Your quietest high-performer gets talked over and mistaken for newbies. Then they quit, and you never see it coming.
Mary Ann Sieghart coined a term for this: The Authority Gap.
It's the distance between someone's real authority and what others actually perceive.
The original research focused on gender. But having sat in rooms with hundreds of founders and their teams, I see this pattern cut across gender, tenure, and expertise.
18% of senior professionals have been mistaken for someone far below their actual level at work.
The mechanism is in the signal - the way someone showcases authority.
The operator who under-signals gets:
→ Interrupted mid-sentence
→ Talked over by louder voices in the room
→ Credited less for the work they own
→ Mistaken for someone junior when decisions get made
Here's what bothers me about this pattern.
📍Confidence drops first
📍Engagement drops next
📍Then the best people leave before anyone notices
By the time a founder realises the strongest operator on the team has checked out, they've already been mentally gone for months.
The room missed it for the same reason they missed their authority in the first place, because there was no signal.
If you're leading a team, stop asking who's delivering. Ask who's delivering AND being seen for it. Those are two very different lists.
If you're the quiet one watching your work get re-attributed, understand that signalling isn't being arrogant. It's the price of being recognised for what you've actually done.
https://www.ft.com/content/729d1a32-62bf-4d61-b3e3-0763b7fe93ca?desktop=true&segmentId=7c8f09b9-9b61-4fbb-9430-9208a9e233c8&syn-25a6b1a6=1#comments-anchor
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