What you need to know before jumping into this
Vanessa Lewis has been spending a lot of time lately talking about how the tech industry actually treats people who try to move into leadership roles, and the gap between what companies say they want and what they'll actually give those people. I've been following her recent work pretty closely because it lines up with something I noticed working on diversity and pipeline programs for about eight years now. The core idea isn't complicated. She's pointing out that most tech advocacy programs spend their budget on entry-level outreach and then wonder why nobody from those programs ends up in a management track. Her framework shifts the funding and attention toward the middle levels — the people who already have a seat at the table but still don't have a voice in how decisions get made. That's the part most people gloss over.
Vanessa Lewis Charting A New Course In Tech Advocacy And Leadership
Her actual framework has three pillars, and I'm going to break them down the way I've seen them work in practice, not the way they sound on a press release. Pillar one is visibility capital. Most people think this means getting conference slots or LinkedIn mentions. It doesn't. It means making sure the right internal committees notice you. I spent a quarter once trying to get our team included in a vendor selection process and kept getting routed to the wrong Slack channels. What finally worked was finding the actual decision maker's assistant and asking them who typically flags concerns early. Not the decision maker. The person who screens for them. That gave me a heads up about an internal rubric that wasn't published anywhere and would have cost us the contract if we'd missed it. Pillar two is narrative ownership. This is where most advocacy programs quietly fail. People are told to "tell their story" and then handed a microphone at an event with zero guidance on how to control the framing. I ran a workshop series where we had participants practice introducing themselves in two minutes flat. Half of them ended up apologizing mid-sentence. Not because they were shy. Because they'd been conditioned to hedge their expertise. The fix was having them record themselves, watch it back, and rewrite anything that contained filler qualifiers like "I think" or "maybe" or "just." Takes about twenty minutes per person and the difference is night and day.
Pillar three is structural leverage. This is the part Lewis emphasizes most and the part most organizations skip entirely. It's not enough to be visible or to own your narrative. You need concrete authority — budget control, hiring influence, project sign-off power. Without that, visibility and narrative are just performance. I learned this the hard way when a colleague of mine was featured in three major industry publications in a single year and still couldn't get approval for a tool purchase that cost less than her annual speaking travel budget. Visibility without leverage is just content generation for someone else's benefit. There's a counter-intuitive thing about all of this that nobody talks about enough. The people who benefit most from Lewis's framework aren't necessarily the ones who need it the most in terms of raw access. They're the ones who are slightly past the beginner stage — maybe three to five years in — because that's when the visibility-to-leverage gap becomes widest. Early career people are still figuring out the basics. Senior people already have structural power. The middle group is where the advocacy framework actually matters, and that's why so many programs miss it. They cast too wide at the bottom and assume the top will sort itself out. I've also seen this approach break down in companies where leadership genuinely doesn't have the bandwidth to implement structural changes. If you're in an organization where every decision requires seven approval layers and the C-suite is focused on survival metrics, narrative ownership and visibility capital won't move the needle. In those cases, the practical workaround is usually external leverage — building a reputation outside the company that creates enough external pressure for internal change. It's slower and more exhausting, but it's the only path that works when the internal system is truly locked.
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If you're looking at this and wondering where to start, the thing I'd recommend is tracking your own visibility-to-leverage ratio for a month. Write down every time someone outside your immediate team asks your opinion on something versus every time you're asked to produce content or perform expertise without any follow-through power. The gap between those two numbers tells you which pillar needs work first. Most people discover they're heavy on visibility and light on leverage, which means Lewis's framework is aimed directly at their problem.
