The Understudy: The Leader Already Doing the Job
Nadia has been running the department for a year. Not in title. Her director took a bigger job in March and nobody filled the seat, so Nadia picked it up: the staffing calls, the budget reviews, the hard conversation with the vendor, the all-hands she wrote and somebody else delivered. Everyone knows who actually runs the place. Nadia knows it too. She is waiting for someone to notice, tap her on the shoulder, and make it official. Meet the Understudy.
The Understudy is not short on ability. She is already doing the job, and doing it well. What she is short on is permission, and she has decided, without ever saying it out loud, that permission is something you receive rather than something you take. So she does the work at the level above her and presents it at the level she is paid for. The budget review goes in under someone else’s name. The decision she made gets described as a recommendation. She is ready for the role. She just keeps auditioning for it.
Look at what it costs. The people above her see exactly what she shows them: a very capable person at her level, which is where they leave her. The seat she is filling never gets filled by her because, on paper, nobody is filling it. And every month she waits teaches her one more time that waiting is what she does, so the next time an opening appears, she will wait for that one too.
Here is the reframe. Nobody is coming to tap her. Not because they do not value her. Because the room cannot promote a person into a job it believes is being done by nobody. The Understudy thinks visibility is bragging. It is not. It is letting the record carry her name.
Two moves. First, run the permission audit. List the decisions she has made this year that she presented as suggestions, and for each one ask: whose permission was I actually waiting for, and did anyone ever withhold it? Most of the time, nobody did.
Second, act as though. Pick the title she is already doing and operate at it out loud for ninety days: her name on the review, her decision stated as a decision, her seat at the table taken rather than offered. Not a demand. A description of what is already true.
Ready is not a feeling someone confirms for you. It is a job you are already doing, with your name finally on it.
The Right Altitude. Available now. therightaltitudebook.com
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