UK Site Manager – Oil & Energy Sector
"I Portrayed Professionalism On Par With Head Office"
Sarah works as a Supply Chain Supervisor within the UK oil and gas industry, in a role that puts her in front of regional stakeholders and makes her the face of supply chain at her site. She’d been in the position for a few years and had already proven she was good at the job. What she hadn’t yet found was a way to be recognised for it in a room that was overwhelmingly male, where success tended to look one particular way. We started with an identity-first strategy: working out not just what she’d wear, but how she wanted to be read the moment she walked into a meeting.
Challenges
Sarah needed to be heard and recognised as the expert she already was, in a room built around a narrow, male-coded idea of what leadership looks like. She’d also relocated internationally for the role, which meant establishing credibility in an unfamiliar market from scratch. That’s a lot to carry at once: proving your expertise, doing it somewhere new, and doing it in an industry where the default picture of authority doesn’t look like you.
She described her environment as one dimensional in what success looked like, and she needed a way to break into conversations that were often shaped by bias towards her more casually dressed male colleagues. The work we did together gave her a way to show up, in her words, “levelled up” so she could get into those discussions on her own terms, even while the underlying bias remained something she couldn’t fix alone.
Results & wins
- Selecting what to wear is no longer a daily obstacle. Getting dressed each morning now works with her day, not against it
- Feels more confident and prepared, and colleagues are noticing her differently in meetings
- Secured face-to-face endorsement from a regional manager in an interaction she went into nervous, and came out of having represented herself with a professionalism on par with regional head office
- Feels empowered to push back on managers when offered roles she doesn’t want
- Has set far more ambitious career targets, both within her company and geographically
- Colleague and senior perception of her has visibly shifted
Watch Sarah’s Testimony
“I wish I had done it sooner — it may feel like a big investment but the payoff can be massive, and you should invest in yourself! You don’t know what you don’t know — this applies to functional (work) skills as well as life skills like style.”
Recognise yourself in Sarah’s journey? If you’re the only woman in the room and tired of a world built around one idea of what success looks like, book a discovery call and let’s build the identity that gets you seen, heard and respected.