You’re sick of being seen as tactical, “in the weeds,” the reliable workhorse executor who gets things done but isn’t the one thought of when better opportunities come up. If that just felt like a little too close to home, keep listening. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to spot what is keeping that perception in place and what will really fix it so you can be regarded in the way you want to and that reflects the true value you bring. I wanted to do this episode because I have been having so many conversations lately with listeners of this show, readers of my book, and people who reach out on LinkedIn and say, “I don’t know if you can help me, but here’s what’s going on.”

And there’s a very specific challenge that keeps coming up for them, regardless of what industry they are in, and it’s usually along these lines: You are consistently doing the work of someone a level or two above you. You are orchestrating different functions that don’t report to you. You’re getting agreement between stakeholders who have totally different priorities.

You are making trade-offs every single week, if not day. You’re managing up, down, and sideways, all at once. You’re absorbing all of the political rigmarole around you. You act as air cover so your team doesn’t have to deal with it and get distracted. You are the one who catches things that would otherwise fall through the cracks, and you’re handling them so no one else has to and everything stays on track.

And I am seeing this sort of “you are the glue” and “immersed in both the high level and the details” effect. I’m seeing that across almost every industry. I had someone who came to me from academia and said, “You know, I am the one managing the department chair’s ego, I run the accreditation review, and I am writing the grant renewal; yet, I am still seen as just an admin.”

Or there was a healthcare leader who was working on this three-year delivery model for a brand-new service line while also reviewing incident reports and physician disputes, but the C-suite was still referring to her and her entire team as a “cost center.” I’ve had a sales director tell me they have rescued hundreds of thousands in revenue.

They’re wrangling sign-off from people across the company on collateral. But when a new role opened, it went to someone else with less experience but who had a stronger story about driving vision and the future of the organization. So you can hear—these are all different settings, but the gravitas gap they’re falling into is the same.

Let me define that term. The gravitas gap is when you are already doing complex, high-judgment work—strategy, balancing, and avoiding risk—but you are being defined by the minutia. It is this confusing space between your actual capability and how much authority people assign you because of the way you come across, you speak, and you articulate yourself, which we’re going to get into more in a moment. When you’re in the gravitas gap, you know you are delivering results.

You’re probably working harder and more dedicated than anyone around you. And maybe you can relate to that; maybe you are someone who has a title to prove your expertise. You’re a senior manager, director, or head of your function, but you are not being treated like someone at that level. And it’s not because you don’t belong there—you do.

But it might be because the way you present and package yourself doesn’t consistently reflect that. You probably have the street cred and decades of experience. You have “great work” emails to back it up. You may even have more expertise and subject matter knowledge under your belt than the people you report to and who you are trying to influence, yet you are not being regarded as one of them.

You are relegated to being seen and treated like a subordinate who is assigned to do the work, to execute it, rather than being seen as a peer who thinks, contributes, and can hold your own at the same level as them. And as a result, people see you as a great operator. You’re very detail-oriented. We turn to you to execute and get things over the finish line.

It all sounds like good and positive things, like compliments, until you realize how much it is not only stifling you but building resentment within you. Now, before I unpack that, I want to highlight for you some of the lesser-known signs you are trapped in the gravitas gap because there are, of course, the obvious ones—like on your performance review, you are told you are on the cusp but you’re not ready for the next level because you’re “too in the weeds.”

That is a very obvious one. But there’s others you may be misinterpreting or glossing over right now, maybe even blaming yourself for, and that’s the last thing we want because all of this is fixable. So some other signs you are caught in the gravitas gap: you get comments like, “Can you zoom out more?” or “What if we thought more strategically about this?”

Or, “What’s missing for me is the bigger picture here—the why behind it.” You’re feeling like you constantly have to justify your existence. Every project or request feels like you have to re-earn the right to ask it or to be there, and that puts you on the defensive and makes you exhausted because you shouldn’t have to keep proving yourself and that what you do is valuable.

You also know you’re in the gravitas gap if the recognition you get is inconsistent. A few people know your work in detail—usually, it’s your direct boss and maybe one skip-level—but outside of that inner circle, most other executives or senior leaders couldn’t articulate what you do and the value you bring. That puts a major ceiling on the results that you’re able to get because you don’t have the broader influence that you need.

You may also find you’re getting deprioritized by those important people. You know you need to build rapport with department leaders, the C-suite, whoever it may be, but you don’t have that cachet yet. So the email you spend hours crafting sits in their inbox for weeks unread. The meeting request you’ve been trying to push forward gets bumped to next quarter again and again because you don’t come across as someone who warrants their time.

And related to this, you may find yourself talked over more than others in meetings. You seem to lose people more easily. They get frustrated with you or cut you off. You notice people’s eyes trailing off and their attention flagging when other people just seem to keep it more effortlessly.

And the last sign here you are caught in the gravitas gap: leadership sees your role or function as something that happens after the strategic conversations and decisions, not before. So they make a choice; they say, “This is the plan,” and then they just hand it to you to put into flight. That can be so frustrating because you’re left retrofitting a strategy for something you would have shaped very differently if you had been involved from the beginning. And all of this stings; it hurts so much more because of all of the behind-the-scenes effort you are doing.

It’s getting totally washed over. It’s going totally unrecognized, and your invisible labor stays just that—invisible. You are not getting credit for it, or worse, the end result is getting credited to someone else who is better at socializing it, which is why this can be so demoralizing. And here’s the tricky part: because that starts to leak out.

You start to pull back in meetings and not speak up as much—be a little more quiet. You become more guarded and defensive about everything, just a little more cynical. And when those protective instincts kick in, the perception of you as “not quite ready” gets even more entrenched because now you are showing up smaller than what you are capable of, which only reinforces that perception.

So this is why you have to nip this in the bud now, because not only does it calcify for you emotionally, but that perception literally calcifies in the minds of others. When you are known as someone who is the “thoughtful, thorough one,” and that’s it—that’s all you are known for—guess what happens? People bring you more of the tactical day-to-day work because you’re so good at it.

You’re reliable, and fighting that perception starts to become even more of an uphill battle day after day. Going from being seen as “tactical” to a more “strategic, high-level contributor” is truly non-negotiable now when we are in a, frankly, very cutthroat and unpredictable market. There have been multiple CEOs—Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Andy Jassy of Amazon, Jane Fraser of Citigroup—who have all publicly announced they are changing how they evaluate performance to focus on things like results, impact, and outcomes, not hours or sheer effort.

There is pressure to speak specifically to prove how your work tangibly changed things for the business. So now the most important decisions about your career—whether you are given a bonus, assigned to a better project, or eliminated altogether—are being made based on how compelling you tell the story of your impact, not just a list of the tasks you got done. And this is what we have been watching happen for clients inside of our Speak Like a Senior Leader program.

The ones who see the biggest results fastest, who totally overhaul how they are perceived in a matter of weeks, come in struggling to make their thinking and the way they come across match their depth and their intelligence. Within a couple of weeks, once they learn how to package their expertise and communicate it in the ways senior leaders are trained to respond to and reward, they are getting unsolicited praise from above. They are being tapped on the shoulder and consulted for their opinion early.

They are being named as the lead on projects. They are being told, “Yes, we are going to put you in for that equity bump retroactive to the beginning of the year,” or, “Yes, now is the time to talk about your promotion again. Let’s have that conversation.” Which is why I can tell you with confidence that all of this is fixable.

And so if you are resonating with this, you cannot afford to stay in the gravitas gap. In this climate, perception is power. Resources are shrinking. Reorgs are happening suddenly. So having this communication on point is your leverage. It’s how you explain something like a slowdown or a missed milestone without sounding like you’re making excuses, and instead gain credibility in the process.

It’s how you advocate for your team’s capacity—not sounding like a squeaky wheel, but showing that you’re not just reacting to changes in the business; you’re anticipating where it is headed. And most of all, this is how you make your value so clear that leaders trust you with bigger budgets, better projects, and yes, the title and the paycheck to match that.

So I want to give you reassurance that if you are seeing yourself in all of this, the solution is not to spend two years and over $100K getting an MBA. It is not to just grind it out and get the latest AI certification because someone told you that’s what’s going to make you more marketable. You already have the goods.

What you’re missing has nothing to do with your capability or your credentials—you have the track record. It has everything to do with how you are speaking to the value you deliver or not, which is entirely within your control. And I hope that is empowering and promising because this perception is not a death sentence.

You don’t have to burn down your career or just leave and start over somewhere new. You can shape how leaders see you, the compensation, the title, and the growth you want and that you get today. So that’s why next, I want to walk you through some of the most common communication mistakes that are keeping you trapped in that detail-oriented territory and actively reinforcing that “in-the-weeds” perception.

But if you want the full five-step system to actually fix this, you’ve gotta sign up for the Overlooked No More Summit. It is happening September 14th through 18th. It’s only one hour a day. I will be teaching and coaching you through the exact five-part framework our clients are using to escape that “reliable worker but never the trusted advisor” trap and instead get support into global-level roles, be looped in and hand-chosen for the best initiatives, and get buy-in for million-dollar projects.

The list goes on. And they’ve done all of this no matter how much of an overthinker they identify with being, because this system is grounded in psychology and the science of working with human behavior—which is perfect, actually, if you consider yourself to be someone who is more perceptive and sensitive.

You have an advantage here because of that. This summit is completely free. Replays will be available for a limited time. The link to register is melodywilding.com/summit, or it’s in the show notes. Do not miss this. We will also be opening the doors for Speak Like a Senior Leader during the event too for the final time this year and some pretty mind-blowing bonuses for those of you who are fast action-takers.

All right, let’s dive into those communication mistakes keeping you trapped in detail-oriented territory, starting with only asking tactical questions in meetings. Chances are right now, you are the one asking about implementation. What’s the timeline? Who will own this piece? Those are reasonable; they’re essential.

Someone has to ask them. But when those are the only things coming out of your mouth in front of a room of decision-makers, if the only things you are talking about are the mechanics of “how,” then they unconsciously categorize you as someone whose job is to make sure the thing gets done. Or worse, if you are only bringing up the ways things could go wrong, then the perception becomes, “Well, this person is a bit of a blocker to what we’re trying to get done here—kind of a naysayer.”

You want to ask questions that encourage people instead to revisit their assumptions, to think harder, to show that you have a point of view, that you’re zooming out and operating a layer or two above the execution—that you are connecting dots between different parts of the business or different meetings you have had, not just asking questions to gather information to execute on the job itself. All right, mistake number two: you treat your one-on-one with your boss like a throwaway status meeting.

You show up, you run through a list of what you did last week, and you log off. In, out, it’s done. This is a huge miss because your boss is a proxy for your work. They are a representative for your impact up the chain of command. So you need to make sure they have something specific, memorable, and recent to fight for you and to position you in the way you want to be seen.

And sometimes what happens is they will explicitly say, “Oh, yeah, I wanted to let you know Melody’s team just landed this big deal.” Sometimes it’s more implicit in the way your boss talks about you to their peers, but every one-on-one is a chance to hand them language they’ll use to describe you upstream.

But if you are simply just describing your process, not the outcomes you achieved, you are wasting that time. I understand the impulse to do this because you probably want to prove you’ve been working hard. You want them to see all the effort, so you walk them step-by-step through: “Well, on Tuesday, I put together the brief.

Then on Wednesday, I looped in this team. Then by Thursday, we had that meeting.” But when this happens, they completely lose the thread. There’s too much to track, and you’ve just used your highest leverage time with your boss only to reinforce that you were busy, not that you were impactful—that you were just doing things.

When your boss asks, “How’s it going? What’s the latest?” what they are really asking is, “What has changed since last week? What can you give me that will make you, me, and the entire team look good?” We had a client in Speak Like a Senior Leader—I’ll call him Neil. He’s a senior director, and before he joined Speak, his one-on-ones with his boss were very transactional.

Run through what he did, call it a day. But he implemented this very specific structure we teach to turn those thirty minutes into a true visibility amplifier. And within a few weeks, his boss was repeating the successes Neil had shared with him to his skip-level—the COO—and that led to Neil getting more headcount for his team without a fight.

He got the highest performance scores in his year-end conversation, which is incredibly hard to earn at his level, and he was nominated for an individual award. And all of that traced back to how he started to better leverage those thirty minutes with his manager week after week. Mistake number three: why you are still being perceived as “tactical” and “in the weeds” is that you spend too much airtime setting the stage.

You are in a meeting, you’ve been invited to weigh in on something. Someone turns to you and says, “Oh, what are your thoughts on this?” And you launch into: “Well, going back to the project we kicked off in Q1, and remembering that we had to align with three teams with priorities coming out of the offsite…

We also had to take into account feedback we got from the customer research phase, which, as you recall, was informed by two focus groups we ran last year, I think what we’re starting to see is…” You have taken an entire minute and said nothing there. And again, you do this because it feels responsible. You want to make sure everyone is up to speed and has the context they need for your recommendation.

You want to demonstrate you’ve thought about this carefully and didn’t jump to a conclusion. But this is where you start to notice the important people in the room checking their phone because there’s nothing substantive. Their attention had to go somewhere. The person who invited you to the meeting is now realizing, “This person just created more work for me because I’m going to have to restate their point more clearly.”

And everyone leaves thinking, “Wow, Melody is smart, but she takes a long time to get to the point,” which then leads to, “I don’t know if we can give her more responsibility because she seems to have a little trouble juggling everything else she has and tracking all of that.” So I call this the “and so, and then” problem, when you open by just giving this meandering play-by-play of what has already happened.

I actually have an entire episode on this—it’s Episode 98—so go check that out, which is all about why you are talked over in meetings and how to stop it. The key insight here is that you most likely don’t need to change anything about your content. That’s solid. That’s sound. Again, you know your stuff.

But you need a crisper structure around it that—especially on your opening—gives them a roadmap, gives them reassurance you are taking them somewhere valuable, and keeps their attention. So it’s kind of like a frame around a painting. It helps people make sense of what you are going to tell them so that they stay with you.

Okay, mistake number four of how you are reinforcing the perception of being a detailed executor and subordinate is all the little ways you put yourself in a one-down position without realizing it. In any interaction, there’s a power dynamic, and senior leaders speak to their reports from an elevated position—a one-up position.

And direct reports, or people who come across like that, tend to speak from a one-down position: “I am below you; I am in a subordinate position.” But you may do this even when you have the same level of expertise as they do, or even more. Peers speak to each other from an equal footing and an equal power dynamic.

So I tend to see people put themselves in this one-down power position, especially when they’re more of that “sensitive, recovering people-pleaser” type. Around here, we call those our “sensitive strivers.” And you do that by being overly deferential and overly effusive in the way you come across, so you end up approaching your leadership as someone who should be grateful for their attention—someone who is proving that you deserve to be in their presence.

So this can sound like, “Thank you so much for your time! I really appreciate you looking at this! I know how busy you are, and I just really appreciate you taking just a couple of minutes. I can’t thank you enough for this.” Or you say things like, “I know you are incredibly busy. I’ll keep this brief. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”

Think about what all those little phrases telegraphed. You are suggesting that their time is a gift they are bestowing on you, that you should feel lucky they chose to spend a few minutes in your meager presence, and that your ask is an imposition. When you do all of this, you are positioning yourself as a supplicant rather than a partner.

And here’s what happens on the other side of all of this. When you’re acting as someone who consistently is just grateful to be in their presence, the other person’s brain automatically slots you as below them in the hierarchy. So they start seeing you as someone who does need their help, who is helpless.

They need your guidance. They rely on your approval. You are not seen as a peer with expertise in your own right—which, again, is the exact perception you are trying to avoid. Now, truth be told, I used to fall into this trap all of the time. I would say things like, “Thank you so much; I know you’re really busy.

I appreciate it a great deal just to have a few minutes with you.” I thought I was being courteous, and what I was actually doing was being so effusive and overly warm and deferential that I was undermining my own standing. Now, gratitude is important, but there is a big difference between being appreciative and excessive deference that makes everyone feel awkward.

So I started using “meeting of the minds” language. Instead of things like, “Well, thank you so much for squeezing me into your packed schedule,” which frames it as them doing me a favor, I would say, “I’m looking forward to chatting with you. I’m glad we could both make time for this together.” Another example of this came from a Speak Like a Senior Leader client—I’ll call her Kate.

She would go into sessions with her top leadership confident she had done her research, and she would say, “Okay, we have a couple of options here. We could do X, Y, or Z. X has this benefit. Y has that risk. Here’s this trade-off for Z. What do you think? What do you want to do here?” She thought she was being collaborative, so she was shocked when executives would get annoyed with her about it because what she was actually doing and communicating was that she didn’t have a point of view, and leaders found that so frustrating because they were waiting for her to tell them the next step.

So she told me that making the shift from asking to stating was so huge for her. It got her pulled into a side project to map out an acceleration strategy for a major program, which is something she said would have never come her way if she had just stayed in that deferential mode. So here’s the bottom line for everything in today’s episode.

The perception that lives in your organization’s collective head about you may not be the one you want or you have meant to earn. It may not reflect your intelligence, the effort you bring to your work every single day, or the range of judgment you exercise. But I also hope what you’re hearing in the examples and everything I’ve shared is that perceptions are malleable.

You have the power to change them. You don’t have to wait for your boss to start finally seeing your worth or for the C-suite to just give you a chance—and that is great news. How people see you is actively being formed and reformed every single day with the way you speak, write, contribute, make requests, and show up, which means you have the power.

You have the power to mold that clay every time you choose to do something differently. This is all exactly what we’re going to help you with at the Overlooked No More Summit. Again, it is five days, September 14th through 18th. It is just one hour a day. It is completely free, and I will give you the five-part system you need to communicate at the next level.

The same one our clients are using to be perceived as next-level, sought after, and set apart from everyone else. So you can register at melodywilding.com/summit or find the link in the show notes. I hope to see you there. That’s all for today, and I will catch you in the next episode.