My leader told me he was leaving. In the same breath, he told me who was replacing him, and it wasn’t me.
There was no process. I knew every process in that place. I knew every risk, and every person who would need a phone call before anything could move, and I had been doing more than half of his job for years. If you had asked me that morning, I would have told you I was in the box seat.
I wasn’t. And it took me a while to work out why.
I had been doing the work without ever talking about the work. Not about the outcomes, not about why they mattered, not about how I was holding the thing together from a strategic point of view. I did it. I just never said it.
So if you have ever wondered how to get ahead in the corporate world, here are the five steps that changed it for me. I worked them out the long way.
Step one: Get clear on what getting ahead actually means to you
Getting ahead in the corporate world is not one thing. It might be a title. It might be money, or a four day week, or the chance to work on something that genuinely matters to you.
So define it first. Write down what success looks like for you right now, rather than the version you inherited at 25, then choose a direction and plan the first few steps you can actually take. I go into more detail on how to do that in Defining and measuring success.
Transformation without clarity is just chaos, and that goes for a career as much as it does for a business.
I know that reads like the boring step. It is also the one everything else hangs off, because you cannot ask for a seat at a table you have not chosen yet.
Step two: talk about the work, not just do it
A new leader once described me as a fixer. Someone he could throw at a problem. I took it as a compliment and went home very pleased with myself.
Fixer did not mean leader. It did not mean strategic thinker, and it did not mean a place in the senior leaders group. It meant every hard problem in the building landed on my desk. The feedback I got was that I lacked presence.
Delivering outcomes reads as strategic. Doing reads as reliable. And strategic is what gets you the seat.
So pick one piece of work you are in the middle of this week, and practise saying it out loud in outcome language. Not what you are doing. What it will change, and why that matters.
If you would like the words handed to you, steal my 60-second Strategic Value Script here. It’s free, and it’s built for exactly this.
Step three: Ask out loud
Humans are shocking mind readers.
Across 35 years I have worked full time, part time and casual, a compressed week and a four day week. I have travelled for weeks at a time, and I have worked entirely from home. Almost every one of those shifts happened for one reason. I asked.
Nobody is sitting in a meeting wondering what you want next. They are too busy thinking about themselves, which is freeing rather than deflating once you let it be.
So name the thing, and then name it to the person who can actually do something about it rather than the person who is easiest to tell.
Step four: Catch the stories before they edit you
Years ago I was plucked out for a brand-new role I had not applied for, and my brain immediately decided that meant I did not deserve it. I walked into a team of very strong, very experienced men, and from the first meeting they ate me alive.
So I did what so many of us do. I fixed the outside. I hired a deportment coach, absolutely certain that if I looked the part I would feel the part. (I did not. I simply stood up straighter while thinking exactly the same things.)
The real work was on the inside, and it runs like this: spot the pattern, name the story, then check that story against the facts you can actually point to. Doubt may still make noise. It just doesn’t get to drive.
This is the step I had to do twice, by the way. People-pleasing, perfectionism and procrastination were mine to dismantle, and they are the same three I teach on now. I wrote a whole post on them: How to stop procrastinating, people-pleasing and being a perfectionist.
Step five: Make a move you can actually measure
Pick one experiment, small enough that you will genuinely do it and specific enough that you will know afterwards whether it worked. Confidence comes from doing, not from thinking about doing.
Then keep the evidence. The women I work with keep an Evidence File, which is exactly what it sounds like – a running record of what they did, what changed, and what people said about it. It is remarkably hard to argue with your own file when review season rolls around.
My own chance came back about twelve months later, once I had learned to speak to outcomes and why they mattered, and to do less doing. I had to back myself to step into that space. I never looked back, and I eventually reached a GM role more senior than anyone who had sat in that room.
The part I most want you to hear
I worked all of this out the long way, across 35 years inside the organisation I joined at 17 as a trainee letter signer.
You haven’t left it too late. You just need to back yourself.
(And if what you are after is thriving wherever you work rather than getting ahead, I wrote that one a few years ago too: Five strategies for thriving in the corporate world.)
If one of these five steps is the one you keep circling without ever starting, tell me which one in the comments. I read them, and your answers are always more useful than anything I could guess at.
And if step four is the one that stops you, the Confidence Codes Toolkit is where I would start. I built it out of this exact work and it costs you nothing.
Until next time, stay fabulous.