You Are Not the Problem: What a People Strategist Taught Me About Why Women Leaders Stall
High-performing women in the workplace consistently do more, prepare more, and deliver more than their male counterparts, and still watch the promotion go to someone else. There is a behavioral explanation for this. Here is what it looks like from the inside.
I recently sat down with Maryam Parvaneh, founder of Culture Bloom HR and a fractional HR consultant with deep roots in organizational development, for an episode of the Integrity Over Scale podcast. What Maryam brought to the conversation stopped me more than once because she was naming things I see every day in the work I do with high-performing women at the Director and Senior Director level.
She said it plainly: in corporate life, promotions were mostly given to men. And as much as organizations tried to be fair and advocate for women, the only person who was truly going to advocate for you was yourself.
That is not a cynical statement. It is a behavioral one. And it is exactly where I start with every woman I work with in 1:1 coaching.
Maryam Parvaneh, Founder, Culture Bloom HR
Organizational development consultant and fractional HR strategist with experience spanning corporate, healthcare, and growing businesses. She works with organizations to close the gap between business strategy and people strategy. Find her at maryam@culturebloomhr.com.
The Gap Is Behavioral, Not Credential-Based
One of the things I find myself saying repeatedly in 1:1 coaching is this: the women I work with are not lacking credentials. They lack neither intelligence, competence, nor results. What is getting in the way is behavioral, and it lives in the specific moments that determine who gets seen as a leader and who gets seen as someone who supports one.
Maryam articulated this from the HR side in a way that validated what I observe from the coaching side. Women, she noted, tend to process things more carefully, more thoroughly, and often with more emotional intelligence than the men they are competing against for advancement. And still, the advancement does not come at the same rate.
This is the core tension I work with. The gap is not about what women know. It is about how they show up in the rooms that matter, whether they take up space before the anxiety has time to build a case against them, and whether the people above them can see their leadership in real time, not just in the quality of their work product after the fact.
"The only person who is really, truly going to advocate for you is yourself. You have to believe in yourself and push hard." — Maryam Parvaneh
The Interview That Changed How Maryam Leads
Maryam shared a story I keep thinking about. Early in her career, she was one of roughly 100 applicants for a corporate position. The hiring manager, a woman, took her to coffee instead of sitting across a desk. She relaxed. She talked like herself. She got the job.
That manager became a formative figure in Maryam's career, not because she gave her the title, but because she saw who Maryam actually was before Maryam had fully learned to see it herself. That is the behavioral work. That is what presence actually means in practice: being able to be fully visible in high-stakes moments rather than managing yourself down to what feels safest.
The coffee interview story is instructive for a different reason, too. The woman who conducted it had already done her own behavioral work. She was not running the interview the way it had always been done. She was running it the way that actually got her real information about a real person. That kind of authority in how you navigate your own professional context, creating the conditions that work for you rather than adapting entirely to the conditions that were designed around someone else, is what I focus on in the work I do.
From the coaching room
The women I work with in 1:1 coaching often come to me after years of preparing twice as hard, arriving early, staying late, and still watching someone else get credit for the room. The issue is rarely capability. It is almost always visibility, specifically the behavioral habits that make capability legible to the people who make decisions.
Mentors Are Not Enough. Neither Is Hard Work.
Maryam made a distinction I want to hold up plainly because I think it gets blurred constantly in conversations about women and career advancement. Mentorship is coaching someone in their daily growth. It is the person who listens, gives feedback, and helps you think through what is working and what is not. Most high-performing women I know have at least one mentor. Many have several.
What they do not have is someone being their voice in the rooms they are not in. Someone who, when a role opens up, says the name out loud before anyone else has a chance to fill the silence. Someone who advocates not from a place of charity but from genuine conviction that this person should be in that room.
Research backs this up. Women in leadership have significantly more mentors than they do advocates. Maryam named it clearly from her own experience: the people who made the biggest difference in her career were the ones who spoke up for her when she was not there to speak for herself.
This is a behavioral gap, not a personal failing. Building the kind of presence that makes people want to advocate for you, learning to make your work and your leadership visible in the right contexts, and developing the relationships that become the foundation for real advocacy, this is learnable. It is also what does not happen on its own through more years of excellent performance.
What Networking Actually Looks Like for Women Who Dread It
Maryam's advice for introverts was one of the most grounded things she said in the entire conversation, and I want to stay with it because I hear the introvert objection frequently from the women I coach.
She does not tell introverts to become extroverts. She tells them to set a goal of three people at any given event. Talk to three people. Then schedule a one-on-one with one of them, over coffee, away from the formal setting. The structure makes the thing smaller. The one-on-one makes it human.
She took a colleague to a networking event at a winery. The colleague had a glass of wine, relaxed, started talking, and built more connections that night than she had at formal events for years. The environment changed the behavior.
This is something I return to constantly in 1:1 coaching. Voice and presence are not fixed traits. They are behavioral patterns that respond to context. When you change the context, even slightly, the behavior shifts. The question is whether you are making deliberate choices about context or just defaulting to the settings that were handed to you.
"You don't grow unless you do the hard things. The hard thing is to get out of your comfort zone." — Maryam Parvaneh
Feedback as a Behavioral Practice, Not an Annual Event
Maryam described something her team used to do called Feedback Fridays, a weekly practice of giving each other honest, specific feedback, both recognition and development areas. She was matter-of-fact about it. You get so much from the feedback. You learn. You grow. You stop waiting for the annual review to find out where you actually stand.
I bring this up because the absence of honest feedback is one of the most underestimated forces keeping high-performing women from advancing. Evaluations get softened. Feedback gets vague. Women end up with performance reviews that say they are excellent at everything and give them nothing to actually work with, while the real conversations about their leadership potential happen in the rooms they are not in.
One of the behavioral patterns I work on most directly in 1:1 coaching is the ability to seek, receive, and act on direct feedback without it triggering the self-doubt spiral. The women I work with are not fragile. But many of them have been in environments where honest feedback was so rare that they lost confidence in their ability to navigate it. Reclaiming that capacity is part of the work.
The Behavioral Through-Line
Looking at everything Maryam shared across our conversation, a single pattern keeps surfacing: the women who advance are not the ones who work hardest in isolation. They are the ones who have learned, through practice and often through explicit coaching, to make their competence visible, to build relationships that convert into real advocacy, and to navigate high-stakes rooms with enough presence that the people deciding who leads next can actually see them leading.
This is not about personality. It is not about being louder or more aggressive or more like the men around you. It is about specific behavioral habits that you can develop with the right focus and the right support.
Maryam built her company by taking a leap of faith into consulting after years of watching how corporate organizations handled (and mishandled) their people. She described being frightened. She did it anyway. What carried her through was not just belief in her abilities. It was belief in the product she offered and the relationships she had invested in over the years.
That is exactly the foundation I help women build in 1:1 coaching. Not confidence as a feeling you wait for. Confidence as a behavioral output, something you build evidence for through the specific actions you take in the specific rooms that matter.
What This Means If You Are a Director Right Now
If you are sitting at the Director or Senior Director level in a male-dominated industry and you have been waiting for your performance to speak loudly enough on its own, Maryam's story and the patterns she named are worth sitting with.
The work you are putting in is real. The results you are producing are real. And the gap between what you are delivering and what is being recognized is also real. It is not a sign that you are doing something wrong. It is a sign that performance alone is not the full picture, and that the behavioral work of building presence, authority, and the right relationships is something you can learn and practice deliberately.
That is the work I do with women who are ready to stop waiting and start building. Not through theory. Through the behavioral, specific, situational coaching that actually changes what happens in the rooms that matter.
Ready to do the behavioral work?
I work 1:1 with high-performing women in Life Sciences, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Aerospace who are ready to close the gap between how capable they are and how visible that capability is. The first conversation is free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do high-performing women in leadership get passed over for promotion?
In most cases, it is not about performance. It is about behavioral visibility. The work gets done, but does not get seen in the rooms where promotion decisions are made. Building the specific habits that make leadership legible in high-stakes moments is what closes this gap, and it requires deliberate practice, not just more years of excellent results.
What is the difference between a mentor and a sponsor in the workplace?
A mentor coaches you through your growth in daily and ongoing work. A sponsor advocates for you when you are not in the room, speaks your name when opportunities arise, and uses their own credibility to open doors on your behalf. Research consistently shows that women have more mentors and significantly fewer sponsors than men at equivalent levels, and that sponsorship is what actually moves careers forward.
How do women in male-dominated industries build executive presence?
Executive presence for women in male-dominated industries is not about mimicking the behavior of the men around you. It is about developing specific behavioral habits around voice, visibility, and how you navigate high-stakes environments, so that your leadership is legible on your own terms. This is the core of the 1:1 coaching work I do at InVivo Leadership Strategies.
What does executive coaching for women actually look like?
In the 1:1 coaching I do, we work on the specific behavioral patterns that are getting in the way. That means the habits around speaking in meetings, navigating difficult conversations, building the relationships that become advocacy, and reclaiming the authority you already have but may have been conditioned not to use. It is direct, behavioral, and built around your specific leadership context.
