David Turner calls this The Criteria Shift. For the first few stages of a career, doing the current job exceptionally well is the path up. Then it stops working, and nobody announces it. The behaviors that earned the promotion to Director can be the same ones that block the promotion to VP.
Every person with a vote carries two or three private standards of their own. How a leader treats the people who cannot fire them. How they handle pressure. Whether they put the mission ahead of themselves. David calls these incognito standards: a real rubric, running in disguise.
Competence was never the question. Trust is. That is why high-output leaders stall and cannot name why. They keep proving the thing that was never in doubt.
Think of it as a credit score you are never shown. Every voter runs one on you. The number gates the promotion, and nobody hands you the report.
I was told I need to be “more strategic” to make VP. What does that mean?
Often it means the real objection got translated into something safe to say. Feedback that sounds like a business concern is frequently a verdict on how you operate, wearing a costume.
Here is one I am not proud of. Dave was a VP of Operations, and his boss, the COO, pushed hard to get him promoted. I sat on the leadership team, one up and over. Dave was sharp and managed up well. He was also controlling and demeaning with my sales VPs, and he liked holding the power to tell my people no. That tripped my floor: how a leader treats the people who cannot fire him.
I never said that out loud. The COO’s bite was brutal, and “Dave treats my people like obstacles” was not a sentence I was going to say in that room. So I told the CEO that Dave was hurting our ability to book revenue. That landed. The promotion kept getting punted. Never a no, just another punt. Dave never moved.
The real gate was character. What Dave heard was revenue. Coach him on the feedback he actually got and he spends years chasing the number, solving a problem that did not exist. In hindsight, my standard may have been partly my own bias. It still decided the outcome.
So ask yourself the uncomfortable version: where might a real objection about you be traveling in disguise, showing up as a business concern when it is actually about how you operate?
Who decides whether I get promoted to SVP?
Everyone in the room, through three gates. You build advancement from the floor up. You diagnose a stall from the ceiling down.
- Floor: peer capital. If your peers will not vouch for you, the room knows before the meeting starts, and you are a nay before the polls open. Brilliance does not offset it.
- Top-up: the private standards. If your peer capital is solid but not overwhelming, you have to clear the standard of every voter who is not already sold. The loud ones have told you their bar. The quiet voter is the work.
- Ceiling: the CEO. At the SVP and C-suite line you are moving into the CEO’s own span, toward a seat that will report to them. Their vote is usually a veto.
Read the ceiling first. If the company is not promoting anyone, there is no open seat, or you are genuinely not ready, then working the room aims a capable person at a problem that was never the room.
Can one executive who doesn’t like me block my promotion?
Yes. Below the C-suite, one quiet voter with a private objection can stall you for years. At the C-suite line, the CEO alone can end it.
Mark was a VP of Product, respected by every peer and every member of the leadership team. He cleared the floor and the top-up. But the CEO would email him directly, two levels down, and tell him to go chase a product, and Mark would not blindly run it. He pushed back and asked for a business case. The CEO never criticized him on the merits. When the chief product officer seat opened, the CEO killed it.
CEOs tell me what they think of the people two and three levels down. Sometimes I am the only person in the building who knows a promotion is dead before the candidate knows it was ever alive.
What do I do about the voter I can’t read?
Decode their standard on purpose. I coached a VP of Operations aiming to run a business unit. The one voter he could not read was the CFO: quiet, and decisive. So we built access, a standing twenty-minute meeting once a month with a real agenda. He found out exactly what the CFO believed about capital investment and the margin levers that move valuation. Then he spoke that thesis back, in the CFO’s own language, in the monthly business reviews where the whole room was watching. The CFO backed him in the next cycle. He got the business unit.
- Pick the one voter whose standard you cannot read.
- Ask for recurring access: a short standing meeting with an agenda. Not a coffee, not a friendship.
- Learn their private thesis, meaning what they believe creates value in their domain, in their words.
- Show it back where the room can see it.
“Build rapport” is the line people write on a development plan so they feel like they did something. You don’t need the CFO to like you. You need him to hear his own thesis in your mouth, in public, before the vote.
If your next promotion were already dead in someone’s private ledger, who would tell you? And if the answer is no one, what is that costing you right now?
David has spent 13,400+ hours coaching CEOs and C-suite leaders at companies from $50M to $27B in revenue, and sits in on his clients’ talent reviews, where promotions are decided. Before coaching he spent 24 years in executive seats, including CEO of a PE-backed technology company and SVP of Sales & Marketing and Managing Director at DigitalGlobe. More about David