In Defense of the Queen Bee

Some people are very good at gathering people. And I don’t mean organizing them. I mean the connecting and the noticing, the way people leave a conversation feeling a little more like themselves. They’re the ones others want to hang out with, because they make people feel seen and genuinely enjoy the energy everyone brings. We don’t have a good word for it.

We have plenty of bad ones. “Social.” “Popular.” “Good with people.” And if she has influence without a title, if she’s the one people orbit even though nobody gave her the job, we reach for the oldest one in the book.

Queen Bee.

We all know how that’s supposed to sound. There was a whole book about it, Queen Bees and Wannabes, the one that helped inspire Mean Girls. Nobody wants to be Regina George. Somewhere along the way it became a warning label, something you’re told to avoid if you want to be taken seriously.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, because I’m starting to understand that some of what I’ve always thought of as personality is actually talent.

I’m good at seeing the possibility in an idea and getting other people to see it too. I’m good at figuring out what people bring to the table and giving them room to run with it. I notice who hasn’t been included. I build traditions and inside jokes and the little things that turn a group of random people into an us.

And even as I type that, I hear a voice telling me to delete it. That’s nothing to brag about. Gee, you must think highly of yourself. Which is exactly the problem.

For a long time I didn’t understand that as a skill. I certainly didn’t think of it as leadership. It was just what I did.

When it works, nobody sees the work. When it doesn’t, the one doing it gets looked at sideways.

And being warm doesn’t mean being soft.

Warmth isn’t the absence of backbone.

You can care about people and still have the difficult conversation. You can create belonging and still set a boundary. You can listen and still disagree. You can make a decision someone doesn’t like and stand behind it.

We’ve created this strange false choice that says you can be warm or tough, relational or decisive, liked or respected.

I don’t buy it.

Yes, I know. A real queen bee doesn’t tend the hive. The workers do that, and the queen’s whole job is laying eggs and giving off a pheromone that tells the colony we are one thing.

Stay with me, because honestly, that’s closer to what I mean than anything else.

She doesn’t run the hive.

She’s the reason it feels like a hive.

That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life, professionally, creatively, and now with this weird little Small Town Alchemy adventure. Designing for belonging.

A sticker about the Dexter viaduct isn’t really about a bridge. It’s a little signal: I know this place. I remember that too. You get it.

Maybe we’ve spent too much time confusing influence with ambition. Connection with popularity. Belonging with fluff. And leadership with being the person who gets to sit at the top of the organizational chart.

I’m not interested in figuring out the approved way to stand out. I’m certainly not interested in climbing anybody else’s ladder.

I’d rather build hives.

I’d rather gather the weirdos and the fangirls and the small-town history nerds and the women with big ideas and finite nervous systems, and keep making places where people can show up with whatever particular thing they bring and feel like they belong.

So this sticker is for her.

The woman who’s been called too much, too bossy, too popular, too Queen Bee.

The one who makes a room full of strangers feel like an us, and has been quietly apologizing for it.

You don’t have to apologize.

Maybe being a Queen Bee was never the problem.

Maybe we just needed a better definition.

It’s OK to Be a Queen.