You got the role. The announcement went out, people wrote congratulations under it, and for about a week it felt like the hard part was over. Then a question came in that should have been yours, and it went to someone else. A few days later it happened again. Your old boss got copied on a thread about work you now own, or the person who used to cover your area got the call, and you were left reading the reply-all wondering when you became the person who gets looped in after the fact.
You start to wonder what you're doing wrong. You work a little harder, you speak up a little more in meetings, and the pattern holds anyway. The room is reacting to a sentence it already had.
The people in that room are doing something very ordinary. For a long time they had one sentence about who handles this work, and they say it without thinking. Your new title changed the org chart. It didn't change the sentence, and the sentence is what people use when you're not there to correct it. A promotion is an announcement to HR. Nobody sat the rest of the room down and told them the answer changed.
I've watched this happen in rooms for 25 years. It feels personal, and it is a timing problem. The room will keep saying the old sentence until someone gives it a new one, and the person best placed to do that is you, early, while the handoff is still easy to point to.
It can be a question to the person who gave you the role: you asked me to take this on, so what does it look like from here, your part and mine? That reminds them of the decision they made and gives them language they can repeat, so the people around them hear a new sentence before the old one sets.
Timing matters here. In the rooms I sat in, planning conversations for next year started in the fall, mostly without the people being discussed, and whatever sentence was going around then was the one people reached for.
I'm running a free workshop on this in three live sessions. You will find out what the sentence about you probably says, write the one you want said, and leave with one move to make before next year's planning conversations start.
Free workshop, three live sessions: Tuesday, November 10 at 12:00 PM ET, Thursday, November 12 at 11:00 AM ET, and Tuesday, November 17 at 11:00 AM ET. Each session is live, with no replay.
Register for the free workshop
Onward, Laurie
