Lady Leader, I want you to think about a moment. Maybe it was your first week in a new role. Maybe it was a leadership team meeting last month where you looked around the room and thought to yourself, I do not fit here. Maybe nobody looked like you, or maybe the culture felt foreign. Maybe the way decisions got made, the way people talked to each other, the way success was defined. None of it felt like you. And perhaps you were right. Maybe the environment was really difficult. Maybe there were things happening in that organization that were real and unfair and completely exhausting. But here's what I want to ask you today. What did you do with that feeling? Did you get curious about it? Did you examine it? Did you ask yourself whether fit was even something you decided to care about? Or did you hold on to it, let it settle in, and slowly start making decisions from that place? Because honestly, I've done both, and I know the difference between what it costs you. I'm Dr. Nicole Bryan, and this is Leading Her Introvert Way. And today we are going to be talking about fit, what it actually is, the three very different ways it shows up, and the one way it might be quietly running your career without your permission. This is the second episode in our Leadership Identity series. If you missed the first one, go back and listen to episode 141. It sets the foundation for everything we're doing in this series. But if you're here and you're ready to move forward, let's get into it.
Welcome back, Lady Leader. I'm Dr. Nicole Bryan. I'm an executive leadership psychologist, an executive coach, and your host. We are in our leadership identity series, and today we're going to be going deeper. Last episode, episode 141, we talked about what leadership identity is, how it forms, and why most of us have never been given the space to examine it deliberately. In today's episode, we're talking about one of the things that gets in the way of that examination, one of the stories that keeps some of the most talented women I know stuck in place. We're talking about fit today. I want to start by saying something that may surprise you given where this episode is going. Fit is real. Organizational fit, cultural fit, it's a legitimate concept. And as someone who spent decades as a senior HR executive, as a steward of organizational culture at some significant companies, I take it very, very seriously. I always have. Now, here's why that matters. Culture is not a soft concept. Culture is what makes organizations actually function. Culture is what allows strategy to be executed. Now, I remember sitting in business school when I was getting my MBA and hearing this phrase that has stayed with me ever since. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Meaning you can have the most brilliant business strategy in the entire world. But if the culture of the organization is toxic, if the people inside it are destructive or misaligned, that strategy is not going anywhere. Nobody's executing it. So when organizations think carefully about who belongs inside their culture, who will contribute to it, who will protect it, who will help it evolve in healthy ways, that's not wrong. That is responsible leadership. I want you to hear me clearly before we go any further, because this episode, today's episode, is not an argument against organizational culture. It's not a dismissal of the concept of fit. What it is, is an honest examination of the three very different ways that fit shows up because they're not the same thing, and conflating them is costing people. The
second face of fit is the one that is weaponized, the one that you're probably most familiar with because it does in fact happen. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that every organization uses fit responsibly or even ethically. They do not, right? They don't. There are executives, there are hiring managers, there are leadership teams who actually use fit as a convenient excuse to discriminate or to exclude others, to keep certain people out of certain rooms under the cover of language that sounds neutral and professional. She's not the right cultural fit. He doesn't quite fit our leadership profile. What that sometimes means is she doesn't look like us. He doesn't move like us. They make us uncomfortable in ways we're not willing to examine or even name. That is real. It happens, and it is a hundred percent wrong. I want to name it clearly because I'm about to challenge you. And I don't want that challenge to feel like I'm dismissing the very real ways that companies can and often do use fit as a weapon against black women, against introverted women, against anyone who doesn't fit a very narrow and often unexamined image of what leadership is supposed to look like. I see it, I've lived some versions of it, it exists. And we have to hold that truth at the same time as we hold the next one, because the next one is the one I really want to talk to you about today.
The third face of fit has nothing to do with what the company or the organization is doing to you. It has everything to do with what you're doing to yourself. And this is the one that I want to sit in for a while because this is the one I see most often. And this is the one I have personally lived. Early in my career, I took a role at Philip Morris. And I want to be clear: nobody at that organization mistreated me in any way. Nobody excluded me. Nobody did anything that I could point to and say, that's the problem. But I looked around that place and I didn't see anybody like myself anywhere. The culture felt foreign, the values felt very different from mine. And I made a decision. Not consciously, not deliberately, but I made the decision nonetheless. I started stepping back. I was showing up physically every day. I was doing the work, but I was slowly, quietly removing myself from the fabric of that company. I was creating distance. I started keeping more to myself. And I told myself a story about why. I said, I don't fit here. This isn't my place. These aren't my people. What I know now, what I can honestly say as I look back is that I did that to myself. Nobody pushed me out. I walked myself to the edge and called it someone else's fault. I did a version of the same exact thing at another company years later. Totally different industry, predominantly different demographics around me, new territory, an industry I knew nothing about, a geography that felt completely unfamiliar. And yet again, I created a narrative. I don't belong here. And again, I use that narrative to justify me pulling back. Here's the pattern that I want you to recognize because I see it constantly with the women that I coach. We feel like we don't fit. And so what do we do? We stop engaging. We close the door literally and figuratively. We do our work, but we don't build any relationships. We keep distance between ourselves and our colleagues, between ourselves and leadership, between ourselves and the company. And then, and this is the part that gets me every single time, we look up and we say, this organization doesn't embrace me. But here's the question that I will ask you the same way I've had to ask myself. Are you embracing the company? Because you can't opt out of the community of your workplace deliberately, consistently, day after day, and then be surprised that the community doesn't feel like yours. Now, I want to be careful here because I know you're listening. And as
an introvert, you don't owe anyone your energy. You do not have to perform like an extrovert. You don't have to be the person at every happy hour, the one who lingers in the hallway, the one who makes small talk for the sake of it. That's not what I'm asking of you. What I'm asking of you is this are you using your introversion as a cover for something else? Are you calling it a preference for solitude when what it really is is self-protection? Are you calling it I don't fit when what it really is is I'm scared of what happens if I actually show up fully here? Those are different things, and you deserve to know which one is true for you. So let me bring this to where I actually want to land.
Fit, cultural fit, organizational fit in all three of its forms is a construct. It's a social construct. It is not an objective standard. It shifts depending on who's defining it, who's wielding it, and what purpose it's serving in the moment? And here is the question I want you to sit with, lady leader. Is fit even on your success criteria list? When you think about what you're trying to build, your leadership legacy, your financial freedom, your influence, the doors you want to open for the women coming behind you, is fitting in really on that list? Did you write that down? Did you decide that for yourself? Or has it just been running your decisions quietly, without your permission, without your awareness, without you ever stopping to ask whether it belongs there at all? Because here's what I know from my own life and my own career. I have been different in almost every room I have ever occupied. Different in terms of how I look, how I think, how I lead, what I value. And I made a decision at some point, not all at once, but over time, that different was not the same as being wrong. That I don't need to fit a room in order to work the room. That my purpose in those spaces had nothing to do with whether the people around me fully embraced who I was. Was it always easy? No. But it was always simple. The goal was never to fit. The goal was always, always to build. And those two things don't require each other. So I'm asking you, not rhetorically, what are you actually there to do? What are you building? And do you need to fit anyone's definition of anything in order to do it? I think you already know the answer.
This is episode two of our leadership identity series. And I want to tell you what's coming. Next episode, we're going to talk about something I've been hearing more and more of lately. Black women who are saying, I don't want to be an executive. I want the soft life. I want ease. I want out. And I have thoughts about that. Specifically, whether this is a genuine choice that you're making or whether it's fear, dressed up really nice and given a very appealing name. And then we're going to close the series talking about the difference between your leadership identity and your leadership brand. What happens when who you think you are and how you're actually showing up are not the same thing and what it's quietly costing you. Now, before I let you go, if today's conversation stirred anything in you, if you're sitting with the question of whether Fit has been running your decisions in ways you didn't choose, I want to invite you to have a real conversation with me about it. I work with managers, directors, and vice presidents in a 12-week one-on-one coaching experience called the Elite Leader Experience. And this examining the stories that are shaping your leadership, getting really clear on who you actually are and who you're choosing to become in your profession as a leader, this is exactly the work we do together. If you're ready, then go ahead and book a call. Use the link in the show notes. I read every single inquiry myself.