You know the person. Maybe you are the person.
She has the idea. She has the evidence. She has sat through the meeting where the wrong decision is being made for reasons she could correct in two sentences. And she waits. She waits to be asked.
The usual diagnosis is confidence. Send her on a course. Teach her to speak up, to network, to raise her profile. The problem is framed as a deficit in her, and the solution is to fix her.
I think that diagnosis is too easy. And I think it lets the institution off the hook.
Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about the speaking subject who is heard, if she is heard at all, on terms set before she opens her mouth. The category arrives first. She is already interpreted. Trinh was writing about the colonial and the gendered condition, about who gets to be the one who speaks and who is only ever spoken about. But the mechanism travels. Institutions decide in advance whose speech counts as insight and whose counts as noise. You can be in the room and still be pre-sorted.
Sara Ahmed gives us the brick wall. The people who get through it rarely see it, because it did not stop them. She also gives us the figure who is forever asked to explain herself, to account for her presence, to prove she belongs at the table she has been seated at. And when that figure finally speaks plainly, she is heard as difficult. Ahmed is theorising race, gender and complaint, and I am not going to pretend the stakes are the same for everyone. But the shape is familiar to anyone whose contribution gets reclassified as attitude the moment it stops being convenient.
Heidi Safia Mirza has spent a career showing how talent in the academy can be present and still managed. Admitted, not sponsored. Visible enough to prove the institution is fair. Not backed enough to let that talent change anything. The presence is real. The power is withheld.
Put these three together and a single point comes into focus. Voice is not only something you produce. It is something the institution grants or refuses. The phrase we reach for, a seat at the table, quietly assumes the table is neutral. That it rewards good contributions wherever they come from. It does not. It has a history, a hierarchy, and a set of assumptions about who arrives already credible.
This matters for professional development and professional services staff in a particular way. We are told to demonstrate our value, to influence upward, to articulate impact. Good advice, as far as it goes. But it still places the whole burden on us. Speak better. Frame it sharper. Prove it harder. The implication is that recognition is waiting on the other side of the right performance, and if we are not getting it, we have not performed well enough.
What if that is not the problem?
What if the problem is that we have accepted, without quite noticing, that our voice is a thing to be granted? That strategic influence is a reward for good behaviour rather than a position we are entitled to take. That permission is something other people hold.
So, the next time you wait to be asked, ask yourself who you are waiting for, and why you have decided they get to decide.
About the author: Rachel Reeds’ 2024 book, Surviving and Thriving in Higher Education Professional Services, speaks directly to the staff who keep universities running and too often go unheard. She built her work around the idea of the positive disruptor: the confidence to challenge, to influence, and to shape decisions rather than wait for permission. Rachel co-hosts the HE Tea Break podcast and runs The Bold Collective, a development community for mid-career professional services managers. She speaks regularly across the sector on strategic voice, career agency, and leading change. Her company Think Bold takes that philosophy into UK HE admissions.