By Tan Hui Yee

The story is common: Bright, driven female executive comes up with an idea for a new product. She leads her team to conceptualise, design and market it.

The product is a success, but she is passed over for promotion. Reason: Her bosses do not think she is leadership material. They do not know she was responsible for the product. In fact, they do not even know what she looks like.

Corporate coach Jane Horan, 53, has seen many such cases in countries as varied as Spain, Britain, the Czech Republic, China, India and Singapore.

The women, she says, all believe the same thing: 'My work will speak for itself.'

What they fail to realise is this attitude will eventually put a spanner in their career prospects.

Ms Horan is an American who runs a Singapore-based consultancy that teaches women leaders organisational savvy.

She conducted a workshop at the recent Women in the Community: Change Movers conference organised by Singapore Management University's Wee Kim Wee Centre and supported by the Shirin Fozdar Trust Fund.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, she notes how many women ace business school, only to graduate and get stuck on the middle rungs of the corporate ladder.

In fact, as the world celebrates International Women's Day, it bears remembering that just 29 of the world's top 2,000 performing companies are headed by women, according to the Harvard Business Review.

Singapore, meanwhile, slides down in the World Economic Forum's annual gender gap ranking and was last year ranked 85th out of 134 countries.

Ms Horan thinks many of these women get stumped by one word: politics.

Not shady, backbiting, hustling office politics, but the political savvy involved in reaching out to influential people to get their ideas past the door.

This requires women to do one thing they have been brought up to avoid: talk about their achievements.

She says that there is nothing self-serving about this process.

'The thing about self-promotion is that it's not always about you,' she says. 'Because you are in a management role, it's about your team. The company expects you to do that.'

There is nothing unethical about it either. 'When you tell people what you have done, you have to have substance behind you. If you tell people: 'I did this,' and you have not done anything, then you lose all credibility.'

She concedes that women who have been taught from young to be modest - even as their male peers were being schooled in one-upmanship in the playground - will find her proposition counter-intuitive, even downright uncomfortable.

'They always go: 'Oh, I don't want to brag' or 'I don't want to be seen as a brown-noser'. But if you do it with ethics and values, it is in essence about sharing your know-ledge with the company.'

For women new to this whole business, she suggests four easy steps:

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