Something came up in a session with one of our program participants recently that we hear almost every time.
She is a senior people and culture leader. Twenty years of experience, restructures, national teams, the lot. She had spent hours pulling her profile together and she said this:
"When you are so far inside your own thing, you cannot see it. The further you go, the more you have done. And when you pull it all together it is overwhelming."
That is the problem in one line.
What actually happens when you write your own story
You have two instincts and they both work against you.
The first is to put everything in. Every project, every system, every restructure, because it all felt significant at the time and leaving things out feels like lying by omission. The result is a profile nobody finishes reading. And nobody is going to spend ten minutes on your LinkedIn profile. They are scanning, and half of them are thinking about what they are cooking for dinner.
The second instinct is the opposite. You strip it back so far that all that is left is a list of duties. You worry you are being too granular, too in the weeds, not senior enough. So you take out the specifics, which are the only things that actually proved anything.
Both instincts come from the same place. You cannot judge your own work, because you were there for all of it.
What we saw that she could not
Two roles on her profile had no achievements at all. Five years in one of them. She had led people and culture across an entire business and restructured her own reporting line out of existence, and none of it was there.
Not because she did not know it mattered. Because she had been deep in the detail for hours, editing and rewriting, and by the time she got to those roles she had lost sight of what a stranger would see.
It took us about thirty seconds to spot it.
The filter that makes this easier
When someone senior is being assessed, it comes down to three things. Did you keep them away from risk. Did you save them money. Did you save them money in other ways, usually through retention.
Everything you write should be pointing at one of those. If it is not, it is probably detail you can lose.
That is the test that is very hard to apply to your own work and very easy to apply to someone else's.
This is not a confidence problem
We want to be clear about that, because people assume it is.
The people who come through our programs are not short on capability or self belief. They are senior, they are accomplished, and they know exactly what they have done. What they do not have is distance. You cannot read your own career the way a recruiter reads it, because you know the context, the politics, the why. A recruiter gets six lines and a scan.
Another participant described her CPO playing something back to her, and how the version that came back was so much better than what she had said. Same content. Different distance.
That is the whole job.
If this is where you are
You do not need to start again. You almost certainly have the material already, sitting in your CV or in your head, in the wrong order and at the wrong level.
What you need is someone on the outside who knows what the market is looking for, reading it cold and telling you what is missing.
That is what we do every week.
Bianca and Emma
People & Purpose
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