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8

Develop and Deploy Your Currency

At forty-eight, with twenty-two thousand people reporting to her, Maggie finally wields considerable power as an executive at a global financial advisory firm. Yet only recently, she says, has she become a leader in her own right. Her boss, a West Point graduate, has worked with her to break a pattern she’s repeated her entire career: what she calls “permanent lieutenant syndrome.”

“I’ve always given 110 percent,” she says. “Whomever I worked for, I gave my all, every day, ten hours a day, weekends and holidays—whatever it took to over-deliver. That endeared me to a lot of powerful men.” She kept rising in the organization as a result, but always, she observes, as someone’s trusted Number Two. Now that she’s ...