She Has a Seat at the Table. She’s Leaving Anyway.

Recently I talked with a woman I coached about a year ago. Back then, she was trying to figure out how to use her influence to shift the outlook of her team. The tone. The connectedness. The way people treated each other. She had a seat at the table, and she wanted to use it for something that mattered.

This year she reached out to re-engage, and the question had changed. She’s decided she can’t stay.

Nobody is blocking her. She’s successful. No one is telling her she can’t make it to the top. She is just tired of, in her words, banging her head against a brick wall trying to change a place that doesn’t want to change. So she’s choosing herself.

Her story isn’t unusual. Successful women aren’t stepping away from corporate because they’ve hit a glass ceiling. It’s quite the opposite.

So here’s what I think is going on.

We were told we could have it all

Gen X women heard it from a very young age: you can have it all. And we were probably the first generation for whom that was true. Sort of. As Oprah put it, you can have it all, just not at the same time.

We came into the workforce bright eyed and bushy tailed, eager to prove ourselves, believing the playing field was level. Over the years we discovered the rhetoric was there, but the behaviors told a different story. The rules of the game were never written to level the field for everyone. The playbook had been written long before we arrived, by people whose experience looked nothing like ours. It fit them. It was never going to fit us the same way.

I know some women had it much harder than I did. But it still wasn’t easy.

Leadership by osmosis

There were expectations of how you were to show up. What leadership qualities were valued. What was acceptable to share, what should be kept quiet, and what you should already know.

Nobody taught you leadership. You were expected to absorb it, like osmosis. So we adopted the styles we saw working around us, styles built by and for people whose path to leadership looked very different from ours. And we adopted them as our own.

The leadership jacket

We knit together a leadership jacket. It projected strength, confidence, decisiveness, calm. Just enough feelings, because we’re women, but not too much, lest we be labeled emotional.

We projected balance, because we needed to show the women coming up behind us that if we could do this, so could they. We hid what was hard, including our own insecurities. We pretended the crass jokes were funny, that the undercurrent of sexual pressure wasn’t there, or didn’t bother us. We rolled with the punches when the team ended up at the burlesque show.

And we tried to protect the women below us by taking it on ourselves, so they wouldn’t get the full impact. Because every one of us had worked for, or with, the woman who was known to eat her young. We were determined not to be her.

And then we made it

In the end, we were rewarded for our performance. We broke the glass ceiling. We were invited into the club. We got the seat at the table. We leaned in.

We thought we were changing things, and in some respects we were. We brought different perspectives. We could take on coaching and development while still delivering results.

So what happened? If we made it, why on earth would we walk away?

Because it was a performance. We put on a mask and our leadership jacket and showed up the way they wanted us to. Somewhere along the line, we lost ourselves in it. The jacket was simultaneously 17 sizes too big and 17 sizes too small.

The whispers

For me, the whispers of doubt started slowly. Every now and then I’d hear it. Is this really it? Or, Am I supposed to be doing this?

Over time, the whispers got louder and more frequent, until I couldn’t ignore them. At the time, I hadn’t seen anyone walk away, and the idea terrified me.

But here’s what I knew. Under the performance and the mask was a leader, and a woman, with her own experiences and skills. And those skills weren’t being fully used or valued. I knew there was something I could do where I would have an impact and be joyful.

I didn’t know what it was yet. I just knew it wasn’t this.

Looking back, I think I heard the same whispers in my client a year ago. She was already describing the brick wall. She could already see that the culture wasn’t shifting the way she’d hoped. But she wasn’t ready to let go of the idea that she could change it from the inside, and I wasn’t going to push her there. That isn’t denial. That’s what the whispers sound like at the beginning.

A year later, they’d gotten loud enough that she stopped arguing with them. Nothing about her situation had really changed. She had.

What I see now

And that’s what I see everywhere now. Women who have made it and are ready to bet on themselves. They are tired of performing and fitting into someone else’s expectations. They are doing the work on themselves. They are realizing that life is too short and they have too much to give.

We are still setting the path. Millennial and Gen Z women are still learning from us, the same way we learned from the women ahead of us. Only this time they aren’t learning how to fit into the mold. They’re learning how to break free from it. And the path we’re setting now says, I choose joy, and I choose me.

It’s a bet that is possible. So no, it isn’t the glass ceiling stopping us. It’s the resilience of the phoenix that rises out of the shattered debris from that ceiling. On her own terms, with clarity and confidence.

Suzanne Roske is a leadership and life coach, speaker, former PwC partner, and founder of Vamonos Executive Coaching. She helps high-achieving women, executives, and leadership teams reconnect with themselves and lead with greater intention.