Positioning yourself for promotion to a senior role doesn’t happen overnight. You need a great performance record and evidence of essential leadership skills.
It can be beneficial to understand the things senior decision makers in your organisation or business use to make C-suite promotion and placement decisions and how senior management views you, in terms of those skills.
Boards and CEO’s are often looking for skills in innovation and managing change, influence, negotiation and persuasion skills, and for people who are strategically, not operationally focused.
Without knowing how your organisation’s senior people and the decision makers view you and your skill set, you’re at a disadvantage in knowing where to devote your career development energies. You need to ascertain if your current role allows you to demonstrate the necessary capability or you may need to investigate a move to a new job that gives you that opportunity.
Instead of wondering why you might never get that ‘shoulder tap’, when you’ve decided to stay with your current business, focus on how a promotion will help the organisation, your manager and the team, and be prepared to communicate it in a simple, logical way.
Tips if you decide to move on:
- Research the role, the business, and/or the board.
- Know about the business, agency or organisation; their social media, annual reports, and any media about them. Use a search engine and find out as much as you can.
- How are you going to create an opportunity to position yourself? For a new role, or for your first or new director role?
- Sometimes you can use a formal process and apply for an advertised role, or us a direct approach – phone call, meeting, email.
- Share your bio/profile and CV/Résumé.
- Note: your C-suite CV is not the same as a Board CV. Tailor your applications and your CV for each role.