The Suit That Was Never Going to Work: A Leadership Presence Lesson

Most women in leadership can name the outfit they bought for their first serious job: the one that never quite looked right, the one they wore out of duty rather than choice. It usually gets filed away later as an early style mistake, when it was rarely that at all. It was the only material available at the time, borrowed from a shop window or a mentor or whatever the last person in the role happened to look like.

An early conversation for the Style & Strategy podcast surfaced exactly this: a three-piece suit purchased because she believed it was what a "professional" was supposed to look like, worn for three months, then never touched again. What changed over the next twenty years of her career, across several employers and a run through the Global Financial Crisis as an advisor, had far less to do with wardrobe than with something leadership presence coaches see constantly: the years it takes to stop borrowing a definition of authority and start operating from one that's actually yours.

By the time she'd stepped into a leadership role at a technology company, the shift showed up in what she wore, but the wardrobe was the evidence, not the cause. There was no single meeting where the change happened; it built through years of small, unglamorous decisions in rooms where the stakes were real, until the version of her that once needed the costume simply stopped showing up to work.

Leaders who are years into a role that once felt borrowed will recognise the pattern here, and the point at which it stopped being true without anyone announcing it. The full breakdown of what changed, and why it rarely happens the way people expect, is on Substack this week.

Read the full article on Substack this week: https://sonyachoilarosa.substack.com/p/borrowed-authority-leadership-presence