When Competence Starts Working Against You

Competence is supposed to be protective.

Many women were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that doing excellent work would create options. That reliability would translate into trust. That if you handled what was in front of you with intelligence and care, the system would eventually meet you there.

For a long time, this appears to be true.

You deliver. You become known as someone who can be counted on. Your judgment is respected, even if not always deferred to. You are invited into more rooms, more conversations, more complexity.

And then, somewhere along the way, something shifts.

Not dramatically. Not in a way that anyone else seems to notice. But you do.

The Myth of Neutral Competence

Competence is often spoken about as if it exists outside of context. As if excellence is a clean input that produces a predictable outcome. But competence is never neutral. It is interpreted.

In many male-dominated environments, competence in women is quietly translated into capacity. Not potential, but bandwidth. The ability to absorb. To stabilize. To carry what others don’t want to hold.

I’ve watched women describe this without realizing they were describing it.

They talk about being the “go-to.” The one people call when things are messy. The person who can be trusted to make something workable, even when it arrives half-formed. They say it with pride at first. Why wouldn’t they? It sounds like value.

But listen closely and there’s often a pause after. A hesitation. As if something doesn’t quite add up.

Because competence, in this form, doesn’t always create movement. Sometimes it creates containment.

When Strength Becomes Infrastructure

There is usually a moment when women first notice this, though it rarely announces itself clearly.

It might be a project that was supposed to be temporary but never leaves your desk. A responsibility that migrates toward you without discussion. A meeting you attend “just to listen” that slowly becomes one you are expected to run.

Nothing formal changes. No title is adjusted. No authority is clarified. You simply find yourself holding more connective tissue. The glue. The translation. The emotional buffering that keeps things from fraying.

Most women don’t resist this at first. They assume this is leadership. They assume this is what trust looks like.

It’s only later, when momentum slows or energy thins, that the question surfaces quietly: How did I become so central—and so constrained—at the same time?

This was the terrain of When My Strength Became My Weakness. Not strength as a personal flaw, but strength as a structural asset that the system learned how to rely on without reciprocating.

Effectiveness doesn’t always create leverage. Sometimes it eliminates it.

The Cost of Being Indispensable

Indispensability is seductive.

Being needed feels like security. It feels like relevance. It can even feel like influence. But indispensability comes with a hidden condition: the system cannot imagine you anywhere else.

When you are indispensable, you are often too valuable to move. Too reliable to disrupt. Too good at what you do for the organization to risk changing the arrangement.

This is where many women feel something stall without being able to name it. They are busy, but not advancing. Involved, but not authoring. Trusted, but not fully empowered.

The work keeps expanding sideways. The responsibility grows heavier. But the frame stays the same.

And because nothing is obviously wrong, the discomfort gets internalized.

The Authority Gap, Lived

In The Authority Gap, I wrote about how women are often trusted with execution long before they are trusted with authorship. That dynamic shows up here with particular force.

You may recognize it in the way decisions arrive already shaped, with the expectation that you’ll make them land well. Or in how your insight is welcomed once it aligns with the prevailing direction, but quietly sidelined when it doesn’t.

Women often become the stewards of decisions rather than the source of them.

They carry the implications. They manage the fallout. They hold the relational consequences. But the original authorship—the power to define the frame—remains elsewhere.

Over time, this creates a subtle erosion. Not of skill, but of self-trust. You begin to sense that your judgment is valued only after it has been filtered. That your role is to refine, not to originate.

This is rarely stated. It is simply enacted, again and again.

Why This Gets Misread as Burnout

By the time competence starts working against you, the symptoms often look like burnout.

Women describe feeling tired in a way that rest doesn’t fix. Decision-making feels heavier. The work requires more effort for the same return. There’s a low-level disengagement that’s hard to justify because, on paper, everything is fine.

So the search for a solution turns inward.

Maybe you need better boundaries. More resilience. A mindset reset. Something to help you “handle” what you’re already handling.

But what’s often breaking down isn’t capacity. It’s alignment.

Specifically, the alignment between effort and agency. Between responsibility and authority. Between what you are carrying and what you are allowed to shape.

When that alignment erodes, the system still functions. The cost simply migrates into the individual.

The Quiet Identity Cost

The deepest cost of this dynamic isn’t exhaustion. It’s a slow disconnection from your own internal signals.

When competence is repeatedly leveraged without corresponding authority, women learn to override instinct. To defer judgment. To second-guess what once felt clear.

Not because they lack confidence, but because confidence has not been welcomed.

This is where leadership begins to feel performative rather than generative. Where success continues, but satisfaction thins. Where you start wondering whether the problem is you, because that’s where the feedback loop always points.

Nothing about this is accidental. Systems reward continuity. They rely on people who will keep things running, even when doing so costs them something.

Naming the Pattern Without Offering Fixes

This is not the moment for strategies.

There is no communication technique that resolves a structural mismatch. No productivity system that restores authority. No internal reframing that substitutes for authorship.

The most meaningful shift begins with recognition.

Recognition that competence is not always rewarded in the way we were taught. That effort can be praised and misused at the same time. That when leadership starts to feel heavier, the issue is often not personal capacity but systemic design.

This reframing is unsettling. It asks women to question systems they have succeeded within, which is far more destabilizing than questioning themselves.

But it is also clarifying.

Because once the pattern is accurately named, it becomes much harder to keep treating it as a personal failure.

This is often the moment where the work becomes private.
Not because something is broken, but because something has quietly shifted.
This is the distinction I work through with a small number of senior women in 1:1 when clarity matters more than momentum.

This lens is central to the work I explore more fully in my upcoming book, The Skeptical Executive, where leadership is examined through internal conditions rather than just external behaviors.