career advancement
career advancement
She had been a director for six years. In that time, she had delivered three major transformation programmes, built a team that was widely regarded as one of the strongest in the organisation, and been nominated for two internal awards. Her 360-degree feedback was uniformly positive. Her stakeholder relationships were strong. By every conventional measure, she was performing at the level required for the next step.
The step did not come. Year after year, the conversation about progression happened, was received positively, and produced nothing. She was not being managed out. She was not receiving negative feedback. She was being managed sideways — given interesting work, genuine responsibility, and no upward movement. She had hit the plateau, and she could not see it clearly enough to understand what was keeping her there.
This pattern is not unusual. It is, in fact, one of the most consistent findings in the research on women's career trajectories. High-performing women plateau at senior levels at a significantly higher rate than their male counterparts, and the explanations offered — that they lack confidence, that they do not network effectively, that they are not sufficiently visible — consistently misidentify the cause.
The McKinsey Women in the Workplace report, now in its ninth year of longitudinal data, has documented the pattern with increasing precision. Women are promoted at roughly equal rates to men at junior levels. The gap opens at the first step into management and widens at every subsequent level. By the time you reach the senior director and VP level, the disparity is substantial — not because women are leaving the pipeline, but because they are stalling within it.
The explanation most frequently offered is the "broken rung" — the idea that the first step into management is where the gap opens, and that everything above it is downstream from that initial disadvantage. This is partially accurate. But it does not explain why women who have successfully navigated the broken rung continue to stall at senior levels, often despite performance records that are objectively superior to those of the men advancing alongside them.
Research by Herminia Ibarra at London Business School provides a more precise diagnosis. Her work on leadership identity transition — the process by which individuals come to see themselves as leaders, not just as people who do leadership work — identifies the specific mechanism through which high-performing women plateau. The issue is not performance. It is identity. The women who advance are not necessarily the ones who perform best. They are the ones who have successfully made the psychological transition from "someone who does this work" to "someone who is this kind of leader."
This distinction sounds abstract. It is not. Ibarra's research demonstrates that the identity transition is a behavioural one: it shows up in how people talk about their work, how they position themselves in conversations about the future, how they respond to opportunities that are slightly outside their current scope.
The woman who has not made the identity transition performs her current role excellently and waits to be recognised for it. The woman who has made the transition performs her current role excellently and simultaneously positions herself for the next one — not through self-promotion in the conventional sense, but through the way she frames her contribution, the conversations she initiates, and the problems she chooses to engage with.
The difference is not confidence. It is orientation. One is oriented toward the present role. The other is oriented toward the future one. And organisations, which are fundamentally forward-looking in their promotion decisions, respond to future orientation even when they cannot articulate why.
The identity transition does not happen in isolation. It happens in relationship — specifically, in the kind of relationship that Sylvia Ann Hewlett's research at the Center for Talent Innovation has identified as the most powerful predictor of advancement for senior women: sponsorship.
Sponsorship is not mentorship. A mentor advises. A sponsor advocates. A mentor helps you understand the organisation. A sponsor uses their political capital to move you through it. Hewlett's research, drawing on data from more than twelve thousand professionals, found that women with sponsors were twenty-three per cent more likely to be promoted than women without them, and thirty per cent more likely to receive stretch assignments.
The sponsorship gap at senior levels is significant and well-documented. Women receive mentoring at equivalent rates to men. They receive sponsorship at substantially lower rates. And the mechanisms that generate sponsorship — the informal networks, the after-hours conversations, the visibility in the contexts where decisions are made — are systematically less accessible to women, particularly to women who are also managing domestic responsibilities.
This is not an argument for working harder at networking. It is an argument for understanding that the advancement system is not a meritocracy, that it operates through relationship capital as much as through performance capital, and that the strategic accumulation of relationship capital is a legitimate and necessary part of career management at senior levels.
There is a specific visibility mechanism that Ibarra's research identifies as critical to the identity transition, and that most career development advice gets wrong. The conventional advice is to be more visible — to speak up more in meetings, to volunteer for high-profile projects, to make your contributions known. This advice is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
The visibility that matters for advancement is not general visibility. It is visibility in the specific contexts where decisions about advancement are made — which are almost never the formal meeting or the high-profile project. They are the informal conversations, the small group dinners, the moments when a senior leader is forming an impression of who is ready for the next level.
Research by Robin Ely and Debra Meyerson at Harvard Business School on gender and organisational change has documented how these informal visibility mechanisms systematically disadvantage women. The contexts in which advancement decisions are shaped — golf courses, evening events, the conversations that happen after the formal meeting ends — are contexts that women access less frequently and less comfortably than their male counterparts. The result is a visibility gap that is not about performance and not about confidence. It is about access.
Understanding the plateau problem accurately changes the strategic response to it. If the problem is confidence, the solution is mindset work. If the problem is performance, the solution is skill development. If the problem is identity transition, sponsorship access, and informal visibility — which the research suggests it primarily is — the solution is different.
It requires a deliberate audit of the relationship landscape: who has the political capital to advocate for you, who is forming impressions of you in the informal contexts that matter, and what the gap is between the impression you are creating and the impression you need to create. It requires an honest assessment of whether you have made the identity transition — whether you are oriented toward your current role or toward the next one. And it requires a specific strategy for closing the sponsorship gap, which means identifying potential sponsors, understanding what they need from the relationship, and building the visibility that makes sponsorship a rational investment for them.
None of this is simple. But it is specific. And specificity is what distinguishes a strategy from a wish.
The plateau problem has a diagnostic component that most women in this situation have not addressed. The question is not just "why am I not advancing?" It is "what is the specific gap between where I am and where I need to be, and is that gap real or perceived?"
In a significant proportion of cases, the gap is not a performance gap at all. The capabilities are there. What is missing is the strategic framework for making those capabilities visible in the right contexts, to the right people, at the right time. Objective assessment — of cognitive capabilities, of leadership behaviours, of the specific competencies that predict advancement at senior levels — provides the baseline from which a genuine strategy can be built.
The Exceptional Performance for Women in Leadership programme is built around this diagnostic foundation. Not because assessment is an end in itself, but because you cannot build a strategy on assumptions. The women who break through the plateau are not the ones who work harder or become more confident. They are the ones who understand the system they are operating in clearly enough to navigate it deliberately.
The programme details are on the pricing page. If you are six months or more into a plateau and you are ready to understand it accurately rather than manage it optimistically, it is worth a look.
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