Getting in the Room Is Only the Beginning

When I joined the Business Resource Group board inside my organization, I saw it as a way to contribute. I wasn’t looking at it as a calculated career move. But the experience ended up changing how I understood the organization and some of the decisions being made around me.

I was spending time with senior leaders whose responsibilities went well beyond my own. They were thinking about risk, reputation, culture, and where the business was going over time. I cared about those things too, but my day-to-day responsibilities gave me a different starting point. I was used to looking at what a decision meant for the work and the people closest to me.

There’s value in that view. The people doing the work see things that can get lost as information moves up. I didn’t need to disregard what I knew from leading a team. I needed to understand what else was involved.

Being around those leaders gave me more to consider. I started paying attention to how they weighed risk, how timing affected a message, and how a decision could be understood differently across the organization. Something that looked straightforward from my position could have consequences I hadn’t accounted for.

That doesn’t mean senior leaders always have the right answer. Having a broader responsibility doesn’t make someone’s judgment unquestionable. But I could see that I sometimes had an opinion about a decision without understanding all the things it was supposed to address. I needed more information before I could fairly evaluate it.

The board also made me more aware of how I represented myself and the organization. I paid attention to the quality of my work, prepared before speaking, and thought about my tone. People outside my reporting line were getting to know how I operated. They could see more than a set of results or a description of my responsibilities.

I understand why people want that kind of access. It can be frustrating to feel like your work never gets beyond the people who already know you. But being included creates its own responsibility. Once you’re there, people get to observe how you contribute, including what you do when somebody disagrees with you.

I didn’t need to have something to say about everything. I needed to understand the conversation well enough to make a useful contribution. Sometimes that meant explaining something from my experience. It also meant listening closely enough to recognize where my understanding was incomplete.

Over time, I developed relationships with leaders who otherwise wouldn’t have known my work. Through the board’s external initiatives, I also connected with executives across industries. That widened my perspective further. My reporting line was no longer the limit of who I could learn from or work with.

Looking back, I can see the career value in those relationships. I can also see how much of the value came from having my own thinking challenged. It would have been easy to focus on who was in the room and miss what I could learn from how they approached the work.

When I think about that experience now, I think about how much more there was to understand than I could see from my own role. Being included gave me access to some of that context. I still had to pay attention and let it change how I worked.