You saw the risk and explained what needed to happen. Nobody acted. Then the exact unfortunate thing you predicted happened. Surprise, surprise.

Now everybody is scrambling and you have to walk into a meeting without broadcasting, “I told you so.”

If you want to be trusted for your judgment, called into rooms where consequential decisions are happening and pulled forward for bigger opportunities, this is an important moment. It's an opportunity to move from being valued as the expert with the correct answer to being experienced as the person who can help the organization hear it, act on it and perform better.

This is what it looks like to operate above the Maverick Inflection Point in the Trust and Alignment Domain.

When the organization finally sees the risk you identified

Imagine that you are a technically exceptional woman dealing with a specialized, high-level risk.

You see that the organization has assigned the problem to a group that does not have the expertise to solve it. The teams that have been given the work do not have the right capability or the accountability required to follow through with the right answer.

You raise the issue early. You draw appropriate boundaries around the part of the problem your team can own. The organization does not fully respond.

Of course, the risk reappears. Now regulators are involved. Senior leaders are trying to determine who should take responsibility, and you are finally invited into the conversation formally.

You know you cannot enter the meeting with the energy of:

• This is what you should have done.

• We already told you this would happen.

• Your current approach is wrong.

• You have not supported us.

Even if you never say those words directly, people can feel the undertone, and that approach produces defensiveness, not action. The more valuable question is:

How do I show that I am thinking strategically and guide people toward a response that will work without making everyone feel exposed?

That's the Trust and Alignment layer of the situation.

Why the expert instinct can work against you

When your expertise has carried you this far, it is natural to assume that your value in the meeting comes from:

• Knowing the most
• Seeing the problem most clearly
• Explaining the technically correct solution
• Making the gaps impossible to ignore
• Defending the answer

Information and expertise may have become your armor in a game that has not always been played on a level field.

Now you are finally being invited into a conversation with senior leaders. The room may feel unfamiliar, so your instinct may be to prove that you belong there.

Experts often respond to that pressure by talking more, providing too much detail, correcting what other people say, pushing harder for the correct solution and filling every available opening with evidence of their expertise.

You may feel as though you are demonstrating competence and readiness, but other people may experience it as a threat.

That is especially risky when the people in the room already feel exposed. They are worried about how the problem happened, who will be held responsible and what the consequences might be. If your communication activates that threat response, their attention moves away from solving the problem and toward protecting themselves.

They start thinking:

• How can I avoid looking incompetent?
• How can I cover myself?
• How can I push the risk onto someone else?
• How can I make sure my team does not take the blame?

I have seen some fairly diabolical things happen when people feel that their backs are against the wall. Do not underestimate what people may do to get out of a jam if they believe someone is pointing a finger at them.

They may already know that you were right

Here is the part I would recommend reading differently: they already know you're competent, you identified the risk, and you made the right recommendation. Proving those points again is probably not the work in front of you.

The next part of the situation requires you to operate in the Trust and Alignment Domain, where you need to answer a different set of questions:

• How do I communicate this so people can hear it?
• Who needs to be involved?
• Who has influence with the exposed teams?
• Who needs to own each part of the response?
• Whose cooperation is necessary?
• What is each person trying to protect?
• How can I give people a dignified way to take ownership?
• What conversations need to happen before the formal meeting?
• How can I make it easier for other people to become part of the solution?
• How can this be framed as an opportunity instead of an indictment?
• How can the organization move forward without forcing everyone to admit that I was right?

This is stakeholder management at a more sophisticated level. It requires you to read the relationships, interests, influence patterns and threat responses surrounding the technical problem.

It may require just as much thought as solving the technical issue, and perhaps more, because it is not the way you are accustomed to solving problems. But this is the bridge to the next level.

The big meeting is probably not where the decision is being made

The formal meeting may be where the issue is acknowledged, documented or publicly resolved, but that does not mean it is where the real decision-making happens. When several teams are exposed and ownership is unclear, much of the Trust and Alignment work needs to happen behind the scenes.

Before the meeting, you may need to understand:

• Who is willing to participate
• What each group can realistically own
• What resistance is likely to surface
• Who has influence with whom
• Which people need a private conversation
• How the options can be structured
• What would make participation workable for each team

The work needs to be handled thoughtfully and sequentially before everyone arrives for the public-stage portion of the process. You absolutely don't want the first discussion about accountability to happen in a large meeting where people feel embarrassed, cornered or forced to defend their teams.

What Trust and Alignment sounds like

Instead of entering the conversation with an undertone of “You should already own this,” you might say something like:

This is becoming increasingly important to the business. How might we solve it together?

Or:

Your team has expertise that would be instrumental here. What would make your participation workable?

Or:

We see three possible ways to structure ownership. Which seems most viable from your perspective?

Or:

What are we missing from your side?

That last one is sometimes described as the beach-ball approach to solving a problem. Imagine one person is standing on the red stripe. Another is standing on the blue stripe. Each is accurately describing what they can see from their position. Asking, “What stripe are you standing on, and what do you see from your vantage point?” brings more of the full picture into view. It allows people to see one another’s perspectives and work toward an enterprise-level solution.

When you ask questions like these, you are not becoming smaller. You are using your authority in a way that increases other people’s ability to act.

Expert thinking and Trust and Alignment thinking

In the expertise domain, you are answering questions such as:

• What is causing this problem?
• What is the correct answer?
• What capability is missing?
• What should the organization do?
• How can I defend the recommendation?

In the Trust and Alignment Domain, the questions expand:

• Who needs to own each part?
• Whose cooperation is necessary?
• Who may feel exposed?
• What is each person trying to protect?
• Who has influence with whom?
• How can people contribute and take ownership?
• How can everyone involved become successful in this moment?
• How do we create the conditions in which the organization can solve the problem?

Trust and alignment are not diplomacy pasted on top of the real work -- at this level, they become part of the real work. Your role begins to shift from being the person who solves the problem to being the person who fosters the organizational conditions in which the problem can be solved.

From lead guitarist to producer

Think of the expert as the lead guitarist and the executive as the producer. Eddie Van Halen is one of my favorite Mavericks. He did not like the sound produced by the guitars available to him, so he Frankensteined different parts together and created something totally new. He could come in, shred a face-melting solo and make the song.

The producer is paying attention to a different set of questions:

• Can the drummer hear the bass player?
• Is the sound actually coming through on the recording?
• Do all the pieces fit together?
• Is everyone playing in the same key?
• Did the whole thing come out better because I was part of it?

While the guitarist asks, “Did you hear what I played?” the producer asks, “Did the whole thing come out better because I was part of it?”

Both roles require expertise. The producer is applying that expertise across a larger system. That's the shift happening when you begin operating above the Maverick Inflection Point.

How executive presence changes the way the organization experiences you

When you make this shift, you can become known as the woman who:

• Is trusted for her judgment, not only her technical knowledge
• Is wanted in the room before the problem becomes a crisis
• Understands how decisions actually get made
• Can influence senior leaders without becoming manipulative
• Is powerful without making everyone around her feel diminished
• Can carry consequential work without having all of it placed on her back
• Is generous enough to let other people become heroes
• Helps the whole organization perform better

You become more expansive, make the room bigger, and ideally, your career becomes bigger, more expansive and more fun too.

What does your next level require from you?

Consider these questions:

Where are you still working to prove that you have the answer when your next level requires you to help the organization arrive there together?

Where are you entering as the expert when the situation requires a broader organizational view?

Who might you be unintentionally making wrong?

How would you behave if you were already confident that you belonged in the room?

You are not leaving your expertise behind when you reach the Maverick Inflection Point, the criteria for success expands. You add the ability to read the power, manage the signals you send, create trust, build stakeholder alignment, connect people, reduce friction and help the organization move forward.

This can be one of the hardest career shifts to make from inside your own situation.

You may know that you belong in more consequential conversations. You may recognize that you are seeing things other people do not see. You may be fully capable of operating at a higher level.

What can be harder to see is how your authority is being interpreted, where misalignment is occurring, who needs to be brought along and what signals the organization is sending you.

The cost of misreading those dynamics can be another six to twelve months of being paused at the same level while someone with less capability moves forward because they understand how to navigate the organization.

Request a Strategic Career Consult

If you are an accomplished woman in STEM or Finance and something in the human or organizational system is making your work or career harder, narrower or more frustrating than it needs to be, this is the kind of situation we can examine together.

In a complementary 15-minute Strategic Career Consult, we will look at what is happening, what the organization may need to see from you now and where your most useful leverage points may be.

You have already done the difficult work of developing your expertise. Now let’s help the system recognize the judgment, influence and organizational range you are ready to bring.

Request a Strategic Career Consult here.