How to get into the room where the real vote happens

By the time the steering committee casts its ballots, the outcome is already settled. It was settled in a corridor, through a string of messages, or during a couple of brief calls the week before, and the meeting simply makes it official. If you're building your strongest case for the meeting itself, you're really preparing for the record. That isn't cynicism. It's simply how organizations operate, and it's the reason sponsorship counts for more than raw performance once you reach a certain point. According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn, just 31% of women starting out have a sponsor, while the figure for men is 45%. Partly, a sponsor is someone who warns you about a meeting while there is still time to shape what happens in it.

The checkpoint

Think back to the most recent significant call that shaped your job or your team in Las Vegas. Answer yes or no to each item, and keep count of how many you only learned about afterward.

A. Before that call, you could name the two or three individuals who would in practice settle it.

B. Prior to circulating the agenda, you spoke one-on-one with at least one of those individuals in Las Vegas.

C. You foresaw the objection most likely to come up and knew who would raise it.

D. That previous week, you put a question to a senior coworker: "What's the word on this?"

E. You grasped what result the decision maker's own boss was quietly hoping for.

F. You lined up one supporter to speak first in favor of what you were asking for.

G. You brought your idea to a person who would push back on it before the official pushback arrived.

H. You could tell whether the decision was still open or had already been reached.

I. Over coffee in a Summerlin café, someone took you through the plan in person rather than with a slide deck.

J. You were part of a discussion that appeared on no calendar and in no minutes.

Interpreting your result

Eight to ten: insider. You're part of the rooms where things get decided. Now your job is to draw another person in beside you.

Four to seven: peripheral. You catch signals as they form, sometimes early enough to change the outcome. You're doing the substantive work and some of the political work, yet a vote still occasionally catches you off guard.

Zero to three: outsider. You get ready for meetings that have, in effect, already been decided before anyone sits down. This is not a personal shortcoming. No one explained that the agenda is the final step rather than the first, and women are more often left to figure that out on their own, since fewer of them have the sponsor who would have told them.

Where to start

Between eight and ten, pick one person two levels below you, perhaps someone in Henderson or Boulder City, and tell her what is actually happening before the next big decision. Doing this is exactly what a sponsor does, and you have already become one.

From four to seven, before your next proposal, spend twenty minutes with the person most likely to resist it and invite them to point out its flaws. People who shape an idea in private tend to champion it in public.

Between zero and three, ask a senior leader this week: "What's the discussion around this before it gets to committee?" Then pay close attention to the reply. Their response tells you who to talk to next, and simply asking shows that you grasp how decisions really move through the organization.

Tally your yeses, and share this with the woman in Paradise or Enterprise who always seems to learn things first.