You’re Performing Like a Senior Leader, But You’re Not Positioned Like One

And what most women miss when they try to close that gap.

It’s easy to assume that once your results speak for themselves, everything else will follow.

More visibility. More scope. More weight.

But that’s not how it works in senior and executive leadership.
Especially if you’ve been operating under the belief that performance and positioning are naturally linked.

They’re not.

In fact, the longer you rely on performance alone, the more likely you are to become the kind of leader who gets thanked constantly….but moved up rarely.

I had a client who had built a $90M function from scratch. No prior infrastructure. No blueprint. She had the results to prove it, and she was operating at a VP level even though her title said Director.

But in every comp conversation, her skip-level would say things like, “You’re doing incredible work, and we’re so lucky to have you.”

That was the tell.
Not because it wasn’t true.
But because the praise never translated to power.

When we looked deeper, her performance narrative was airtight but her leadership story was out of sync.

She was still being described in the language of execution, not enterprise contribution. They could see her impact, but they didn’t know how to account for it. Because she hadn’t shown them how.

This is what most women miss.

It’s not about adding more metrics or waiting for a better project to prove yourself.
It’s about how your leadership is being read by people who make resourcing decisions long before you’re invited to the table.

Here’s what gets in the way for even the sharpest women I work with:

1. You define your value by outcomes, not decisions.

Most performance stories center on what got delivered. But senior leadership isn’t assessing output. They’re assessing how you think. They want to know what informed your direction, not just what shipped.

If you don’t narrate your decision logic, your work gets bucketed as implementation even if it was your strategy that made it possible.

2. You speak in complete sentences, but not in enterprise language.

You’ve got clarity. You’ve got numbers. But if your phrasing still centers around terms like “keeping the trains running,” “holding the team,” or “jumping in,” your brand gets coded as supportive. Not strategic.

You’re not being read as the one who sets the conditions. You’re being read as the one who adapts to them.

3. You lead change but you don’t position it as change leadership.

You’re out here untangling messes, cleaning up failed systems, onboarding 3x what was scoped and quietly calling it “helping out.” That’s not modesty. You’re rewriting leadership as labor. When you don’t elevate the narrative around the complexity you hold, you train people to see it as stability, not transformation.

And that’s where the disconnect happens.

Not because you aren’t ready for more, but because the perception of your leadership is still shaped by a version of you that solved smaller problems.

So what’s the actual fix?

Not more executive presence training.
Not another project to “prove” your worth.
And definitely not waiting for someone to recognize your growth.

The fix is reframing your leadership in the language of enterprise value.

It means learning to describe your work through the lens of risk, enablement, resourcing, and direction.
It means shifting your value from outcomes to orchestration.
And it means updating the story before someone else uses the old one to justify why you’re not ready.

If this landed and you know you’ve outgrown how your work is being talked about, this is what I help women with every day.

Let’s walk through your leadership story and reframe it, before you lose another quarter being read as the role you’ve already outgrown.

In 45 minutes, we’ll surface the real narrative gaps, shift the language, and anchor your value to what decision-makers actually care about, so you’re not just seen, but taken seriously.

If you're done being described by what you handle and ready to be positioned by what you drive, this is where we start.

In your corner,
Alicia