A client of mine came to a session having done homework we’d agreed upon that she honestly wasn't thrilled about: a Stakeholder Map.

It's an exercise I use often, plotting out who actually influences a decision and how close you are to each of them.

"I realised I try to avoid truth-telling exercises about my relationships," she admitted. "But this made all my gaps far too clear."

She was the senior one in her department.

Had been for years.

And when she filled in the boxes for the people who'd actually be in the room for the next round of promotions, more than half of them were blank.

Not because those people didn't like her.

She'd simply never taken the time to get to know them, or to make sure they knew what she'd actually delivered.

As we went through it properly, the gaps weren't the whole picture.

There was evidence of something else too, sitting right there on the same page: people who'd already shown up for her, more than once, who she'd never quite counted as allies because they weren't the ones with the ‘final’ say.

Her energy shifted visibly once she saw it. She had advocates in the wider team.

She'd simply filed them under "nice colleague" rather than "someone worth investing real time in," because technically they weren't senior enough to matter, on paper.

She started talking about what a bit more deliberate time with them might actually do.

Not networking, exactly. Something closer to what she called, laughing slightly at her own phrase: "Turning them into creative co-conspirators, after all, I know they want the best for me since it benefits them too."

She began reaching out. Not to the strangers on the Exec Committee first, but to the people already half-way there, the ones the map had shown her she'd undeutilised.

Coffee catch-ups.

A proper conversation about what she'd delivered that year, instead of assuming it spoke for itself.

The blank boxes on the Exec Committee didn't fill themselves in overnight.

But the map had done its job.

It's harder to keep avoiding a gap once you've seen it drawn in your own handwriting, and harder still to keep believing you have no allies when the evidence in front of you says otherwise.

She still finds this kind of exercise uncomfortable.

She still does it anyway, now, before it becomes a promotion-season scramble.

Want the deeper version of this?

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