Stop Blaming The Ceiling

You've been blaming the wrong ceiling.

The glass ceiling is real. I'm not here to dismiss it. Age discrimination happens - older workers pushed aside for younger ones. Gender bias happens - women doing the same work for less money. Racial bias happens, and it's uglier and more systemic than most organisations want to admit. Someone once described to me the bamboo ceiling - the invisible barrier she kept hitting as an Asian woman trying to climb through a predominantly white leadership structure. These are real. They cause real harm. And if you've hit one, your frustration is completely legitimate. But frustration isn't a strategy. And the ceiling isn't always the reason.

Too many people use the ceiling as the explanation. They point up at it, arms folded and say: that's why I can't get through. And in doing so, they miss what's actually holding them back. It isn't the ceiling. It's them. More specifically, it’s what they've been building.

The real ceiling

Underneath the glass ceiling - or the bamboo one, or whatever version you've been staring at - there's a different barrier doing most of the damage. I call it the leadership ceiling.

The leadership ceiling isn't imposed on you from the outside. It's built from the inside, quietly, over years, by people who have invested everything in the wrong currency. It sits directly above the point where your expertise ends and your influence begins. And for most aspiring leaders, that gap is enormous.

Here's the thing about the leadership ceiling: you can't see it until you're already under it. Perhaps even with your face pressed up against it. You spend years doing good work. You get promoted for doing good work. And then one day the promotions stop, and you can't work out why, because you're still doing good work. Better work, even. You've got more experience than anyone in the room. You've got the qualifications to prove it.

That's the ceiling. And the only thing that breaks through it is influence.

The entry fee

I work with leaders at all levels across diverse sectors and industries. Really smart people. Experienced people. And a lot of them are stuck. Not because of discrimination. Because they have spent their entire careers building expertise - when what actually moves people through the ceiling is influence.

Expertise is the entry fee. Nobody on that panel is sitting there wondering if you know your stuff. If you weren't credible, you wouldn't have made the shortlist. You don't need to convince them you're smart. You wouldn't be in the room if you weren't.

What they're looking for - what they're really trying to figure out - is whether you can move people. Whether others will follow you. Whether you carry any weight in a room that isn't yours.

Sharp, capable, respected. A strong contender on paper. But knocked back again - always a variation of the same feedback: went with someone whose leadership presence felt more developed. What does that even mean? It means influence. And they didn't have enough of it.

The bamboo fork

Most people trying to smash through a ceiling are using the wrong tool.

If you believe the barrier is the ceiling itself, you keep swinging at it. More credentials. More visibility in the wrong rooms. More effort poured into proving you're experienced enough, qualified enough, deserving enough.

But if the real barrier is influence - your ability to shift thinking, earn trust, and move people without needing the title to do it - then you're not just using the wrong tool. You're solving the wrong problem.

It's like trying to smash through a glass ceiling with a bamboo fork. Exhausting. Demoralising. And completely missing the point.

What influence actually looks like

I'm not going to give you a five-step framework here. That's a different conversation. But I want to make influence concrete, because too many people treat it as some intangible quality you either have or you don't.

You know someone has influence when they speak and the room adjusts. Not because of their title, but because of the weight their thinking carries. You know someone has influence when their name comes up in conversations they're not in. You know someone has influence when they can walk into a room full of tension and reframe it without anyone quite knowing how they did it.

None of that comes from a qualification. It comes from how you show up over time. The way you handle a difficult moment in a meeting. The way you advocate for something with enough clarity that others start to believe it too. The way you make people feel when they're around you - like they've been seen, like the work matters, like they're following someone worth following.

That's what influence is. And it's built slowly, through hundreds of small moments, long before you have the authority to lead.

Put the fork down

I'm not telling you discrimination isn't real. It is. And if you've experienced it, I'm not asking you to minimise that.

But I am asking you to consider which ceiling is actually in your way.

Because if you spend another year collecting credentials, updating your LinkedIn, and waiting for someone to finally recognise how capable you are - that's on you. The panel can already see what you bring. What they can't yet see is whether you can lead.

The ceiling isn't glass. It isn't bamboo. It's influence. And unlike the other ceilings, this one you can do something about.