Career Suicide. For Who?

I’ve been told, in a hundred quiet ways, that writing this would be career suicide.

For who?

If a company reads this and decides not to hire me, they’ve just handed me something I’d otherwise spend two years learning from the inside. They know the environment. They’re comfortable with it. That isn’t a door closing. That’s a door labeling itself.

So let me say the thing we usually only say behind closed doors.

We talk constantly about women supporting women. We almost never talk about what happens when scarcity turns women into threats to each other.

I have worked with extraordinary women. Women who advocate when the person isn’t in the room. Who make introductions without needing credit. Who see someone talented coming up behind them and create more room instead of less. Most of the women I’ve worked with have been this.

This isn’t an indictment of women.

It’s an indictment of insecurity standing too close to power.

And there’s a version of it that deserves more attention precisely because it’s uncomfortable to talk about: when someone who fought their way into a scarce leadership seat starts protecting that seat from the people coming up behind them.

I’ve lived that version.

The leader who agrees with you in private and goes silent when it counts. The mentor whose support slowly becomes surveillance. The praise that sounds generous until you realize it has a ceiling built into it. The exclusion that’s subtle enough to deny.

And the most damaging version: the slow construction of a narrative that you’re not quite competent, not quite ready, don’t quite understand the business.

Not through one dramatic lie. Through enough small suggestions that eventually other people start repeating them.

That’s what makes this behavior so effective. And when it happens inside a system where people are already competing for fewer leadership seats, the damage compounds.

Because now the scarcity isn’t just coming from the structure. We’re enforcing it on each other.

The part that took me the longest to accept

Once someone has decided you’re a threat, your behavior stops being the variable.

You can show up early. Mentor generously. Support them in the room and outside of it. Hand them wins. Do the work flawlessly.

It doesn’t matter.

Once the agenda is set, it isn’t an opinion anymore. It’s a plan. And the follow-through happens no matter what you do.

That’s the cruelest part. It’s also the most freeing, once you understand it.

You cannot outperform a decision that was never about your performance.

The threat was never your conduct. It was your capability. And you cannot behave your way out of being capable.

So you stop auditioning for a verdict that was sealed before you walked in. You stop pouring your best self into the one seat incapable of receiving it.

The only real counter to an agenda you can’t stop is to stop standing in its range. Not by shrinking. By building somewhere your talent isn’t a threat to someone’s survival.

What the diversity conversation has underexamined

We spent years fighting for representation in leadership, and representation matters. But representation alone was never the finish line.

Getting through the door matters. What you do with the door once you’re inside matters more.

Do you guard it? Or do you make it easier for talented people behind you to walk through it too?

Because putting a different person in the chair doesn’t automatically change the leadership model. Scarcity leadership can wear any face.

Men do this too. Of course they do. We just tend to have different language for it: politics, turf protection, empire building, succession management. The underlying behavior is the same.

Someone else’s capability feels like a threat to your relevance, so instead of becoming better, you make them smaller.

That’s not a gender problem. That’s a leadership problem.

Insecurity has an operating cost

I’ve become increasingly convinced that this isn’t only corrosive to people. It’s expensive.

When talented people have to spend energy managing politics, defending their credibility, figuring out who is safe, or making sure someone else doesn’t take credit for their work, that energy isn’t going into the product. It isn’t going into customers. It isn’t going into solving the hard problem.

Insecurity has an operating cost. Trust has an operating return.

That’s why I don’t believe developing people and delivering results are competing priorities. The strongest teams I’ve led weren’t strong despite the trust we built. They were strong because of it.

People challenged me. They challenged each other. They took risks because being wrong wasn’t politically fatal. They shared what they knew because knowledge wasn’t currency to hoard.

And when someone became capable of doing something I used to be needed for, I didn’t see a threat. I saw leverage.

The best thing I’ve built was never the deliverable

It was the capability left behind. The person who stopped waiting for permission. The leader who became better than me at something I once owned. The person who walked into a room differently because someone had made it safe for them to realize they belonged there. The team that could operate without me.

That’s the point. I don’t want to be indispensable because everyone around me stayed small. I want to become unnecessary because everyone around me got bigger.

And yes, I want more women in leadership. But I want something harder than representation.

I want people who get through the door and turn around. I want leaders secure enough to hire people who scare them a little. I want executives whose legacy isn’t how long they kept the chair, but how many people became capable of sitting in it because they were there.

I want to build in rooms where talented people make each other better, not smaller.

If saying that closes a few doors, fine. Those doors just labeled themselves.

Career suicide.

For who?