I spent almost twenty years at one of the largest banks in the world. By any objective measure, I had a successful career. I was Ivy League undergrad, had my MBA, and spent my career leading digital product at a place known for M&A. I was promoted multiple times, given increasingly complex organizations to run, and entrusted with some of the company’s most visible initiatives.
For most of those two decades, I worked for two of the same senior executives.
At the time, I thought I was lucky. They were smart, politically connected, and knew how to navigate the institution. I assumed that if I kept delivering, my career would naturally follow the same trajectory as theirs.
In hindsight, I see something different.
They routinely took credit for my team’s work. They kept me out of the meetings where relationships were built and succession decisions were quietly made. They were generous enough to promote me, but never enough to create the possibility that I might someday have their job.
It was a remarkably stable arrangement. I did the building. They did the storytelling.
I don’t say that with bitterness anymore. If anything, I understand it better now.
Large institutions are full of people who have convinced themselves they are meritocracies. But they are also full of people whose first instinct is self-preservation. Those two realities coexist far more comfortably than most of us would like to admit.
And while not everyone gets promoted to their bosses’ chair, but women encounter an additional, unspoken constraint: you can rise, just not so high that your success becomes a man’s discomfort.
For years, I mistook that ceiling for patience. I thought, My time will come. It never occurred to me that the system was working exactly as designed.
In my late fifties, I find myself looking back not with anger, but clarity. The machinations required to keep proving yourself, managing everyone else’s ego, waiting your turn, and pretending not to notice who was getting the credit are exhausting. I don’t miss any of it.
What I do miss is the version of myself who believed that exceptional work inevitably spoke for itself. It doesn’t.