The call you're supposed to ignore, and why the smartest women always take it

At 11:40 on the morning after the best quarter of your career, an unknown number lights up your phone in Cleveland. You decline it. The voicemail is from a recruiter whose name you recognize, but she won't say the role out loud on a message. You are 50, operating as chief operating officer in all but title, deep into the year you spent ten years working toward. Your board values you. The CEO relies on you. The plan is on track. Every common-sense reflex says to erase the message, and you have erased the last three.

You already know what the call really is. It is the marketplace pricing what your replacement would cost. The only question is whether you can afford to stay in the dark about the answer.

Option one. Let it go

You erase the message and return to the plan. The price is quiet but cumulative. Recruiters keep running lists, and after three polite non-answers your name drifts onto a different one, the list they stop dialing. Strangers who can actually see your work are the ones who decide what you are worth. If no one is reaching out, no one is looking closely. The year you are winning is also the year your value is at its peak, and you have just chosen not to learn what that value is.

Option two. Take the call for information only

When you ring back, use a line that commits you to nothing at all. "I feel settled where I am, and I make a point of returning every one of these calls. Tell me about the role, and if it's not right for me I'll tell you who it is right for." The price is half an hour, plus a slim chance that what you hear appeals to you. The return is a figure, a title, and a read on how the market sees you, which often sits a full level above how your own company sees you.

Option three. Pursue it

You move through the interviews while you are at the top of your game, inside a building where someone will sooner or later catch on to the Tuesday afternoons. The price is attention you can't spare, a loyalty question if word gets out, and a real chance of an offer you will have to make a decision about. The return is leverage, along with a clear answer to a question you have never said aloud: what would it actually take to get me to leave?

Counsel from seasoned leaders

Leaders who have run large organizations are unambiguous: take the call. Not because you plan to go. Because the call is data, and it comes at no cost to you. A 2025 Deloitte study of 7,500 women revealed that a mere 5% plan to stay with their present employer beyond five years. The women who move on gracefully were not restless. They had already worked out their worth long before any offer arrived.

Recruiters, unlike your manager in Shaker Heights, will also tell you which level of role the market believes is your true fit. If the call is for a chief operating officer seat and your company still lists you as a senior vice president, that is not an offer. That feedback is a correction you can apply inside your current company in Parma or Westlake without ever leaving.

The result

Option two, with no exceptions. It isn't a big decision. It's a thirty-minute check on your market value, and the women who make that check are never caught off guard by their own worth or by anyone else's estimate of it. Pick Option C only when the offer in Strongsville or Medina is large enough to make you pull up a chair.

Your vote

What is your reply? Let it go, take the call, or pursue it. Cast your vote below. Next week, we will publish the findings from Greater Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, including the figure that stopped most of you cold.