The good employee is easy to describe.
She shows up, hits her targets, and makes her manager’s life easier. She gets the work done before the deadline and uses the extra hours to think about how the work could be done better next time. She has ideas, and sometimes she shares them. Most of the time, they go nowhere.
She doesn’t complain or job-hop. She doesn’t ruffle too many feathers. When something isn’t working, her first instinct is to try harder, take on more, or fix it from the inside. She tells herself that effort is the variable. If she gives more, the situation will give back.
This is the story I hear most often from the women I coach. It’s also the story Lori Munoz told me when I interviewed her for Rerouted.
Lori spent years in the nonprofit sector as the employee everyone counted on. Strong work ethic. Big ideas. The kind of person who couldn’t accept “that’s how we’ve always done it” and kept proposing change in environments that weren’t built to absorb it. From the outside, she was doing everything right, but inside, she was hitting a wall.
The story she was telling herself: try harder, prove more, take on more responsibility, and eventually it will land.
It didn’t land, and it wasn’t ever going to. I asked Lori, “What was the moment you realized that something needed to change in your career, and how did you act on it?”
The nonprofit budgets she worked against weren’t built on what was possible with the resources available. They were built on what the org wanted to claim. So she was being asked, in her words, to swim across the channel when you’re barely able to float, and the only thing they’ve given you was actually to make you sink.
“I never stopped to think: do I have everything I need to actually achieve this? That never crossed my mind as an employee. Me being the optimist, me thinking that I could do these things, me seeing this as a challenge, never really stopped to think: oh, well, do I have everything I need in place to actually achieve all of these things? That never crossed my mind as an employee.”
That’s the trap. The high-performing, optimistic, “I can figure this out” employee doesn’t audit the setup. She audits herself. When the targets don’t get hit, she looks inward. When the ideas don’t land, she assumes she needs to communicate them better. When the burnout starts, she questions her resilience.
Lori, looking back from her 40s, asked a question I want every woman reading this to ask:
“What are you trying to prove? That you could endure burnout? That you’re resilient? That you can take on more work with less pay? What if you stopped?
These are tough questions and it may take time to flush out the answers.
My clients who eventually make the move that changes their career trajectory aren’t the women who tried harder. They’re the women who stopped to ask whether the system they were performing inside could reward what they were giving.
The shift isn’t from “I’m not good enough” to “I am good enough.”
It’s from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What is this workplace built to do? And, “Is it the right fit for me?”
Lori left traditional employment to start BrokersOfGood, a company built on partnerships between businesses and nonprofits, run on a model she chose instead of one she inherited. It took her years to get to the version of it she’s running now. It was a bold move, but the interesting part is what she had to stop believing about herself to do it.
If you recognized yourself in the first three paragraphs, I’d offer one thing. You’re probably not underperforming. You’re probably under-resourced, working in a place that mistakes your willingness to absorb that gap for endurance, and treating your effort as the renewable resource that closes it.
The audit isn’t about you. The audit is about the place.
What’s the question you’ve been avoiding asking about where you work?