A Story About Getting a Seat at the Table When Your Work Speaks and You Don’t
How do I turn my technical work into influence? You stop letting the work speak for you and start letting it show how you think. Technical work gets used. It rarely gets you a voice in the decision – however excellent it is. Influence comes when people can see the judgement behind the work, connected into one clear picture of how you think, what you’ve learnt, and what drives you.
Let me tell you a story about a woman whose work was trusted completely, and whose opinion was never sought.
Janice is a character I created — her situation will be familiar to anyone whose expertise is relied upon everywhere and whose opinion is never asked for.
Trusted, and Not Consulted
Janice was forty-nine, and the person the company could not operate without.
As compliance lead, she was the reason they’d never had a serious regulatory problem. She saw the risks before they formed. She built the frameworks that kept an entire organisation on the right side of lines it didn’t always know were there. Her work was trusted absolutely — nobody ever questioned a Janice report.
And nobody ever asked Janice what she thought they should do.
She’d hand up an assessment, flawless and thorough, and it would be received with genuine gratitude — and then the strategy would be set in a meeting she wasn’t in, by people who treated her work as a constraint to design around rather than a mind to think with. She was the guardrail. She was never the guide.
It had a particular sting to it, because her work was so clearly valued. This wasn’t neglect. They relied on her completely. They simply relied on her the way you rely on a system — something that works, that you’re glad exists, that you never think to ask for its opinion.
She’d sit with her excellent, finished report and look through the glass at the meeting room where the real conversation was happening, and think: they trust my work more than anyone’s. So why am I never in there?
The answer, when she found it, was in the gap between those two things — the work, and her.
The Report and the Person
It came clear to her the day she watched a colleague from finance do something she never did.
He’d produced an analysis — good, but honestly no better than the work Janice produced every week. The difference was what he did with it in the room. He didn’t send it up and wait. He walked them through not just what he’d found, but how he’d come to see it — the assumption he’d started with, the thing that had surprised him, what he now believed they should do and why.
By the end, they weren’t thanking him for a report. They were asking him what he thought about the next three things on the agenda.
Janice saw it exactly. He had let them see his thinking. She only ever let them see her work.
And those are completely different things. Her reports were the conclusions with all the thinking removed — polished, definitive, and silent about the mind that made them. She’d spent years perfecting the one form of communication guaranteed to keep her invisible: the finished document that shows the answer and hides the person.
A report says here is what’s true. It does not say here is how I think, here is what I’ve learnt, here is what I’d do. And it is the second thing — the judgement, not the finding — that a room invites to the table.
Why the Work Isn’t Enough
Here is the mechanism, and it’s the thing nobody tells the excellent specialist.
Good work earns trust in the work. It does not, by itself, earn a voice. These feel like they should be the same thing. They are not. Trust in your output makes people rely on your output — which can keep you exactly where Janice was, indispensable and outside the room, precisely because your work is so dependable that nobody needs to involve you to use it.
A voice comes from something the work alone can’t show: how you think. Not the conclusion, but the judgement that produced it. Not the risk assessment, but the way you weigh risk. Not the framework, but the values underneath it and the experience that taught you them.
And here’s the part that matters for someone like Janice, who had years of it: your thinking is not scattered across a hundred reports. It resolves into three stories. The failure that shaped how you work. The success that shows how you see. The passion that drives why any of it matters to you. Told together, those three connect into one clear picture of your judgement — and judgement, unlike a report, is something a room asks to have at the table.
You do not turn technical work into influence by producing more of it. Janice’s output was already beyond reproach. You turn it into influence by making visible the thinking the work was hiding.
What Janice Found
She sat down one evening and, for the first time, looked past her reports to the experience underneath them.
She found three stories.
A failure. Early in her career, she’d been right about a risk and lost the argument — because she’d delivered it as a wall of regulation, and the room heard a compliance officer saying no. The thing went ahead, hit exactly the problem she’d flagged, and cost a fortune to unwind. It taught her that being right in a language the room won’t listen to is the same, in the end, as being wrong. She stopped delivering rules. She started explaining what the rules were protecting.
A success. The time a whole strategy hinged on a risk everyone was treating as a formality. Janice didn’t just flag it — she showed the room the specific, human way it would play out: not “regulatory exposure,” but here is the exact morning this lands on someone’s desk, and here is what it does to us that afternoon. They restructured the entire plan around it. What it showed her about herself: she doesn’t see rules. She sees consequences, as scenes, before they happen — and a scene is something a room can act on.
A passion. She’d gone into compliance from an unlikely place — she’d watched, early in her life, a good organisation do real harm to people simply because nobody had thought through what a decision would actually do downstream. That never left her. It’s why she does this work, and it isn’t about rules at all: it’s about the person at the far end of a decision who has no voice in the room where it’s made. She’s their voice. She always has been.
Three stories, none of them a framework. All of them the truth about how she works.
The Room She Got Into
A strategy session came up around a decision with a risk at its centre — the kind she’d normally have assessed on paper and watched them design around.
This time she asked to be in the room. And she didn’t bring a report. She brought her judgement, and she let them see how it worked.
“Before this gets decided, I want to show you something — not the regulation, the consequence. I made this mistake once, early on: I was right about a risk and I delivered it as a rulebook, and the room stopped listening, and it cost us badly. So I’m not going to hand you a rulebook. I’m going to show you the exact morning this decision lands on a real person, and what it does to them and to us. And then I think we should decide together.”
The room turned to her. Not to her report. To her.
She wasn’t more expert that day. She was the same compliance lead, with the same faultless work behind her.
She’d simply stopped sending her thinking up in a form that hid her, and started letting the room see the judgement that had been there all along.
Within months, Janice wasn’t the guardrail the strategy was designed around. She was at the table where it was made — because the organisation had discovered that the way she thought about risk was worth more in the room than any report could be outside it.
How to Turn Technical Work Into Influence: What Janice’s Story Shows
Trust in your work is not the same as a voice. Excellent output makes people rely on your output — which can keep you exactly where you are. A voice comes from showing the thinking the work hides.
Send up judgement, not just findings. A report says what’s true. It doesn’t say how you think, what you’ve learnt, or what you’d do. The second one is what a room invites to the table.
Show the consequence, not the rule. Janice’s power was making risk a scene — the exact morning it lands on someone’s desk. A room can’t act on “regulatory exposure.” It can act on a picture it can see.
Connect the three stories into one judgement. Your thinking isn’t scattered across a hundred reports. It’s a failure that shaped you, a success that shows how you see, and a passion that drives it — and told together, they’re a picture of your judgement a room can trust.
The story you lead with is the one the moment needs. A room unsure whether to trust you? The failure you can name. A room about to misread a risk? The success only you can see. A room deciding what it’s all for? Your passion. You carry all three; the moment tells you which.
You Already Have What the Room Needs
Years of faultless work held every story Janice needed. She hadn’t been failing to earn her place — she’d been earning it in a form that hid her completely. The failure that taught her to speak the room’s language. The success that showed her she sees in consequences. The passion behind the reason she does this at all.
Yours are there in the same way — in all the excellent work you’ve handed up that people trusted, and used, without ever meeting the mind that made it.
Continue the Work
And if you want to go deeper — finding your three stories and the insight beneath each one; translating your expertise into something a room can act on; connecting your stories into one picture of how you think, what you’ve learnt and what drives your work; and knowing the moment to speak so your judgement shapes the decision rather than arriving after it — that is what my third Professional Self-Coaching resource is for. The thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work, placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Get the Seat at the Table — Professional Self-Coaching for Strategic Influence Tell the Three Stories That Turn Your Expertise Into a Voice People Listen To
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
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