Q. What if I am too visible in my organization?
A. Interesting question which needs to be unpacked.
For this woman, being “too visible” as a leader meant it was difficult for her to “get her work done.”
It’s important to identify what “getting her work done” means to her. For example, this woman was a highly skilled engineer who had risen through the ranks based on her technical excellence. She was now in a leadership role with very little time to exercise her technical skills.
For her, “getting her work done” was still aligned with her technical role and identity, rather than the new and different skillset required by her outward-focused leadership role.
In order to go back to her concern, we need to understand:
- What is expected of her as a leader within her company?
- How does she want to interpret this role so it also aligns with her strengths, interests, values and priorities?
Now, given a different starting point, if we circle back to her initial comment about being “too visible” – does that still hold?
A key leadership function is to gather resources for your teams and the organization – and this requires visibility. I often see women who have risen through the ranks due to their technical skills who want to keep using them in their leadership positions. But what they are being asked to do requires an entirely different set of skills. Being visible and building and leveraging relations is “getting your work done” if you are a leader.
See my post: “From technical expert to leader: shifting identities and questions of authenticity.”
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