There is a shift that needs to happen as we become more senior in our careers, but I don’t think we talk about it enough.
Early on, much of our professional life is about proving ourselves. We build expertise, demonstrate that we can deliver, learn how the organisation works and establish our credibility. We want people to know that we are capable and can be trusted with greater responsibility.
That makes sense. We are building the foundations of our careers.
But for many women, the proving never really stops.
We get the promotion and immediately start working to demonstrate that we deserved it. We enter the senior meeting and feel we need to be exceptionally well prepared before we speak. We step into leadership and continue trying to know every detail, solve every problem and have an answer for every question.
At some point, leadership asks something different of us. It asks us to move from continually proving that we deserve to be there to trusting that we have earned our place and learning how to inhabit it.
The habits that helped you succeed can follow you into leadership
Most leadership roles don’t come with a magical internal transformation.
You can receive the title, the team and the authority while still carrying all the habits that helped you get there.
Perhaps you’ve built your career by being extraordinarily prepared. You may be known for your expertise, your ability to solve difficult problems or your willingness to take responsibility. Maybe you’ve learned that being useful is one of the safest ways to establish your value.
These qualities can take you a long way. But leadership changes what is required.
If you continue measuring your contribution by how much you personally know, fix or deliver, you can end up doing a more senior version of your old job rather than actually stepping into leadership.
The work becomes less about demonstrating your individual capability and more about creating clarity, making decisions, developing other people and holding responsibility for outcomes you cannot personally control.
That transition can be much harder than it sounds.
Expertise and authority are not the same thing
One of the most uncomfortable parts of becoming a more senior leader is discovering that you will increasingly find yourself in rooms where other people know more than you do.
They should.
If you’re leading talented people, they will often have deeper technical knowledge than you. If your remit expands, you will be responsible for areas you haven’t spent your career mastering. As decisions become more complex, there may be no single answer that can be found through enough research or preparation.
You still need to be informed. You still need to ask good questions and understand enough to exercise sound judgment. But leadership cannot depend on always being the most knowledgeable person in the room.
For women who have relied heavily on expertise to establish credibility, this can feel exposing. If knowing is how you’ve learned to feel safe, not knowing can feel like evidence that you don’t belong.
But authority at a senior level comes from somewhere broader than expertise. It comes from judgment, experience and the ability to hold complexity without needing certainty before you act. It also comes from knowing when to trust the expertise of others.
You don’t diminish your authority by saying, I don’t know enough about this yet. Talk me through it.
Sometimes that is exactly what good leadership looks like.
Leadership requires you to take up your role
Authority can be a complicated word for women.
We often associate it with dominance, hierarchy or a style of leadership we may not want to emulate. Many women have also spent years learning how to exercise influence without appearing too forceful, how to be confident without being perceived as arrogant, and how to navigate the narrower range of behaviour that women leaders can sometimes be afforded.
Those dynamics are real. Women don’t lead in a vacuum, and the same behaviour can still be interpreted differently depending on who is displaying it.
But rejecting authoritarian leadership doesn’t require us to reject authority itself.
If you have been entrusted with a leadership role, there are moments when people need you to occupy it. They need you to make the decision when there isn’t consensus, name the issue others are avoiding, set expectations or provide direction when the path forward isn’t completely clear.
You can do those things while remaining collaborative and deeply human.
In fact, authentic leadership isn’t about becoming less authoritative. It is about finding a way to exercise authority that is congruent with who you are.
Stop using overwork as evidence of commitment
One of the ways proving can continue in leadership is through work itself.
We tell ourselves that because we are responsible for more, we need to do more. We stay across every detail, make ourselves available for everything and step in whenever there is a problem. Being busy becomes evidence that we’re taking the role seriously.
But seniority doesn’t mean you should personally carry more and more of the organisation.
The nature of your contribution needs to change.
There may be things you were once praised for doing that you now need to stop doing. Decisions someone else should make. Meetings you no longer need to attend. Problems your team needs the opportunity to solve without you.
Letting go of those things can feel strangely uncomfortable because they provide tangible evidence that we are contributing. Thinking, discerning, setting direction and creating the conditions for other people to succeed can feel less concrete than producing something ourselves.
But leadership isn’t measured by how exhausted you are at the end of the week.
Sometimes doing less of the work is what allows you to lead more of it.
You will make decisions without knowing exactly what will happen
This may be one of the biggest transitions of all.
As responsibility increases, so does ambiguity.
You will make decisions with incomplete information. You will choose between options that each carry risk. You will occasionally make the wrong call. There will be outcomes you couldn’t have predicted and circumstances beyond your control.
No amount of preparation removes that reality.
If you believe leadership requires certainty, you will either delay decisions until certainty arrives or experience enormous anxiety every time it doesn’t.
Neither is sustainable.
The goal isn’t to become careless or overly certain of yourself. It’s to develop enough trust in your own judgment that you can make the best decision available to you, remain open to new information and adjust when necessary.
That is very different from needing to prove you were right.
You don’t need to become someone else to look like a leader
I’ve worked with many women who reach a more senior level and begin looking around for clues about how they are supposed to behave.
They become more formal because senior leaders seem formal. They speak differently in meetings. They suppress warmth or vulnerability because they worry those qualities will undermine their credibility. Sometimes they unconsciously adopt the leadership style of the person who held the role before them.
This is understandable. When we enter unfamiliar territory, we look for models.
But leadership becomes much more powerful when we stop performing our idea of what authority should look like and begin developing a way of leading that is genuinely our own.
That doesn’t mean simply doing whatever feels comfortable. Leadership asks us to stretch, develop new capacities and sometimes behave in ways that don’t come naturally.
Authenticity isn’t staying exactly as you are.
It is being able to grow without abandoning yourself in the process.
You have already been given the seat
There will always be moments when you question yourself in leadership. A bigger role creates bigger decisions, and none of us reaches a level where we suddenly know everything we need to know.
But there is a difference between questioning a decision and continually questioning your right to make one.
If you’ve spent much of your career proving that you’re capable, it may take conscious effort to recognise when you no longer need to operate from that place.
You don’t have to know everything before you speak. You don’t need to personally solve every problem to justify your position, and you don’t need to replicate somebody else’s leadership style to demonstrate that you belong.
The work now is different.
It’s learning to trust your judgment while remaining open to challenge. It’s allowing other people to bring expertise you don’t have and becoming comfortable with the responsibility of making decisions when there isn’t a perfect answer.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s recognising that leadership isn’t something you prove you deserve every day.
At some point, you have to allow yourself to lead.
If you’re thinking about the kind of leader you want to become, Authentic Leadership is one of the individual Women Rising modules available through The Career Studio. It will help you understand your strengths, values and leadership style, and develop a way of leading that feels genuinely aligned with who you are.
Because stepping into greater leadership shouldn’t require you to become someone else.
It should allow you to become more fully yourself.