The worst time to be up for promotion is right after you get a new manager

You are up for promotion. The work is there, and it has been for a while. Then the person who decides changes. Your new manager started a few weeks ago. They do not know your track record. They are forming their read on you in real time, and the cycle is already moving.

Most people meet that moment by hoping. They assume the work will carry the story, because it always has. It will not, because the person reading it does not yet know what good looks like from you.

I know this one from the other side of the table. I once joined a SaaS company as a manager, still ramping myself, and inherited a senior IC right as his promotion cycle opened. I did not know what he had done. I knew what was in front of me, which was not much yet.

He did not wait to find out how I would read him. He scheduled time. We met in one of those conference rooms where you can hear the whole floor through the walls, and he walked me through a short, deliberate case: where his work had moved the company's actual objectives, where he had delivered, and where he was stretching past his current role on purpose. None of the work was new. The decision to make it explicit was.

That is the move most people skip. They do the work and wait to be noticed for it. He did the opposite. He made the decision easy for the person who had to make it, before anyone asked him to.

It changed the conversation. I could advocate for him because he had handed me the evidence in a form I could carry into the rooms he was not in. I did not have to reconstruct his value from a vague good impression. I already had the sentence.

Then I asked him something that was not on the promotion script: what do you want to be doing in five years. Not to deflect the promotion, to reframe it. The promotion was one rung. The real question was whether the rung was on the right ladder. Most people are so fixed on the next title that no one ever makes them answer the larger one.

Six months later the company went public. A leadership role opened soon after. I told him to interview, not because the outcome was certain, but because the worst case was not failing to get it. The worst case was skipping the chance to practice at the level he eventually wanted to play. He got the role. 18 months in, he had already passed the highest bar he could have set for himself.

Then the part no one planned for. Six weeks into his first management role, the offices closed. Overnight, everyone went remote, and something quietly sorted people into two groups.

The people who had built their standing on being around, the hallway presence, the desk you walked past, the face in every room, faded out of the conversation. Their work had not gotten worse. It just did not travel, because there was no hallway left for it to travel through.

What traveled was clarity. Written updates. Decisions documented where others could find them. Work that could be understood without the author in the room to explain it. The people who held their ground were not louder. They were readable.

That is the whole thing, compressed. The variable in a senior career is rarely the quality of the work. By the time you are senior, the work is good. The variable is whether the people who decide your next move can read what you do accurately, in the rooms you are not in, at the moment the decision gets made.

Most people only ever do the first half. They get clearer about their own value, privately, and then wait for that clarity to register on its own. It does not register on its own. Someone has to be able to carry it without you.

This runs through the four pillars of the Stand Out Advantage: Define Your Edge, Build Your Presence, Master Your Moments, and Lead Your Growth. Which one is your bottleneck depends on where you are standing right now, and from the inside it is hard to see which.

The Clarity Assessment is where you find out which one, before another cycle passes with the work strong and the read missing.

→ Book yours. $149.

Onward, Laurie