Women don’t take enough credit for their work.
Yesterday, I had a conversation with one of my coaching clients that struck a nerve. She’s a Global Product Line Manager overseeing the growth strategy, vision, and direction of a $2B product line for a large Fortune 500 company.
By all accounts, her impact is immense.
But here’s the problem: because she doesn’t directly own P&L, she saw herself as being in a “support” role — not a decision-making one.
This mindset has quietly sabotaged her for years. She hesitated to own the impact of her work, downplayed her contributions, and, as a result, minimized her role during interviews for leadership roles.
This is a common pattern I see with many of my incoming female clients. We have been conditioned for decades to put our heads down, work hard, and only take credit for the direct work we do. We feel guilty for taking credit for the larger organizational impact because wasn't this “team effort"?
But the hard truth is, if you don’t advocate for your own impact, no one else will.
Inside
THE FEARLESS HIRE, my signature career accelerator program, we work on breaking this self-sabotaging cycle so women leaders can show up confidently, own their value, and close high-paying leadership roles.
Here are three strategies that help our clients authentically self-promote and 10X their confidence:
1. Reframe Your Role as “Strategic”
Even if our clients don’t directly own the P&L, their work drives key business outcomes. The strategies they implement, the vision they shape, and the results they deliver are all part of the decision-making process. Through coaching, our clients learn to reframe their contributions in terms of the strategic outcomes they enable, so they can stop seeing themselves in support roles and start seeing themselves in decision-making ones.
2. Start with Facts, Not Feelings
It’s easy to diminish the impact of our work when we approach our career through a lens of self-doubt. Instead, our clients learn to anchor themselves in facts. What are the measurable outcomes of their work? What specific problems have they solved? How can they quantify their contributions with numbers and metrics, like revenue growth, cost savings, or team performance improvements? Facts don’t lie, and become the cornerstone of increased self-confidence.
3. Learn the Art of Storytelling
Facts are critical, but they need to be packaged in a compelling way. Our clients develop concise, engaging stories about their key achievements using my SOARR storytelling framework, focussing on the challenges they overcame, the decisions they made, and the results they delivered. These stories are powerful tools for interviews and executive conversations—they help you stand out and stay memorable.
Taking credit for your work isn’t arrogance - that's real leadership. When you own your impact, you not only position yourself for high-impact roles, but you also inspire the next generation of women leaders to do the same.
Agree?
