3 Reasons Why Your Impact Isn’t Being Heard...Even When It’s Obvious
Why your results aren’t translating to recognition.
Let’s not pretend you’re unclear.
You know what you’ve delivered.
You know the scope you’re carrying.
You know the decisions you’re making behind the scenes to keep teams from derailing, projects from unraveling, and people from falling through the cracks.
So when someone says,
“You just need to speak up more…”
It doesn’t just feel tone-deaf.
It feels insulting.
Because it assumes you’ve been silent.
When really you’ve been carrying weight the org never stopped to name.
You’re not underperforming.
You’re being misread.
And until that shifts, you’ll keep getting left out of the conversations you’ve already earned a seat in.
Let’s name where that misread usually starts.
You speak in completions, not consequences.
You’ve been trained to focus on outcomes. So you do:
“I led the rollout.”
“I handled the reorg.”
“I delivered the project.”
But what those statements don’t capture is what would’ve happened if you hadn’t done it.
They don’t show the risk you absorbed.
The escalation you prevented.
The cost you protected the business from.
And in high-stakes rooms, that’s the difference between being thanked… and being promoted.
Because if you don’t name the impact, the system assumes it didn’t happen.
Your impact didn’t go unnoticed, it got absorbed.
That’s not on you.
But repositioning it is in your control.
You lead with what you did, not what your leadership made possible.
You’re fluent in execution.
That’s what got you here. It’s also what’s keeping you stuck.
Because when you lead with the steps, the process, the delivery…
people don’t hear the strategy. They hear “doer.”
They hear support.
Not driver.
“I built out the reporting workflow.”
Great. But what did that do?
Did it reduce error rates?
Improve decision-making speed?
Flag compliance risks leadership didn’t even see coming?
That’s what senior and executive roles are resourced around.
And if you don’t say it, someone with half the skill (but better language) will.
You shrink the scale of what you carry because naming it feels political.
You’ve seen what happens when women take up too much space.
So you stay efficient. Gracious. Careful.
You say things like:
“I supported the transition plan.”
When the truth is:
You created the only viable roadmap during an organizational breakdown.
But you don’t say that because you’ve been trained to believe that naming your full weight might make people uncomfortable.
So you shrink it.
You pad it.
You translate it into something palatable.
And you end up invisible inside work that would’ve collapsed without you.
That’s not humility. That’s mis-positioning.
And it’s costing you.
You’re not tired because the work is hard.
You’re tired because the weight of it is invisible and the gap between your impact and your recognition is too wide to ignore anymore.
This isn’t about performing louder.
It’s about making your leadership legible to the people who control scope, comp, and succession.
That’s what we do inside Positioned for More.
We translate quiet excellence into executive power.
But whether or not we work together, I want to say this….
You’ve been carrying outcomes no one’s named, absorbing risk no one sees, and holding standards that benefit everyone but you.
It’s time your positioning matched your weight.
Not to prove yourself
But to protect what you’ve already built.
In your corner,
Alicia Perkins