Eleven years in one place teaches you an enormous amount — the kind of fluency that usually takes a decade to build and cannot be faked by anybody who hasn't put in the time. 🗝️
You know which director actually decides things and which one just attends. You know the system that breaks every March. You know the history underneath the policy that makes no sense, because you were in the room when the thing happened that caused it.
All of that is real expertise. Almost none of it can leave the building.
Loyalty buys you standing inside one building. It does not buy you standing anywhere else, and nobody mentions that until you are outside.
What loyalty actually purchases
Trust, mostly. Room to be wrong occasionally. The benefit of the doubt on a bad quarter. Those are worth having and I am not going to be cynical about them.
What it does not purchase is a floor. Not on your salary, not on your role, not on your job existing next quarter. Restructures do not read your tenure with any affection. The spreadsheet does not know that you stayed through the year everybody else left.
That is not a betrayal, exactly. It is just a category error that we all keep making — treating an emotional relationship as though it were a contractual one, because it feels like one from the inside. 🖤
How it quietly costs you 📉
Your value gets described in the local dialect. You are the person who owns the Q3 process. You run the thing. Everybody internally knows exactly what that means and precisely nobody outside does.
Meanwhile the market has been having a separate conversation about what your work is called and what it pays, and you have not been in the room for any of it. So when you finally look up, you are not negotiating from your actual worth. You are negotiating from a number somebody set in 2019 and adjusted for inflation twice.
Don't get it twisted — none of this means leave. Plenty of women should stay exactly where they are. It means knowing what staying costs, so it is a choice rather than a default.
Your worth got described in a dialect only one building speaks. Then you tried to spend it somewhere else.
How to stay legible from the outside
Twice a year, translate one thing you did out of the local dialect. Not for a CV. Just write down what the work actually was in words a stranger could price — what you owned, how much moved through it, what changed because you were there.
Take one call a year with somebody hiring for what you do. Not a job hunt. A price check. You are allowed to know what your work costs without leaving it.
And keep your proof somewhere that is yours. Not the shared drive. Yours.
The takeaway
One paragraph this week. Describe the most valuable thing you do, in language somebody who has never met your company could understand and put a number on.
If that is hard to write, that is not a sign you have wasted your time. It is a sign the translation has been overdue for a while — and it is much cheaper to do it now than in the week you need it.
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