Career Strategy and Leadership Advancement for Women
- May 6
- 3 min read
By Iaros Belkin
Founder of Belkin Marketing
A woman I know spent three years building what she called her network.
Thousands of LinkedIn connections.
A conference circuit that had her on a plane every six weeks.
A stack of business cards she, unfortunately, didn't know how to use.
And she got passed over for a role that was, by every measurable standard, hers. The person who got it had less than half her credentials. But they'd spent two years having dinners with exactly the right six people.
I've watched this pattern play out across 19 years of advisory work. And what it taught me, uncomfortable as it is, is that most career advice is optimizing the wrong variable.
Performing harder is not the same as advancing faster.
Most guidance tells women to show up more visibly collecting more endorsements and building more content. And that's not wrong. It's just incomplete. Because the decisions that actually move careers are: the name that gets put forward in a room you're not in, the introduction that changes everything. And those happen somewhere else entirely. They happen in the 15 minutes before the session starts. At the dinner that wasn't on the official program. In a quiet conversation between two people who've been building trust for two years while you were working on your slide deck.
The room you're not in decides more than the room you are. I've never found a workaround for this.
So what actually works?
Identify, specifically, whose endorsement would change your trajectory. Not the most impressive names you can imagine. The actual people who have the ear of whoever makes the decision you care about next. Then reverse-engineer where those people spend unstructured time. A conference panel is the wrong answer. A dinner with eight people who were pre-selected by someone with taste: that's where character gets assessed, not just competence. Just do it. Contribute. Be a memorable person. Be yourself. And, importantly, don't pitch.
The second thing, and this one tends to surprise people: stop waiting for invitations and start building the context yourself. Co-host anything with someone who has the network you want. Organize the dinner. Pull together eight people who should know each other and make it happen. This isn't just generous. That's your repositioning. Connectors hold a form of power that compounds quietly and doesn't require a title to exercise. I've watched founders with no brand recognition open doors that polished executives with TED talks couldn't, because they were known as the person who made things happen for others.
The third thing is the one most people build too late. Before you need it, build a public record that can travel without you. Specific, cited, structured contributions to the conversations that matter in your field. When someone Googles your name before deciding whether to introduce you (and they will, every time), what they find either opens the door or quietly closes it.
Thought leadership for its own sake is noise. A specific, verifiable track record of knowing what you're talking about is a credential that works while you sleep.
None of this is fast. The relationships that sponsor careers (not mentors, but sponsors: people who actually move resources on your behalf) operate on 18-month cycles at minimum. But the founders who advance fastest aren't working harder at the visible game. They're playing two games at once, and they started the second one before anyone told them to.
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