the glue work rather than absorbing it. In meetings, be the person who frames the problem or names the decision that needs making, because that’s what the room remembers as leadership. This is the behavioral layer of executive presence, and it’s built one repeated signal at a time.

4. The Narrative Gap: Nobody Can Say What You’re the Leader Of

Here’s a test. If I asked your boss’s boss to finish the sentence “she’s the person you go to when…”, could they? Could your boss? Could you?

The women who get seen as leaders have a narrative, a short, repeatable story about what they lead, what they’re building, and why it matters. “She’s the one turning our data platform into an actual product.” “She’s the leader who takes struggling teams and makes them perform.” That story travels into rooms you’re not in and does your advocacy for you.

If no such sentence exists about you, it’s usually because you’ve never written it. You’ve been so busy doing everything that you’ve never chosen the thing. And I do mean chosen, because this is the part women resist: a narrative requires you to emphasize some of your work over the rest of it. When you’re brilliant at many things, picking one feels like a loss. But a story about everything is a story about nothing, and “she does a great job across the board” has never once, in all my years of coaching, been the sentence that got someone into a succession conversation.

So take the time to write your one-liner. What are you the leader of? Not your job title, the change you drive, the problem you own. A good test is whether the sentence would still be true if you changed companies, because that’s what makes it about your leadership rather than your current job description. Then use it everywhere: in how you introduce yourself, in how you frame your updates, in what you tell your boss you want to be known for. Give the people who would advocate for you the words to do it with, because right now, if they wanted to champion you in a room you’re not in, what exactly would they say?

Is Your Mindset Holding You Back? The Inner Work That Makes the Outer Work Possible

Now, I can already hear some of you saying: Toni, I know all this. I’ve read the advice about speaking up and claiming credit. I just… don’t do it.

If that’s you, the gap isn’t knowledge, and we need to talk about what’s actually in the way, because is your mindset holding you back is a genuine question here, not a rhetorical one.

For most of the women I work with, the block is one of three beliefs. First: “good work should speak for itself, and having to point at mine feels like cheating.” I understand it, and it’s wrong. Work doesn’t speak, people do. The belief in a pure meritocracy is the single most expensive belief I see in high-achieving women, and I did a whole episode on mastering your value and why underselling yourself costs you if you want to go deeper on this one.

Second: “if I act like a leader before I’m given the title, I’ll be seen as arrogant, or as too much.” This fear isn’t irrational, the double standard is real, and women do get penalized for behavior that gets men promoted. But the answer isn’t to shrink, it’s to be strategic. Outcome language, factual attribution, clear recommendations, a crisp narrative, none of those trip the “too much” wire. They read as competence, not ego. You have more safe room to move than the fear is telling you.

I want to sit with the second one a moment longer, because the fear of the double standard deserves more than a drive-by. Yes, there is a narrower band of acceptable behavior for women in most tech organizations, and pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence. But here’s what I’ve noticed in years of watching this closely: the behaviors that most reliably trigger the backlash are the ones that read as claiming status, interrupting, self-aggrandizing, taking up space for its own sake. The behaviors I’m teaching you in this episode read as adding clarity. Framing the decision. Stating a recommendation with reasons. Attributing outcomes factually. These are contribution signals, not dominance signals, and the room receives them completely differently. That’s exactly why this particular playbook works for women when the generic “be more confident” advice so often backfires.

Third: “if I try to be seen and it still doesn’t work, that will hurt more than never trying.” This is the quiet one, and I see it more than either of the others. Staying invisible feels safer because it preserves the story that you could have been recognized if you’d wanted to be. But you deserve better than a protective story. And here’s what I’ve watched happen in practice, over and over: when women do this work properly and consistently, it works far more often than the fear predicts. And in the cases where it genuinely doesn’t, where you change your signals for six, twelve months and the organization still can’t see you, that’s not failure, that’s data. It tells you the problem was never you, and it tells you where not to spend the next five years of your career.

Where to Start This Week

You now have the map: four gaps, and the mindset work underneath them. Here’s how to make it real, and I want you to actually do this, not just nod along on your commute.

First, run the diagnosis. Take twenty minutes with a notebook and be honest. Which of the four gaps is costing you most right now? Listen to yourself in your next few meetings, reread your last few update emails, and ask: am I speaking in activity or outcomes? Can my work be attributed to me? What signals am I repeating? Does a one-line narrative about my leadership exist? Pick the one gap where the honest answer made you wince.

Second, change one signal, starting now. Not four changes, one, done consistently for a month. Rewrite this week’s update in outcome language. Put your name on the thing you’d normally let slide into anonymity. Replace one “would it maybe make sense to…?” with “my recommendation is.” Draft your one-liner and say it out loud to another human. Consistency is what changes a picture, so pick the change you can sustain.

Third, tell one person what you want. Perception change accelerates enormously when at least one person with influence knows what you’re building toward. That might be your boss, a sponsor, a mentor. “I want to be seen as the leader who X, and I’d value your read on what’s in the way” is one sentence, and it turns a private ambition into something other people can help with.

And a word on timescales, because I know some of you will do this for two weeks, see nothing, and conclude it doesn’t work. Perception has inertia. The picture people hold of you was assembled over years, and it doesn’t redraw itself in a fortnight. What I see in practice is that the signals compound quietly for a while, and then somewhere between month two and month six there’s a moment, a comment in a calibration meeting, an invitation you didn’t expect, your name in a conversation it’s never been in before, where you realize the picture has changed. Keep going through the quiet part. That’s where most women stop, and it’s precisely the wrong moment to.

Being seen as a leader isn’t a personality transplant and it isn’t a performance. It’s a set of consistent, honest signals about the leader you already are. You’ve been doing the hard part, the actual leading, for years. This is just letting it be seen.

A Final Note

If this episode has landed, if you can see the gap between the leader you are and the leader they see, and you want to work out how to close it in your specific situation, with your specific organization and its specific politics, let’s do that together on a strategy call.

Every month I offer a limited number of these complimentary calls to listeners of this show. Forty-five minutes, your situation, and a clear picture of your most direct path forward. Book yours at tonicollis.com/lets-chat.

Thank you for listening. And remember, keep leading. Bye for now.