I had a call last week with a client, a senior leader in finance. She felt stuck in her career, and she'd come to me for help building her executive presence.

As we were diving deeper into her leadership, I'd started noticing a pattern. So the session before last week, I'd asked her to do a small thing for me: write down everything she does at work that isn't actually her job.

She showed up with a list, and honestly, she read it to me like she was a little proud of it. The deck her boss presents upward - she builds it, because his version is not good enough and it makes the whole team look bad. Her colleague’s team – she feels their leader is weak, so his people have quietly started bringing their decisions to her instead, and she guides them, because that team used to be hers. The cross-functional mess that nobody owns - she sorts it out, because someone has to and she is fastest.

It was a long list. None of it was her job. All of it had her name on it.  

I asked her one question. Why do you do all of it?

And the answers came fast. It's better for the organization this way. The team's had a hard couple of years and deserves someone steady. If she doesn't do it, "it doesn't get done right". Besides, helping her boss win is helping herself, because when he looks good the whole team looks good, and she's on that team.

Every reason was a good reason. It was also a reason that made Pia the generous one, the reliable, the one person the place would struggle without.

That’s the tell.

I told her, “Listen to what you just did. Every single reason you gave me is a reason that makes you look good. Not one of them is a reason that’s actually good for you.”

Here is what I see, over and over, with senior women.

She does the work that isn't hers and she calls it being helpful. Being senior. Being the one who can be counted on. And some of it genuinely is.

But here is the part nobody says out loud.

Every time she does her boss’s deck, her boss never has to get better at it. Every time she makes the call for the weak leader next door, that leader never has to start leading.

➡️ Every time she quietly fixes the thing nobody owns, the people above her never have to notice it was broken.

She thinks she’s holding the place together. What she's really doing, is making it very comfortable for everyone around her to keep underperforming.

So here's the question I left Pia with.

You have a list too. You created one with your name on it - work that was never your job. Be honest about what that list's really doing. Is it proof of how much you can be trusted? Or is it the reason nobody above you has had to fix the thing that actually needs fixing?

If you have a list like that, and most of the women I work with do, look at it honestly. Pia's list kept a lot of people liking her. But it didn't move her one step closer to the job she actually wants.

/Ulrika