Memes

This makes perfect sense to me.

At the start of your career, you want to be important enough that people will care about your opinions, which means getting invited to meetings where things are discussed.

Stage 2, you've been there long enough and know how things work so you can offer input and help make decisions.

Stage 3 is the point at which people will come to you for input outside of meetings because that's easier. You just want to do your job and generally don't care about decisions anymore unless they bring sweeping changes.