Still learning this lesson

One of the biggest career lessons I learned from my stints at Citi and Goldman wasn’t about finance, forecasting, strategy or stakeholder management.

It was about access.

Not access to systems.

Access to opportunities.

The projects that create visibility.

The meetings where decisions are made.

The conversations that happen before the official conversation.

The sponsors who speak for you when you’re not in the room.

For a long time, I assumed good work naturally led to more opportunities.

Now I know the reality is more complicated.

As a woman, there were moments where I wondered whether gender plays a role.

I have experienced moments where I felt I was being evaluated differently.

There were moments where I felt I had to prove the same thing multiple times before it was believed.

But over time I realised something broader:

Every workplace has visible org charts.

And invisible org charts.

The visible one tells you who reports to whom.

The invisible one tells you who influences whom.

Understanding the second one may be one of the most important career skills nobody teaches.

Because opportunities rarely move through process alone.

They move through people.

And sometimes the hardest lesson is realising that performance and visibility are not always the same thing.