Right role, wrong company is the wrong diagnosis

Last week I wrote about the sentence I hear more than almost any other, and why your own description of yourself keeps coming out sounding like every other strong person in your function. This week is about the move people reach for when they cannot fix that, and why it so rarely does what they hope.

You have probably already run the math on leaving.

A cleaner org, a manager who finally gets it, a company whose name looks better in the story you tell yourself. Maybe you have half-written the reply to the recruiter who keeps circling. Before you send it, it is worth sitting with one uncomfortable question, which is whether the thing you are trying to leave is actually something you will carry out the door with you.

For 25 years I sat in the rooms where these decisions get made, and I watched a version of this play out over and over. A strong performer decides the problem is the company, so they move, and within a couple of quarters the same pattern has quietly reassembled itself somewhere new. They are still the person trusted with the hard accounts and the first call when something breaks, and they are still read as the executor rather than the leader. The building changed and the read did not, because the read was never a property of the building.

How you are read is not stored at your company, waiting to be left behind.

You carry it, because it lives in how you describe your work, in what you lead with, and in the sentence other people repeat about you when you are not in the room. Change the company and you change almost everything except the one thing that was actually holding you back.

None of this means a move is wrong. Sometimes it is exactly right. But if you have not changed how your value gets read, a move does not solve the problem so much as relocate it, and it costs you the tenure you had banked to do it. The people who leave and finally break out are usually the ones who fixed the read first, and then chose to move from a position of strength rather than running from a misread they never named.

This is the third piece in a series on the gap between what you do and how you are seen. One question is worth carrying into your week. If you landed the new job tomorrow, what would you do differently in how you describe yourself, and why are you not already doing that where you are.

If you want to see which pattern is quietly misreading your value, the quiz is the fastest way to find out. Five minutes, and it is free.

→ Take the What's Your Read quiz

Onward, Laurie