In this keynote excerpt, Margaret Spence recounts a pivotal moment from 25 years ago when her manager told her she lacked leadership potential and should stay in her current role. Despite this discouragement, Spence pursued her vision, eventually becoming a seasoned risk management and HR professional with 32 years of experience. Ten years after the discouraging conversation, she returned to the same industry conference as a keynote speaker, with the same former manager now sitting in the audience, visibly shocked. The narrative serves as a motivational illustration of self‑advocacy, resilience, and the power of proving one’s worth to skeptics, emphasizing that personal empowerment can overturn others’ limited perceptions.
Chapters
Imagine that you've spent 5 years sitting in a particular desk in your office. You've learned all the tasks that they've asked you to learn. You've done everything that you should do as a leader. And one day you see a position posted and it's the ideal position. It's the one that you've craved your whole life for. It's the one that you saw yourself in the minute you arrived in the company that you work for. And imagine that when you saw that position posted, you thought to yourself, what I could do to have that position. Let me go ahead and have a discussion with my manager about that job. And so you schedule an appointment, you go in, and you speak to your manager. And during that conversation, you give her all the reasons why you should have that position. You basically ask for the job that you want. But instead of embracing your vision for where you want to go, Your boss says to you, "You're really good where you are. There's no reason for you to leave that position that you're in right now." Furthermore, she said, "I don't really see you having the potential to be a leader." And she added, "Not only do I not see you having the potential, I just can't see you in a leadership role within our company. That discussion occurred 25 years ago between myself and my boss. I today am sharing my story with you, a story of empowerment, a story of my life, and a story of coming full circle. 10 years later, I was keynoting our industry conference. For those of you who don't know my background, I've been in risk management and HR for the last 32 years. And so fast forward 10 years, and I'm keynoting the conference, and my boss that told me that I had no potential is sitting in the audience. She's 3 rows back, and her eyes are about to pop out of her head because I'm standing on the stage. That is how you show people who don't know who you are, who you are.
