There is a version of you that exists in the minds of the people who decide your career. They have a picture, a story, a set of assumptions about who you are, what you are ready for, and where you belong. And the uncomfortable truth is that this version is almost never fully accurate.
For women in STEM, and especially for women of colour and Black women, that gap between your actual identity and your perceived identity is not just frustrating. It is expensive. It costs you promotions, raises, stretch assignments, and opportunities. In Episode 062 of the Lunch with Leaders podcast, Adaeze Iloeje-Udeogalanya names this gap precisely and gives you a clear, strategic path to close it before it costs you another year.
Listen to Episode 062: The Story They Tell: Transforming How Decision Makers See You
The Picture in Their Heads
Think about the decision makers in your organisation right now. These are the people who decide who gets tapped for the VP role, who gets invited to the leadership table, who gets considered when a stretch assignment opens up. Now ask yourself one honest question: do you actually know what they think of you?
Not what you hope they think. Not what you believe they should think based on your track record. What they actually think.
Adaeze is direct about what her two decades of navigating the workplace have taught her. There is always a story already in the room. Decision makers have formed assumptions about who you are, what you are capable of, and what you deserve. Those assumptions arrived before you had a chance to shape them. And the system that built them is not neutral.
For women, particularly women of colour, the narrative decision makers carry is almost always incomplete. It is shaped by bias, filtered through a system not designed to see the full picture of who you are or what you bring. And that incomplete picture is driving decisions about your future every day, whether you are aware of it or not.
Why Hard Work Makes It Worse
This is the part that stings, and it deserves to be said clearly. Working harder does not fix this problem. In most cases, it deepens it.
When you become the person who solves every problem, absorbs every crisis, and delivers on every impossible deadline, you build a specific reputation. You become indispensable exactly where you are. And organisations have very little incentive to move someone who is perfectly filling a critical gap at the current level.
Adaeze shares this from her own experience. Earlier in her career, she was the go-to problem solver. Any fire that needed putting out, she was called. Any crisis that needed managing, she was sent. It felt fulfilling. Also, it also quietly stalled her career, because the story being built about her was not “future leader.” It was “reliable executor.” Those are very different narratives, and only one of them gets you promoted.
A 2025 Yale study cited in this episode makes this concrete: women are consistently rated as strong performers and simultaneously underestimated for leadership potential. Strong performance is working against advancement. The harder you work without managing the narrative, the more deeply you entrench the wrong story.
A Gallup study adds another dimension. Women are more engaged, more committed, and more motivated than their male counterparts right now, and they are still burning out faster and advancing slower. The effort is not the problem. The story is.
Once a Story Is Set, It Sticks
Understanding why the narrative is so hard to change once it is established helps explain why you cannot afford to be passive about it now.
Human beings default to cognitive efficiency. When decision makers already have a story about someone, they look for evidence that confirms it, not evidence that contradicts it. Updating a narrative requires effort and intention. It is not something they will do spontaneously, regardless of how much you deliver.
Adaeze puts it plainly. If you are waiting for other people to take the initiative to update the narrative they have about you, you could be waiting a very long time. The story they have will not update itself. It will only update if you actively, deliberately, and consistently give them a different one to replace it with.
This is not a comfortable truth. It requires accepting that the outcome of your career is not solely determined by the quality of your work. It is significantly shaped by the quality of the narrative surrounding your work. And that narrative is your responsibility to manage.
Hear Adaeze break this down in full: Listen to Episode 062 of Lunch with Leaders
The Woman Who Got Laid Off and Rehired at Three Times the Salary
Adaeze shares a story in this episode that captures the stakes of invisible value more powerfully than any statistic could.
A woman at a company was laid off as part of a cost-cutting exercise. Nobody in leadership had a clear picture of what she actually did or how critical her work was to a major ongoing programme. She was invisible to the people making the decision, so she was cut.
Shortly after, the company discovered that the programme could not proceed without her. Every day of delay was costing millions of dollars. They brought her back, but this time as a consultant at three times her previous salary.
Her value never changed. What changed was the decision makers’ sudden, forced awareness of it. The tragedy is that she had to be laid off for that awareness to arrive. Her invisibility, not her incompetence, nearly ended her career there.
This story is not an outlier. It is a pattern. Women in STEM frequently do critical, irreplaceable work while remaining largely invisible to the people who matter most to their advancement. The work speaks. The room just cannot hear it yet.
Owning Your Narrative Is Leadership
One of the most important reframes in this episode is the distinction between self-promotion and leadership expression. These are not the same thing, and confusing them keeps women silent in exactly the moments when they most need to speak.
Making your value visible to decision makers is not arrogance. It is a leadership responsibility. When you walk into a room and leave an inaccurate impression of your capability, when you let an incomplete story go unchallenged, when you stay quiet while someone with less impact gets more visibility, you are not being humble. You are being invisible.
Adaeze offers a set of concrete strategies for taking ownership of the narrative:
- Walk into rooms with intention: Every interaction with a decision maker is an opportunity to update the story they carry about you. Prepare for those moments rather than letting them happen by accident.
- Speak up when you can update the narrative: When a project lands well, when you solve a complex problem, when you drive a meaningful outcome, say so. Clearly. In language that connects your contribution to the business impact it created.
- Make your leadership potential obvious: Do not wait for people to notice that you are ready for more. Give them specific, visible evidence of your strategic thinking, your people leadership, and your capacity to operate at the next level.
- Ensure the right people have the full picture: This is not about broadcasting yourself constantly. It is about making sure the specific people who influence decisions about your career actually know what you do and what you are capable of.
Your One Action Step This Week
Adaeze closes the episode with a direct challenge. This week, identify at least one decision maker in your organisation and do a genuine audit of what they know about you.
Ask yourself:
- What does this person actually know about my work and my impact?
- What story are they telling about me, if they are telling one at all?
- Is that the story I want them to have?
- What would I want them to say if someone asked about me today?
Let the answers to those questions inform your next move. Not what you wish the answers were. What they actually are.
This exercise is uncomfortable for most people. It is also one of the most useful things you can do for your career this week. You cannot change a story you have not examined. And you cannot examine a story you are too afraid to look at.
This connects directly to the storytelling and narrative work explored in Episode 061 — Anatola Araba: Imagination as Innovation and World Building for the Future, where Anatola made the case that the stories we tell about ourselves and our futures are not separate from our achievements. They shape what becomes possible. The same principle applies inside your organisation. The narrative preceding you in every room shapes what decisions get made about you in every room.
The Leadership Edge Diagnostic
To give this work a precise starting point, Adaeze introduces the Leadership Edge Diagnostic, a free five-minute assessment that measures how you are showing up across five dimensions.
The five dimensions are:
- Authority
- Influence
- Visibility
- Relationships
- Resilience
The diagnostic identifies exactly where the gaps are between how you are currently being seen and how you want to be seen. It does not just name the problem in vague terms. It shows you specifically which dimension needs the most attention and where to direct your energy first.
Access it free at link.africanwomeninstem.com/leadership. Adaeze describes it as probably the best five minutes you will spend this week, and based on what this episode surfaces, that is not an exaggeration.
Conclusion
You are not being held back by who you are. You may be held back by who people think you are.
That distinction is both painful and empowering. Painful because it means the effort you have been pouring into your work has not been enough on its own. Empowering because it means the thing standing between you and your next role is not some unfixable deficit. It is a story. And stories can be changed.
The women Adaeze works with in her coaching practice tell her the same thing when they finally make the move and get the role and the recognition they have been working toward. They say: I did not change who I was. I just changed how I was being seen.
That is the work. Not harder delivery, not more patient waiting. Not hoping the right people will eventually notice what you have been building. Strategic, deliberate, consistent ownership of the narrative that follows you into every room.
Start with one decision maker. Run the diagnostic. And decide today that you are done letting an incomplete story make decisions about your future.
Listen to the full episode: Episode 062 — The Story They Tell: Transforming How Decision Makers See You
Take the Leadership Edge Diagnostic: link.africanwomeninstem.com/leadership
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