The Story Being Told About You Is Wrong (And You're Letting It Happen)

A few years ago, my client Cassandra was called “cute” by a co-worker. Twice. By two different people.

Though new in her job at the time, Cassandra was highly experienced and skilled. Nothing very “cute” about that. After some initial analysis she realized (based on all that experience and skill) that the company’s current methodology for creating client proposals wasn’t optimal. So, she added some extra tweaks to a document to make it more useful and ultimately, adoptable. Again, nothing “cute” going on here.

Her much older colleagues (who are at the same management level as her) however, found differently. They found her highly professional, customer focused behavior to be very “cute” indeed. They also found it both necessary and appropriate to tell her this.

WTF?

It’s not just Cassandra. I guarantee people at work are telling stories about you right now.

They’re doing it in the conference room after you leave. And over coffee with the hiring manager you haven't met yet. It’s happening in the Slack thread between two senior leaders who are quietly deciding if they should give you that high-visibility project you’ve been lobbying for.

And here’s what truly sucks about that: most of those stories were written without your input and have very little to do with who you actually are and what you’re actually capable of.

The good news is that the narrative that follows you through an organization is not fixed. It can be shaped, redirected, and built intentionally. But doing that requires you to stop treating your reputation as something that simply happens to you and start treating it as something you actively manage.

That shift is harder than it sounds, especially if you were trained early in your career to let the work speak for itself.

The thing is though; it doesn't. The work is sitting in a corner, not speaking to anyone.

Why the Default Narrative Rarely Flatters You

If you haven't been intentional about your narrative, a default one has almost certainly been written for you. And the default narrative for high-performing women follows a few recognizable, career-limiting patterns.

You are "reliable." Which is a word people use when they want to say capable but not necessarily leadership material. You are "detail-oriented," a quality celebrated at your current level and quietly used to keep you there. You are "a great team player," which sometimes translates to: we don't picture her at the strategy table, but she'll make sure the deck looks good before the meeting.

This is not accidental, and it is not a you problem. There are decades of psychological studies explaining exactly why it happens.

Social psychologist Alice Eagly's Role Congruity Theory and Madeline Heilman's Lack of Fit model together form one of the most replicated findings in organizational psychology: women are broadly perceived as "communal" (warm, helpful, collaborative, kind) while men are perceived as "agentic" (assertive, decisive, competent, leader-like).

Leadership, meanwhile, is culturally coded as agentic. Which means that when people are forming a quick impression of who belongs in a senior role, the mental template they are working from looks a lot more like your male colleague than like you, regardless of what either of you have actually delivered.

The truly maddening part is the double bind this creates. If you lean into communal behavior, you are seen as warm but not leadership material. If you exhibit agentic behavior, the same research shows you risk backlash for violating gender expectations: perceived as less likable, less hireable, or just generally "a lot." You know the word. We all know the word.

This is the structural backdrop against which your narrative is being written. And within that structure, the women who advance are, with some frequency, the ones who have figured out how to shape what people say about them in rooms they are not in.

What Narrative Management Is Not

Before getting into what you can actually do, a few things that narrative management is not, because there is a lot of bad advice floating around this topic.

It is not self-promotion theatre

If your instinct is to cringe at the words "personal brand," I get it. A lot of what gets called personal branding is performative, exhausting, and transparently strategic in a way that reads as hollow. Nobody is asking you to write LinkedIn posts about your morning routine or appear on a ring light talking about your leadership philosophy while a candle burns meaningfully in the background.

It is not spin

Narrative management is not about making people believe something that isn't true. It's about making sure the true things about you are the ones that get told, clearly and consistently, instead of being buried under a pile of impressions formed in passing.

It is not a one-time fix

You don't have one good conversation and check the box. Your reputation is updated continuously by everyone who interacts with you, which means managing it is ongoing work, not a project with a completion date.

How to Actually Shape the Story

Here is where most career advice goes vague on you. "Build your personal brand." "Be more visible." Thank you, that is extremely helpful, I will go do that immediately.

Let's be more specific.

Step 1: Audit what narrative currently exists

You cannot change a story you haven't read. Before you strategize, you need an honest picture of what people currently think, say, and assume about you.

Start by paying attention to the patterns in how people introduce you. Do they lead with your title and then immediately describe your operational function? Do they emphasize your helpfulness rather than your thinking? When your name comes up for a stretch opportunity, which ones are they? Execution-heavy projects or the ones where someone needs to own a strategic call?

The assignments you receive are narrative data. If you are consistently handed the stabilization work, the relationship repair, the behind-the-scenes complexity, and you want to be known as a strategic leader, that gap is telling you something.

If you have a trusted colleague or mentor who will give you an honest answer, ask them directly: "What do you think people in this organization say about me when my name comes up?" Brace yourself. The answer may be illuminating in the way that a cold shower is illuminating.

Step 2: Define what you actually want to be known for

Not twenty things. Not everything you're good at. Three. These should be specific enough to be memorable and ambitious enough to represent where you are going, not just where you have been.

"Reliable" is not one of them. Neither is "hardworking" or "dedicated." These are the professional equivalent of describing someone as "nice" on a dating profile.

Think instead about the problem you uniquely solve, the perspective you bring that isn't coming from anyone else in the room, and the outcome that follows you across roles and organizations. That combination is the beginning of a real narrative. Write the three things down. If you can't articulate them in one sentence each, neither can anyone who is trying to advocate for you.

Step 3: Deliver the narrative consistently and strategically

Your narrative is not built in the annual performance review. It is built in hundreds of small moments throughout the year. The question you ask in a leadership meeting that shows you are thinking two levels above your current role. The recommendation you frame not just as a solution but as a strategic choice with tradeoffs. The email you send that demonstrates you have a point of view, not just an update.

Here is a practical structure for this: before any significant meeting, presentation, or high-visibility interaction, ask yourself which of your three narrative pillars you can demonstrate in this moment. Not artificially. Not by wedging it in. But by intentionally using the opportunity to show rather than just do.

If one of your three things is "I see the market dynamics others miss," then when someone asks for your read on a problem, you give a market context before you give a recommendation. Every time. That repetition is how a reputation is built.

Step 4: Recruit third-party narrators

This is the part that makes people uncomfortable, and it is also the part that matters most.

You cannot be the only person telling your story. Research on impression management in organizational settings has consistently found that the most durable professional reputations are maintained and spread by others, not just by the person themselves. The most credible account of your leadership is one that comes from someone other than you, because the moment you say "I'm a strategic thinker," someone in the room is silently auditing that claim.

When someone else says it about you, it lands differently.

This is why sponsors matter far more than mentors at any stage where you are trying to advance. A mentor talks to you about your career. A sponsor talks about your career when you are not in the room. That difference is enormous.

Cultivating a sponsor is not about schmoozing or performing gratitude. It's about building a relationship where someone senior understands your work deeply enough and trusts your judgment enough to put their name next to yours in a conversation you'll never hear. Give them material to work with: share your thinking on organizational challenges, show them where you've made calls that paid off, let them see the version of you that is operating above your title. If no one in your organization fits this description, that is the most urgent career problem you have, and fixing it should move to the top of your list.

Step 5: Correct the narrative in real time when it drifts

There will be moments when the story being told about you is wrong, reductive, or outdated. Staying quiet in those moments is not modesty. It is abdication.

If you’re in a meeting and someone mischaracterizes your contribution, you correct it in the room, calmly, specifically, and without a lengthy apology for having an opinion. "Actually, I'd frame my role in that project a bit differently. I was leading the strategic scoping, not just the coordination." One sentence. Then you move on.

If you notice over time that you are consistently getting credit for execution but not for the judgment calls that made the execution possible, that pattern needs a direct conversation with your manager. Not a vague "I feel underrecognized" conversation, but a specific one: "I want to make sure the decision-making component of my work is visible in how my contributions get described, particularly when my name comes up for new opportunities. Can we talk about how to do that?"

This is uncomfortable. Do it anyway. Discomfort has a shorter half-life than a narrative that caps your career.

The Thing Nobody Tells You About Trying to Get Promoted

Early in your career, you got ahead largely by being very good at your job. The technical excellence, the reliability, the ability to deliver under pressure: those things brought you to where you are now.

At every subsequent level, the game changes. The criteria shift from what you have delivered to who you are as a leader, how you think, who follows you, what problems you see before others do. And critically, whether the people making advancement decisions can tell a coherent, compelling story about why you belong at the next level.

That story is your narrative. You can leave it to chance, or you can help write it. The women who move up tend to understand, often after one bitterly instructive missed promotion, that shaping perception is part of the job. It is not vanity. It is not a distraction from the real work. It is the real work, and it always has been.

You can leave your narrative to chance, or you can help write it. One of those options has a better track record.

A Starting Point

If you want to pressure-test your current narrative, try this. The next time you are in a room with senior leadership, listen to how you are described when someone introduces an idea you contributed to. Listen to what language gets used. Notice what is emphasized and what is left out.

That is a thin slice of your current narrative. Is it the story you would write yourself?

If not, you know where to start.

Well Hellooooooo there! Not sure how you're currently showing up in the rooms that matter? The Stuck Director Assessment can help you identify exactly where your visibility and positioning might be working against you, and what to do about it.