Most of my career has been spent advising executive teams and next generation leaders. Even when I was very junior, my training was focused on the senior leadership team. So I have become a bit of a specialist about how to advance to the top of an organisation, and what kinds of skills you need once you’re there. And of course, like all things, you really need the skills before you’re in the room. But it doesn’t always work like that. In fact, people often get into a room based on what they have done in the past. And less often does someone say, but do they have what it takes for their future roles.
There’s a version of a person where it doesn’t align in every organisation. It’s not the technical skills. It’s not the general good citizen stuff like being dependable and accountable and thoughtful. This is the person for whom promotion is a given for a long time. Until it’s not. And when it stops it’s often more like a slow delay. They were a rock star, then still very good with loads of potential, then possibly next gen… and the delays between each next step get longer.
There usually isn’t one specific thing. They just stop quite being ‘the right fit’ for the next things. No bad reviews, no change in performance. Just other people start getting the next opportunity — and maybe not even people that five years prior were being considered. But some people evolve into the future version they need to be and some people continue to excel at — but only excel at — their current success.
To reach C-suite success requires shifting perspectives, even when you don’t need to
Each transition into a new role should also be an experience in giving up some past behaviour. When you are junior, it’s often certain tasks. You evolve from the simplest to more complex. Then from complex tasks to small projects, then bigger ones. You manage the intern, then one new hire, then a small team. At each level, your execution tends to become smaller, and reliance on your expertise becomes judgment and management.
So what happens at the top? Why do some people make the smaller jumps and not the bigger one? It might be just the opposite: when you are early in your career the evolution is stark and mandatory. You have to learn new skills to be able to function in the role. You have little professional experience so your evolution is rapid. You knew a little, now you know more. You give your first presentation. You go from never managing anyone, to getting used to leading a team.
The later transitions are smaller. Nothing forces an evolution when a team you manage grows from 8 to 12, or even 12 to 20, though maybe it should. The challenge is that now you have to evolve more consciously. You can get a lot of the job done based on all you’ve learned. But you risk not being ready for the job ahead of you, if you don’t keep expanding your perspective.
So the evolution becomes optional in a way it never was before. And optional evolutions mostly don’t happen.
From having the answer to shaping the question
The strongest contribution in a senior meeting is often not the answer. It’s noticing that the question is wrong, or that the group has moved to trying to solve before it agreed on what it was solving. That’s tough for high performers, because having the answer is what worked for years.
But having the answer is an execution person’s game. You can know how to do a thing, run a process, finish a project — have the answer — when you are earlier in your career. A lot of the problems at the top don’t have ‘an’ answer. They have various options, all with various amounts of cost and risk. Examining inputs is the value add.
A well-known study revealed the strongest teams were the ones who reported the most errors. At first, that data made it look like the strongest teams made the most errors. But it was the reporting that was the team’s strength. The win wasn’t having fewer errors, it was understanding them. Looking actively at what was wrong, being willing to sit with what didn’t work, is not unlike sitting with what can’t be cleanly answered. But it’s where strong teams thrive.
One thing you can do is consider how much of that last meeting you spent listening, versus just waiting to talk. If you find you’re just waiting to talk, you might be missing the thing that could change your mind. Waiting to talk is about making a point. Listening to what’s being said is about understanding the situation.
Less function, more framing: how your relationship to the company changes
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that being able to think across functions is therefore to act across functions. We don’t want the legal team weighing in on ad spend or the finance department solving talent issues. That’s just chaos.
What you do want is a team who uses their own expertise to see how it might illuminate the challenge. In other words, your general counsel doesn’t need to be opining on your media strategy. They can, however, contribute that compliance issues around social media hit the budget and slowed down campaign approvals. That’s not blame, and it’s not self-sacrifice. That’s moving from the media team’s issues aren’t my job to sharing ownership that organisational excellence is everyone’s job, as cheesy as that might sound.
One tell is how your answers are framed. Are you answering from inside your own vertical — we hired twelve people last quarter, on budget — or are you looking at the bigger picture and recognising how what you know is interconnected? We hired on budget, but it took six weeks longer than planned, and the sales team spent that quarter short-staffed against a target nobody adjusted.
That second version is harder to say. It’s also the one that gives the room something it didn’t already have.
At the top, it isn’t about getting credit. It’s about finding answers.
First, I have seen enough leadership teams that there’s no way you’d get me on record suggesting that top executives don’t want credit. They do. But at this point in your career, the way you really increase your influence is whether you help find solutions. Most people at that level will meet the expectations set within their own verticals, or have very reasonable explanations when they don’t. It’s how they got in the room. It can also be the thing you get easy credit for but not… call it interest-bearing credit. We sort of expect the CFO to manage the financial health correctly. And at that level the space between very good and exceptional gets tighter. But the relationships, the decision making, the power — to be frank about it — often goes to those who can see across the board. The people who can thrive in those rooms focus less on getting credit for an execution of something within their own experience and push to help even in places where they don’t have to take ownership.
None of that shows up on a performance review. All of it shows up in who gets asked what they think when the decision is genuinely hard.
