You Cannot Break Through as a Manager With an Outdated Strategy 

You Cannot Break Through as a Manager With an Outdated Strategy 

3.13.2026

By Jennifer Andrus

You sacrifice time with your family and outside interests to put in more billable hours. You take on more projects at work, but you are not tapped for leadership roles. What comes next is a period of questioning of your own value and self-worth.

This scenario marked the opening of a recent New York State Bar Association program, “Breaking the Manager Ceiling: for Women Navigating Advancement, Influence and Visibility in the Legal Profession,” sponsored by the Women In Law Section.

“You are stuck because your strategy is outdated. It worked in the past, but it’s no longer effective in moving you to the next level,” said attorney and author Jean Tien. “The reason there is a manager ceiling is a lack of clarity about who you are today.”

Tien is a best-selling author and creator of The S.U.C.C.E.S.S.™ Method, her 7-part process to break through barriers to success. She is a licensed attorney in New York who has worked in finance for over 20 years and is an executive director at a global investment bank overseeing enterprise-wide operational risk. She also speaks on organizational conflict and leadership strategies. Tien shared how her career path changed during the COVID pandemic when she had time to step back and find clarity about her identity in both her personal and professional life. She found herself at a plateau in her career and found the solution was not more billable hours, but defining her leadership values.

“I have given up time with my newborns, my family and sacrificed my health,” Tien recounted. “I was still seen as someone doing the work, but not someone leading it.”

She researched these leadership myths that women hold onto that no longer meet the needs of their work in the middle years of a career. Tien says a paradigm shift is needed to move from a leadership model based on your position to one of inner authority. This inner authority is derived from a connection to your personal values.

“You are more than what you deliver on paper,” she said. “Your leadership identity gives you the guardrails and builds a reputation where people will know what you stand for and how you show up in both your professional and personal life.”

Creating a Leadership Identity

Tien used the second half of the program to instruct the lawyers in attendance on how to create their own leadership identity using a pattern like a Venn diagram. The Values Vector encourages you to find which values show up on both sides of the diagram.

“What is the vision – what would success look like for you at this point? The values that go with it are the non-negotiable principles that govern how you pursue the vision,” she said, adding “You can achieve this vision without losing parts of yourself along the way.”

For example, if you value your family, how do you dedicate time to them? If you value your integrity, how does that show up in the decisions you make in your practice? Tien says the exercise helps you assess if you are leading from your values or from the values and expectations of others.

“If your work and your values are not aligned, you will show up as disgruntled and people will see it,” she warns.

The more shared values you have in the middle of the diagram, the better able you are to lead professionally and personally at the same level. You don’t have to pretend to be someone you are not. You can show up and be yourself because you’ve built that rapport and reputation.

Tien offered a free quiz to give you a quick leadership assessment to jump start the creation of your leadership identity.