There’s a moment, once you’ve fought your way to the position you’ve wanted, the position that truly matters to you, when it would be very easy to stop.
You made it.
You earned it.
So now you’re going to hold your ground, protect what you’ve built and ensure that you keep your place at the table you worked so hard to reach.
I understand why women settle there. I get it.
Let’s be honest, getting into the room and taking your seat at that table took everything you had, and the idea of spending more of your hard-won energy on anyone else’s journey can feel like a luxury you can’t afford.
You’re tired.
You’re still proving yourself daily. There is plenty on your plate, and maybe the last thing you need is another responsibility added to your never-ending list of things to do.
So let me be frank with you, the way I’d be if you were sitting across from me.
Leadership asks something of you beyond your own success.
If you want to see change in your environment, your industry and/or the wider world, you are part of that change equation. You don’t get to want a better landscape and then opt out of shaping it.
You are part of the equation
This is the bit we like to dodge. We talk about how the system needs to change, how the structures are stacked, how the culture has to shift. All of this is very true. The temptation is to put the responsibility for change somewhere out there, with HR, with the board, with policy, with the government or with someone more senior than us.
But if you’re in leadership from Director to C-Suite, then you are no longer at the bottom looking up.
You have a seat now. You have a voice in meetings that decide things. You have a name people recognise and a reputation that carries weight.
I know that when you were further down the ladder, you were most probably frustrated that nobody used their power on your behalf.
Well, now that power is yours.
Which means the change you keep waiting for has, in part, become your job. Of course, not all of it. Nobody is asking you to fix an entire industry, the patriarchy, your company or all of life’s injustices single-handedly, while running your own remit.
The responsibility and the resulting question are narrower and far more answerable than that. Here is the question:
How are you moving, in the position you now hold, in a way that creates something better for the people coming behind you?
If you know better, you’re responsible for doing better
There’s a line I come back to often, because it cuts through every excuse I’ve ever made, myself. If you know better, you are responsible for doing better.
- You know things now that you didn’t at the start.
- You know which doors are guarded and which are propped open if you know where to push.
- You know how the unwritten rules work, the ones nobody explains to you, the ones you bruised yourself learning.
- You know what it costs a woman to walk into a room where she’s the only one who looks like her, because you’ve done it, more than once.
Sorry to say, this kind of knowledge comes with an invoice attached. Once you can see how the game is played, pretending you can’t is a choice.
Staying silent when you could say the thing, declining to make the introduction you’re perfectly placed to make, watching a talented woman get talked over and saying nothing, those are all choices, even when they feel like simply keeping your head down.
I’m not saying that to make you feel guilty. Guilt is useless, and you have better things to do with your time and attention. I am saying it because this kind of responsibility, taken on willingly, is one of the most powerful things a leader can do. It turns you from someone who survived the system into someone who reshapes it.
You don’t have to change everything
Look before you keel over with the perceived unbearable responsibility. Here is some relief and release.
You don’t have to change everything!
The image of the world-changing leader as someone making sweeping, heroic, headline-grabbing moves puts most people off before they even start, because it sets a bar nobody could reasonably clear on a Tuesday afternoon between a myriad of meetings.
Real change rarely looks like that.
What it looks like is the senior woman who says a junior colleague’s name in a promotion conversation she wasn’t obliged to join. It looks like sharing the salary figure you were told never to disclose, so the woman negotiating after you walks in with better information. It looks like being honest about the messy bits of your own journey instead of presenting a varnished highlight reel that makes everyone else feel they’re failing.
None of those things requires permission, a budget, or even a grand strategy. They require you to notice the moment and choose to act. That is it!
The accumulation of small, deliberate acts by women who decide to lift as they climb is precisely how the landscape shifts.
It always has been.
Women like you, making choices that accumulate and change everything.
The ladder you’re tempted to pull up
I’m gonna name the opposite because it’s more common than we admit. Here goes.
There is a pull and maybe even a push that once you’ve made it through something hard, to believe the next woman should have to earn it just as painfully as you did. You suffered for this. Why should she get it any easier?
Through my clients, I’ve heard of the senior women who have freely said to a woman coming up behind her, “Well, I had to go through it, so you’ll just need to suck it up!” That’s horrific. To me, when you get in a position, it should be about making the journey easier, not harder. It should be about eradicating the heinous things that had to be tolerated, not endorsing them.
Look, I understand the feeling; I understand that that hard experience means something. But I don’t trust where it leads us.
You see that instinct is exactly how the ladder gets pulled up, one rung at a time, by people who genuinely don’t see themselves as part of the problem. The hardship you went through doesn’t become more meaningful by being passed on. It becomes meaningful when you use what it taught you to make sure the next woman spends her energy on the work itself, rather than on the obstacles you already mapped and overcome.
The women who shaped my own path weren’t the ones who tested me to see if I was tough enough. They were the ones who handed me the map and said, here, this is what took me years to figure out, take it. I think of Tam, who sat me down and showed me the how-tos of getting your team on board and supporting them. Women like her make all the difference.
So, what can you do today?
I don’t want this to be a piece you nod along to and forget by lunchtime, because you’ve gone back to clearing out your emails. So let me give you a how-to.
Pick one thing.
Today, or this week at the latest, before the distractions of life and work make this blog, this rally call fade into the background.
- Think of one woman coming up behind you, think of her name and picture her face.
- Now ask yourself what you know that would make her journey easier?
- Now consider a way to hand it to her.
Make the introduction. Share the figure. Recommend her in the room she’s not in. Tell her the truth about the thing nobody told you. Put her forward for the opportunity she’s too uncertain to ask for. Remind her that she is good enough.
It won’t feel like world-changing leadership in the moment. But if you multiply that single act across every woman who reads something like this and decides to do it anyway, and you start to see how an entire generation of women in leadership can lift the one behind it.
Look, hard-won women’s rights are being rolled back. Companies are either shelving women’s programmes or no longer wishing to commission them.
You are positioned to be the difference.
You wanted a better world for the women coming after you. You’re now standing in a place where you can build one, in small, real, daily ways. So there’s only one question left:
What will you do today, however small, to make the journey easier for the woman who comes next?
If you’re looking for a community of senior women in leadership who have committed to changing the world as they work on themselves, come join us at The Circle of Brilliance Collective
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