Everyone tells you you're doing great. Nobody tells you the standard you're actually being held to. Why women in tech careers stall on feedback nobody gives.
By the end of this you will know what that unspoken standard usually is, and how to ask for the feedback that names it.
Sharon Lynch has been asked more than once to lower the standard for women. Her answer has been no every time, and not because she wants fewer women in senior roles. The moment the bar drops, the whole organisation reads it as proof that women could not clear it, and every woman hired after that carries the diversity hire label whether it fits her or not.
She is CEO of Modus Create, and before that she ran Slalom's product engineering organisation across the Americas, a team of more than 1,400 people.
What she describes in this conversation is the quieter problem underneath. Managers, often men but women too, are afraid of how developmental feedback will land, so they soften it or skip it altogether. The result is that women are held to a high standard nobody has articulated, evaluated against a bar nobody has described, and passed over for reasons that never get said out loud. When Sharon left her last role, a colleague's first question was not about the org chart. It was who is going to give us the hard feedback now.
Women in tech careers rarely stall on capability. They stall in the gap between how well she performs and what anyone is willing to say about it.
The rest of the conversation is about what closes that gap. Sharon's route to CEO ran through the business fundamentals: utilisation, expenses, revenue, how money is actually made. She is direct about why this matters. Functional leaders know their own function extremely well. Executives tie everything together, and you cannot do the second without understanding the first. That shift from individual contributor skills to an executive mindset is the one she watches most women stop short of.
She also talks about asking her way into rooms she was not invited to, why asking your team to explain the data is not a failure of trust, what leadership legacy looks like when it is not about you, and why a title reveals the leader you had already become rather than creating one.
WHAT'S COVERED
→ Why "you're doing great" is the most expensive feedback you can receive
→ What happens to every woman in the room the moment the standard is lowered for one
→ Why understanding utilisation, expenses and revenue changes how executives look at you
→ How to ask your way into the rooms where the numbers get decided, without signalling that you don't trust your team
→ Why being right the fastest costs more than it wins
→ What a title actually changes, and what it only reveals
RELATED EPISODES
How to give feedback as a leader — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/152-how-to-give-feedback/
The promotion gap for women in tech — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/290-women-in-tech-promotion-gap/
The shift from tactical to strategic leadership — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/292-executive-leadership-for-women-strategic-shift/
CONNECT WITH SHARON LYNCH
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharondlynch/
Modus Create — https://www.moduscreate.com/
Ready to stop guessing at the standard you're being measured against? Book a strategy call — https://tonicollis.com/lets-chat/
This episode was sponsored by our guest, Sharon Lynch. Thank you Sharon and Modus Create for helping to bring Leading Women in Tech to this community.
#WomenInTech #TechLeadership #WomenInLeadership #Leadership #LeadingWomenInTech
