ISSUE #108

How to tell not yet, not now, and not here apart.

What did they do that I didn't?

It's the question that follows you out of the announcement. Your peer got the VP role. Three years ago you were at the same level. Your reviews were strong. Your team delivered. On most days, you'd have said you were the stronger operator of the two.

You clapped. You sent the congratulations note. Then you went back to your desk and started replaying the last eighteen months, looking for the moment it was decided.

I've asked for bigger opportunities myself, and later in my career I was the person sitting in the rooms where we discussed who was ready for the next level. From both sides of that table, the answer is rarely the one people expect.

Years ago, on a large public-sector program, I worked closely with a lead engineer on the client side. I'll call him Grant. He was outstanding. People relied on him. Exceptionally sharp, articulate, knew his material cold. He could debate anyone in the building and win. He worked 10 to 12 hour days in an environment where that was rare, and he delivered an enormous amount.

His entire case for himself was that he got things done.

What he didn't do was bring people along. He didn't much care what people thought of him, and he treated being right as enough. Along the way, he made enemies at senior levels.

He was passed over for promotion again and again. I remember one conversation where he was bitter and upset, and he genuinely didn't know what else to do. He'd done everything he believed the job asked of him.

His output was never in question. The people deciding simply weren't going to promote him, no matter how much he delivered. The rest of the case was missing, and nobody was going to build it for him.

The first time a peer moves ahead of you, it feels like a single decision. It rarely stays that way.

Once your peer is a VP, they sit in the calibration meetings where the next round of names gets discussed. Quietly, a story forms around each of you. One is "on a trajectory." The other is "a strong director." Both are compliments. Only one of them gets attached to the next opening.

By the time that opening arrives, the people deciding will be working from the story, not from your latest results. Another year of harder work won't rewrite it, because harder work only adds evidence to the story already told: excellent at the current level.

The window to change it is still open. It narrows with every cycle you spend waiting to be discovered.

When I talk with leaders about building a promotion case, I come back to three lenses. Most people are strong on one. Very few have built all three, and fewer still have said any of it out loud to the person who decides.

1. Results. Can you describe last year's work in business terms, without leaning on the technology? "We improved disaster recovery" tells an executive very little. "We cut recovery time from eight hours to under two" tells them what changed for the business. Even better if you can quantify it in financial terms.

2. Scope. Where has your influence reached past your formal responsibilities? Which leaders outside your function could describe your work accurately, without you in the room?

3. Readiness. If you disappeared for two weeks, would your area keep moving? Or would every escalation still find its way back to you?

Notice what none of the three measures: how hard you work. Effort shows up underneath all of them, which is exactly why it feels like it should count. At the next level, nobody is asking whether you can work harder. They're asking whether you're already operating there.

Smart leaders stall at this point for a predictable reason. Asking feels like campaigning, and campaigning feels beneath them. So they keep doing the work and hope the case makes itself.

It makes sense when you look at where they came from. In technical work, the work is the argument. A system either holds under load or it doesn't, and nobody has to lobby for a deployment that succeeded. Years of that teach you that talking about your results is a little suspect, something people do when the results can't stand on their own.

At the next level, that instinct works against you. The people deciding aren't close enough to your work to see it. They see what reaches them. If nothing reaches them, they fill the gap with whatever they already believe.

Let that sink in for a moment…

Grant's problem was never effort. His whole case rested on one lens, results, and he kept adding to it, year after year, while the other two stayed empty. Longer days couldn't fill them, because neither one is measured in hours.

The leaders who advance handle the ask differently. They don't tuck it into the last two minutes of a weekly one-on-one. They schedule a dedicated meeting and say what it's about, so nobody walks in guessing. They open with the outcome they want: "I'd like to be considered for the VP role, and I'd like to walk you through why." Then they give three examples, one for each lens. Then they stop talking.

That last part is harder than it sounds. One of the easiest ways to weaken a strong case is to keep making it after you've made it.

Then ask the question I think matters most in the entire meeting:

What would you need to see from me to support this promotion?

Sometimes the answer is "you're ready," and the conversation turns to timing. More often it's some version of "not yet." That's where the second trap waits. The leader starts defending. "But I built the strategy last year." Now it's an argument, and arguments rarely end in promotions.

The leaders who move treat "not yet" as information. They get curious instead. What would stronger strategic thinking look like at the next level? Which opportunity over the next six months would demonstrate it? They leave the room with three things: what needs to change, what evidence would show it, and when the conversation happens again. Then they send a short email confirming all three, so everyone is working from the same page.

That email becomes the roadmap. It also tells you something later on.

Say you're told you need more strategic experience, so you spend six months leading a strategic initiative. At the next conversation, the gap is executive exposure instead. You spend six months on that. Then it's something else again. Expectations can evolve, and that's normal. Goalposts that move every time you reach them are a different thing, and you're allowed to ask about it directly: "Six months ago we agreed on these areas. I believe I've delivered on them. Is there something broader that's stopping you from seeing me in this role?"

The answer tells you whether you're facing "not yet," "not now," or "not here." Those are three different situations, and each one calls for a different career decision.

One shortcut deserves a mention, because leaders ask me about it all the time: getting an outside offer to force the decision. It can work. As a leader, I've had people bring me outside offers, and sometimes we made retention offers because we wanted to keep them. The cost is that the relationship changes the moment the offer is on the table. You're saying you'll leave unless something changes, so only have that conversation if you're genuinely prepared to go. Never bluff with an offer.

Most leaders can't tell which situation they're in. The person being evaluated is the worst-placed person to read the room, and that's normal. It's also why so many capable leaders spend years working on the wrong gap.

If a peer just moved ahead of you and you're working out what to do next, start with the conversation itself. I recorded a video that walks through it step by step: how to build the case on results, scope and readiness, how to open the meeting, the exact question to ask, and what to say when you hear "not yet." Watch it before your next one-on-one with your manager, not after.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMVtf4lM1PQ

Your peer didn't take your promotion. They asked for theirs, and they built the evidence while you were waiting to be noticed.