In my regular life, I am an open book.
Not a naive one. Not a foolish one. But what you see is largely what you get. I do not suffer fools lightly and you will always know where you stand with me. I am direct. I am transparent. I say the thing I mean and I mean the thing I say and I do not spend a lot of energy managing other people’s perceptions of who I am.
Work is different.
Work is where my direct deposit lives. That is the beginning and the end of that relationship for me. You pay me. I deliver. We go home. And somewhere in the thirty plus years I have spent navigating corporate America I learned something that changed everything about how I show up in that space.
Let them underestimate you.
Not by accident. On purpose.
The gift that nobody credits.
Here is what I know from three decades of watching how corporate America handles Black women’s excellence.
If you give these people your best, they will accept it with both hands, use it for themselves, and present it to the room as though you handed them a gift specifically for their benefit. No credit. No mention. No acknowledgment that the idea, the framework, the solution, the language that just landed so well in that meeting came from the woman sitting two chairs down who has been doing this since before half the room was employable.
The research confirms what we already know in our bones. Studies show that Black women are significantly less likely to be credited for their ideas in group settings than their white counterparts. We are more likely to have our contributions interrupted, talked over, or attributed to someone else entirely. The excellence is extracted. The source is invisible.
I watched this happen enough times to make a decision.
If my one hundred percent becomes their one hundred percent with my name nowhere on it- they can have my twenty-five. My twenty-five is still their one hundred. And I keep the rest for places where I am seen as a full person and compensated accordingly.
The 25% strategy. A field guide.
Twenty-five percent is not phoning it in. Let me be precise about that.
Twenty-five percent of what I bring to a room is still more than most people in that room are operating at full capacity. The KPIs get met. The work gets done. The deliverables land on time and at quality. Nobody is suffering. Nobody is getting a bad product.
What they are not getting is the full version. The version that would require genuine recognition to sustain. The version that would require them to see me completely- as a cognitive virtuoso, as a strategic thinker, as someone whose depth of expertise genuinely changes outcomes- and compensate me and credit me accordingly.
They declined that offer. Repeatedly. So, I withdrew it. Quietly. Without announcement.
The twenty-five percent is purposeful. It is calibrated. It keeps the peace, meets the requirements, and protects the rest of me for the work that actually sees me.
Where the other seventy-five percent lives.
Here is the thing about strategic withholding. You have to actually put what you are holding somewhere.
My consulting work gets the full version. My writing gets the full version. The rooms where I am recognized as a whole person- where my expertise is the point of my presence rather than a resource to be harvested quietly- those rooms get everything.
That is where the cognitive virtuoso shows up. That is where the thirty years of pattern recognition and organizational psychology and hard-won wisdom gets deployed with full force and full ownership.
Corporate America gets the garden variety. Everyone else gets the garden.
The body count principle.
I want to tell you something that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with this concept.
Your man does not need to know your body count. He does not need to know how very well you have studied the art of seduction or how many times you have deployed it successfully. Leave him something for the imagination. Give him sparks of perfection here and there. Let him discover your depth gradually and on your terms rather than arriving to a full inventory on day one.
This is not deception. This is strategy. This is understanding that mystery is its own form of power and that full disclosure serves the other person’s curiosity more than it serves your interests.
Corporate America is the same energy.
Not every room needs to see everything. Not every colleague needs the full picture. Not every manager needs to know what you are actually capable of- especially if that knowledge will be used to extract more from you without additional compensation or recognition.
Show them what they need to see. Keep the rest. Reveal it on your terms, in your time, in the rooms that have earned it.
It benefits you.
It benefits you.
What strategic underestimation actually looks like.
It looks like answering the question asked rather than the three questions behind it that you already know the answers to.
It looks like letting someone else present the solution you helped build without correcting the record in real time.
It looks like not volunteering your full analysis in a meeting where your full analysis will be adopted, stripped of your name, and presented to leadership as a collaborative effort.
It looks like saving your sharpest thinking for the proposal, the client meeting, the side business, the consulting engagement where your name is on the invoice and the credit is non-negotiable.
It looks like knowing the difference between a room that is worth your full presence and a room that is just going to take what you give and file you back under vendor support staff.
Confident Kevin already met her. She smiled. She answered what was asked. She kept the rest.
And on Friday her other invoice cleared.
The permission you did not know you needed.
Pull back.
Not from excellence. From the indiscriminate distribution of it. Excellence is a finite resource and where you spend it matters enormously.
Every room does not deserve your best. Every colleague is not entitled to your full thinking. Every organization that has decided you are more valuable as a workhorse than as a leader has forfeited the right to your complete investment.
Give them what the job requires. Keep the rest for yourself- for the work that sees you, pays you correctly, and puts your name on what you built.
You are not obligated to be fully visible in spaces that have decided not to fully see you.
Let them underestimate you.
And then go somewhere that does not.
Have you ever made a conscious decision to pull back at work? How did it change things? Drop it in the comments.
