Hi friend.
Nine consultations this week. Different industries. Different titles. Different runway situations. Same pattern. Respectfully, what are we doing.
One of you walked in having just acquired two companies for $7 billion. Without an M&A team. Her words: "She's like, I thought an agency did that. I go, no, they do not do this."
One of you is wrapping a healthcare nonprofit you ran as COO, while running the wind-down, while job hunting, while trying to figure out if you should "wait it out" or activate the network now. "I'm getting all kinds of mixed messages, and so my brain right now is just kind of all over the place."
One of you negotiated a base, a sign-on, AND an exit package on the way into a global executive role. And said the sentence I want every one of you to read three times: "So many women never think of that, and men do all the time."
One of you applied to 400 roles since last summer. Got one interview. Showed me what you called "80,000 versions" of your resume.
And six of you. Different rooms. Different days. Same sentence.
"This does not sound like me at all. I'm not in here."
"I struggle in verbalizing what I actually can do."
"What's the hardest thing for women to do? Toot our own horns."
"I would have never talked about myself like that. I would have never gotten there."
This is the pattern. The data is real. The narrative is missing.
You are running $3B pipelines. You are integrating acquisitions with no integration team. You are turning around data businesses that "no one really thought they needed." You are coaching senior leaders who claim to care about people while wrecking their lives. You are, every single one of you, doing the work of three to five people for one paycheck.
And the words on your resume, your LinkedIn, your bio, your pitch in the room? They sound like a sanitized agency wrote them. About somebody else, who never actually did the work.
That gap is not a personal failing; it is the system working as designed. McKinsey and Lean In's Women in the Workplace 2025 report found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women are. The broken rung is real, it has now persisted for 11 straight years, and it compounds at every level after that.
And here is the receipt that should make every one of us sit up. Korn Ferry interviewed 57 women who had run large U.S. corporations. 65% of them said they did not realize being CEO was a career option until somebody else told them.
Read that twice. The CEOs themselves did not see themselves in the room until somebody named the room out loud.
And here is the part most pieces will not say out loud. Some of this is also on us, not as a character flaw, as a habit. The system trained the silence in. We sometimes keep performing it long after we left the building. Muscle memory is real. Muscle memory is also retrainable. It is time.
This Week's Perspective Shift
If your resume reads like an agency wrote it, the market will price you like an agency hire.
The work to translate your scale into your own voice is not a vanity project. It is the precondition for the next role, the next negotiation, and the next exit package you write into your contract on the way in. Not on the way out. On the way in.
So here is the upgraded script.
Stop saying "led cross-functional initiatives" when what you mean is "ran a $7B acquisition without an M&A function."
Stop saying "supported strategic priorities" when what you mean is "I am the reason this number exists."
Stop saying "I struggle to talk about myself" and start saying "Here is what I built. Here is what it returned. Here is what it cost. Here is what nobody else in the room could have done."
That is not bragging. That is documentation.
Try this
Pull up your last performance review. Highlight every number. Those are receipts. They belong on your resume in Action + Outcome + Context language, not buried in HR-speak.
Write down the most recent thing you did that nobody else in your company could have done. Three sentences. That is your pitch.
Read your current LinkedIn About section out loud. If it does not sound like you, it is not yours yet. It is a draft somebody else would have written.
Add the exit package conversation to your negotiation list before your next role. Yes. On the way in. The men in your industry already do.
If this is the year you stop being unclear about yourself in public, this is the work we do. Scroll-stopping resumes, LinkedIn audits, executive bios, briefs, and the cover letter that matches. We write. We help. We do not coach.
Reply "ME" and we will get you on the calendar. Or simply book here.
Kate
P.S. If you read this and a specific name popped into your head, forward it. The women who get hired at this level are the ones whose friends keep saying their names in rooms they are not in yet.
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