Whose Potential Gets Room to Grow? A Reflection on Opening Doors from Both Sides of Influence

When I learned that Canadian Lawyer named me one of its Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers and WXN included me among its Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada, I was deeply grateful and profoundly honoured. 

However, more recently, I have found myself thinking less about the honour itself and more about the deeper meaning behind these awards, and about the language behind honorific titles. Words like influence and power are not ornamental. They have an unmistakable gravity and consequence, and, as such, they demand careful reflection.   

What does it mean to say someone is an influential lawyer and a powerful woman in Canada today?   

We often think influence and power are rewards for personal success. I have come to believe something different. Influence and power matter most early on in our lives and careers – when they are exercised on behalf of people whose true potential and ultimate trajectory remain unknown.    

My own career reflects that reality. 

I came to law without much of the social capital that makes a profession easier to navigate. I went through Ontario’s publicly funded school system. To finish university, I needed student loans and was still repaying them well into practice. I often found myself sitting across from people whose tuition had been paid and whose summers had been spent at Bay Street firms, while mine were spent working restaurant shifts.  

I am one generation removed from two women in my family who lived below the poverty line. One grandmother sold eggs door to door. The other did not work outside the home but took on boarders in her tiny three-bedroom home. I did not inherit professional networks. When I walked into my associate job, I did not yet understand that professions operate through both formal and informal systems; that there are unwritten rules about who could ask for what, and that knowing someone could matter as much as knowing something.   

I watched others move through these spaces with an ease I could not find in myself. 

Fortunately, I encountered people who were willing to take chances on me. Throughout my career, I have benefited from mentors who were also sponsors. They did more than offer advice. They opened doors, created opportunities, and entrusted me with work that allowed me to grow. 

Senior lawyers gave me difficult work before I had demonstrated that I deserved them.  One was Kevin Ross. Another was Peter Kryworuk. They introduced me to important clients, included me in consequential conversations, and advocated for me when I was not in the room. They did not create my ability, nor did they know with certainty what I would do with the opportunities they provided. What they did that was transformative was to give my ability somewhere to develop – they found spaces where that ability was empowered and made visible.   

Sponsorship matters more than we acknowledge. We like to believe that merit precedes opportunity. In this story, talent rises because talent deserves to rise. Institutions merely reveal what was already there.   

But that is only part of the story.   

American sociologist and professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s work shows that people develop in response to the opportunities the are provided. The insight is simple, but the implications are profound: people become capable of more when they are trusted with more.  

Judgment grows when people are given decisions to make. Confidence flows from responsibility. Expertise deepens and sharpens from exposure to challenges.   

Someone consistently trusted with difficult work has more chances to become demonstrably good at difficult work. Someone excluded from consequential conversations has fewer chances to show that they deserve to be in the room. Someone who is told their voice is too quiet, their style insufficiently authoritative, or their background unfamiliar with the challenge at hand may never discover whether those judgments were accurate or merely reflections of who has traditionally been heard.   

Over time, opportunity disappears from the story and the record remains. By the time someone has built a significant practice, become a trusted adviser, or acquired a reputation for leadership, we look backward and treat the outcome as destiny – as the confirmation of qualities that were always there.    

We see the polished advocate but not the first senior lawyer who trusted her to argue in court. We see the rainmaker but not the introductions that opened doors. We admire judgement, confidence, and experience while forgetting that all three had to be developed somewhere.  

There is a paradox at the heart of professional advancement.   

We give people opportunities because they appear capable. Later, their success is taken as proof of that capability. Yet some of the evidence we point to emerged only because they were given those opportunities in the first place.   

Sponsorship is one expression of this dynamic. A mentor transfers knowledge. A sponsor transfers influence and exercises power to create meaningful access and foster trust. The kind of capital that is difficult to generate independently.   

Much of that capital travels through relationships, familiarity, confidence and networks.  Those informal networks are powerful. They are also uneven.  People do not enter professions with the same level of access.   

I know this because I experienced it.  

Now I am a Managing Partner. When an important assignment arises, I decide whom to consider for it. I introduce lawyers to clients. I advocate for people when they are not in the room. In ways both obvious and subtle, I have become one of the gatekeepers. 

This is where I must reckon with what I know – and think judiciously about the exercise of influence and power.  

I have tried to make different choices because of my own experience. I try to look past the behaviours that institutions and professions reward most readily. I try to notice when confidence is mistaken for competence, or when a familiar style of self-presentation is mistaken for leadership. Because I have lived on the other side of those judgments, I can sometimes see them more clearly than I once did.   

But awareness does not eliminate bias.   

When I move quickly to say yes, is it because I genuinely see potential, or because the person reminds me of someone I already know, perhaps even of myself?     

When I hesitate, is it because cautious is genuinely warranted, or because I am reproducing the same informal calculus that has prevailed in our profession?  

I cannot always tell. 

I know I have made some good decisions and some poor ones. There are people I should have advocated for more strongly than I did. Moments when I was not paying sufficient attention. Situations where I fell back on familiar patterns because they were easier to recognize than possibility itself.  

The question that occupies me now is the same one that shaped much of my own career: whose potential deserves the opportunity to become proof?   

That, to me, is the honest version of influence.   

Influence is not control. It is recognizing that decisions which seem small in the moment can alter the course of someone else’s career. It is accepting responsibility for making those decisions thoughtfully, while acknowledging that certainty is not always available.   

By the time someone is recognized for leadership, we tend to forget the acts of trust that made that leadership possible. The assignment. The introduction. The recommendation. The blunt but needed advice. The chance to prove oneself. Those moments disappear from the story, even though they were pivotal to creating it.   

The recognitions that prompted these reflections celebrate influence and power as accomplishments, and I am deeply grateful for them. Yet I have come to believe that influence and power matter most long before they can be recognized or measured, let alone celebrated. They matter in the moments when someone else’s future remains uncertain, and we have the power to open a door, to expand and transform what becomes possible for others.     

That, more than any title, is what influence and power ask of us.