#60 | The Career Progress Formula Most Women Need to Build Influence and Unlock Promotion

Are you doing exceptional work but still not getting the influence or career progress you expected?

For many women in corporate leadership, the issue is not capability - it is visibility. This episode explores how imposter syndrome, workplace dynamics, and outdated assumptions about merit can quietly limit influence and slow career progress, even for highly capable women.

• You’ll understand why performance alone is rarely enough to move your career forward.
• You’ll learn how influence, image, and exposure shape career progress in ways most women were never taught.
• You’ll walk away with simple, practical ways to become more visible and more influential without losing your authenticity.

Play this episode to learn how to turn your existing strengths into greater influence, visibility, and real career progress.

More from the show

Your Career Prompt Pack full of questions and challenges to help you craft your career story.

New episodes are released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Stuck, simmering, or onto something juicy? I want to hear it. Drop me a line at caroline@inspireyourgenius.com - I read them all.

And here is the Spotify Playlist to accompany UnShakeable Her.

This podcast explores resilience, imposter syndrome, and credibility while unpacking how boundaries, conflict, and feedback shape the way we handle pressure, influence, and guilt at work. It also looks at promotion, work-life balance, people pleasing, decision making, and visibility, offering honest conversations about how to grow professionally without losing your confidence or yourself.

Transcript

Caroline Esterson (00:00)
Well, hello there, I'm Caroline Esterson and welcome back. On Monday, I asked you three questions about the promotion that went to someone else, about the idea you didn't say out loud and about the brilliant work that somehow just wasn't enough. And I gave you a word to sit with. Visibility.

Caroline Esterson (00:23)
Hello, I'm Caroline Esterson and this is Little Moves Big Careers, helping women in corporate leadership who are constantly second guessing themselves to build the daily habits that compound into unshakable confidence. Yep, that's you.

Caroline Esterson (00:40)
So here's what you're getting today. Firstly, you're to get the science behind why the most capable, most hardworking women are sadly the most likely to be overlooked, not in spite of their ability.

because of specific documented structural conditions that nobody told them about. Then you're to get a framework with three letters that explains in three numbers exactly what drives career advancement. And then three moves that help you to put it right, woven into work that you're already doing. So it's nothing added, nothing that requires you to become someone you're just not.

Let's start by looking at why visibility matters more than ever right now. Because the game has changed and nobody sent a memo about it. On Monday I said that performance was never the problem. The

problem was visibility, whether the right people can see what you're doing. But here's the thing that I want to add to that today. Visibility was always important. What has changed now is the urgency. Because right now in 2026, three things are happening simultaneously that are making the visibility gap between women and men wider than it's ever been before.

I was sharing this research last night with my husband and he was utterly gobsmacked. He went, this is your podcast, isn't it? As if it could be for anything else, right? But it's got some really interesting stats that made both of us really think. And I've taken these from the McKinsey Women Workplace Report.

which is focusing on change since COVID,

So onto the three things that have changed. firstly, it's the return to office gender split. As organisations have pushed for people to return to the office, men have gone back at higher rates than women, which actually makes complete sense. Women are still disproportionately carrying the caring responsibilities. The school runs the flexibility that hybrid work made possible.

But here is the consequence that nobody warned them about.

86 % of chief executives surveyed said that they plan to actively reward the people who came into the office with favorable work and financial considerations. Not the people doing the best work, the people they could see doing it. And women are three times more likely than men to leave their jobs altogether when return to office mandates come in.

which means the women who stay working flexibly, still doing their brilliant work from a hot desk or a hybrid schedule built around the children and caring responsibilities are becoming increasingly less visible at exactly the moment visibility matters most. Fewer women in the building, More decisions being made by people who reward physical presence.

That is a structural visibility problem and it's getting worse, not better.

So the second thing, AI is making performance invisible.

Artificial intelligence is now doing more and more of the work that used to make people visible. The analysis, the written recommendations, the research, the slides even. Things that took time and demonstrated capability are increasingly things a tool can produce in seconds, which means the work itself is becoming harder to distinguish. If you keep your head down and let the work speak for itself and the work increasingly looks like everyone else's work, then what exactly is speaking

for you.

Performance used to be visible by default, now it has to be made visible deliberately. And then the third thing is the ambition gap, which isn't actually about ambition at all. So going specifically onto McKinsey's report, the largest study of women in corporate America found that for the first time, there is now a measurable gap in ambition.

80 % of women want to be promoted compared to 86 % of men. It might not sound like a lot, but here's the critical finding underneath that headline. When women receive the same career support and visibility as men, that gap disappears entirely. It's not ambition that's missing. It's the conditions that make ambition feel possible.

So we have a situation where capable, motivated, hardworking women are becoming less visible at work. They're getting less support and advocacy and are beginning rationally and understandably to wonder whether putting themselves forward is actually worth it.

That is what those three moments that I talked about on Monday were really about. They're not about weaknesses. They're about a structural visibility problem in a system that wasn't designed with them in

let me give you a few more stats behind these findings. The McKinsey report found that progress towards gender equality has frankly stalled with women facing reduced career support,

higher burnout and a persistent broken rung at the first step to management.

persistent broken rung shows that the gap in promotions from entry level to manager remains with only 93 women promoted for every hundred men. For women of color, this figure drops to 74.

Women are less likely than men to have a sponsor, a key driver for promotion and hindering early career advancement. And there's a flexibility stigma. Women working remotely are less likely to get promoted or have a sponsor compared to those on site. A penalty that doesn't affect men as heavily.

Six in 10 senior level women report feeling burnt out, higher to their male counterparts. And all of this is compounded by declining commitment with companies scaling back on diversity and inclusion initiatives and only half prioritizing women's advancement.

So this adds up to a really complex landscape.

And it might sound a little bit disheartening, but you know what? Now we know the rules of the game. Now we know what we're playing in. We can actually do something about it. And that is what's important here.

So let's move on and look at the Pi framework, which explains everything for us. Way back in the 1990s, a leadership consultant called Harvey Coleman spent years watching her careers actually advance. And this holds true even now to help focus our attention on what actually matters. And what he found was this.

Career advancement is driven by three things and he called it pie. P is for performance, which is basically how well you do your job. I is for image, how you're perceived, your reputation, your presence, your professional brand, if you like. And E is for exposure. Who actually knows what you do? How visible your work and capability are to the people who make decisions.

And here's what Harvey Coleman found about how much each one contributes to career advancement. So let's take them one by one.

The P is for performance, doing your job brilliantly. What would you make the percentages for how important this is?

Okay, I think you're going to be shocked here. It accounts for just 10%. That's all. If we move on to image, that accounts for 30%. And exposure, who knows what you do. That accounts for 60%. Now, I want you to just think about that for a moment.

Because my first reaction was this can't be right. Surely if you're doing brilliant work, gets noticed. Surely merit counts.

is how I interpret this. Merit does count. Performance does matter. It's actually the heart of everything. It's your foundation. Without it, nothing else works. No amount of visibility will save you if the work isn't there.

And this is the part that nobody tells you. Performance on its own, however brilliant, only accounts for a small amount of what moves you forward, which means you could be doing the best work in the building. And if the right people don't know you're doing it, you're relying on 10 % of available evidence to make the case for you. And the person who got the opportunity you were working towards, well, they were probably relying on all three.

And that's not a reflection of your ability. It's a reflection of what part of the pie you were investing in.

so before we get to your little moves for today, I want to make a distinction. And for me, this is really important because it was a mistake I made very early in my career. I saw visibility as peacocking. You know, those people that showing off. I want you to know it doesn't mean this.

It doesn't mean sending emails about industry trends at 7.30 in the morning. It doesn't mean taking the credit for other people's work.

a meeting about a framework from a newsletter you saw. And it doesn't mean promoting ideas that you didn't develop. What it does mean, and this is the distinction that really matters, it means that you make sure

that the brilliant work you're already doing doesn't happen in a room that nobody else can see into. You don't need to do more. You just need to make the invisible visible. And I want to give you an example of what happens when the invisible stays invisible because I saw it recently and it just seemed like such a clear example to me. I was working with a team who were gifted and I do mean gifted.

a genuinely brilliant opportunity. They were in a room with their CEO. I mean, how often do teams get to actually just be with the CEO? He wanted to thank them personally for what had been a very difficult year. And then as a gesture of genuine openness, he asked them the question, what do you need from the business to make your work easier? Silence. So he prompted a little bit more silence.

Eventually their manager had to speak on their behalf. Afterwards in the corridor over lunch, the ideas were pouring out what they needed, what would help the things that they've been thinking about for months. They were not short of ideas and they weren't disengaged, but they were second guessing their own value in front of someone important. So they made the choice to stay quiet and a CEO who genuinely wanted to hear from them.

went back to his office, having heard from the manager instead. What a wasted opportunity that was. That was 15 people simultaneously choosing invisibility in the room that could have changed how they were seen.

So the little moves we're about to go through are the antidote to that moment.

They're small, they're specific, and they're woven in, not added on. Three moves, each one targeting a different letter of pi, each one designed to fit inside the work you're already doing, not on top of it. firstly, little move one, the headline, which is all about moving performance into exposure.

What I want you to do every time you complete something significant, whether it be a project, a client conversation, a problem solved or a team member delivered, write one sentence that names what happened and why it mattered. Send it somewhere. It could be an email to your manager, a message in the team channel, a note to yourself dated and saved one sentence, 30 seconds. By doing this, you're making sure your work has a witness beyond the people who are in the room when it happens.

And you're building a habit, a habit that helps you witness the value that you're contributing. And it might look something like this.

account renewal, three months of relationship rebuilding paid off. They specifically said how much they valued the new reporting system to aid their own decision-making. Are there any other clients who would value this? Or?

Maybe?

through her first independent stakeholder presentation today. She was fab. Spending time together, working through her talk track and focusing on outcomes made a real difference. She's really keen to do it again. So short review, real work, named a witness.

Little move number two, the room. This is about gaining exposure in the right meetings. So here, before your next meeting, when you think there's a more senior person that will be present, spend two minutes preparing one thing to say, not a speech or a presentation, just something like a question, an observation, or insight that you've made through connecting two things.

Write it down before you go in so you've got it there and say it in the first 15 minutes before the room fills up with other noises and your window closes. Think back to that CEO and his team. They had the ideas, every single one of them. The difference between saying it in the room and saying it in the corridor afterwards is everything. One advances your career, the other advances the conversation that you're already having with the person next to you.

Which one do you think is more important? Two minutes of preparation, one contribution, first 15 minutes. And then finally, little move number three, the warm name drop. And this is about building your image. So once a month, just once, tell someone two levels above you about something that happened. Warm, briefly, 15 seconds.

might be in passing at the coffee machine at the end of a meeting in a one line email.

Let's take those two examples we looked at earlier. How would it sound like here? So the Robertson account renewed this week, really tough. The team worked so hard to get it there. And now we have a new reporting system we can use to add greater value with other clients too.

or I wanted you to know that Mara presented independently for the first time today

you would have been really proud of her.

You're not bragging, you're making sure that the person who has influence over your next opportunity has something warm, specific and recent to associate with your name. Harvey Coleman called this managing your exposure. Once a month, 15 seconds, warm, specific.

So let's bring this back to those three moments from Monday. The promotion that went to somebody else, the idea you didn't say out loud and the brilliant work that somehow just wasn't enough. None of these moments happened because you weren't good enough.

it rewards performance. Nobody told you that. Nobody handed you the breakdown.

when they handed you your job title. Pi is not a manipulation. It's not peacocking. It is your map. It shows you where the terrain actually is. And the three moves don't ask you to change who you are.

They ask you to make sure who you are is visible to the people who need to see it.

And remember those three moves, the headline, the room

the warm name drop. That is the exposure and image columns of Pi being actively managed intentionally and intentionally done consistently is how little moves become the thing that looks from the outside like an extraordinary career.

So on Friday, you have the song chosen specifically for the woman who has just understood the game she's in and is now deciding on her own terms to play it differently her way, plus three quick fire moves that make the headline,

the room and the warm name drop even easier to actually do. So before Friday, a question for you. Where is your work currently invisible and who needs to be able to see it?

Please send this episode to a woman, a friend or colleague who is frustrated that her career isn't moving at the speed she wants it to. This may help and block her. See you Friday and remember, make your move, even if it's tiny, especially if it's tiny.