The promotion starts before the title

I've worked with plenty of capable people over the years who were more than good enough for the next step and didn't get there, or at least, not for a long time. Three of them come to mind. None of them was short on skill or experience. What held each one back was something harder to see, and I think it's more common than most people realise.

Three people, three patterns

The first was a strong head of department. She ran a tight department, her results were excellent, and she had the respect of her team and the wider organisation. She applied for senior leadership roles within the same organisation several times, and each time she was unsuccessful. After every rejection she was deeply upset, and that was the part she couldn't move past. Not the disappointment itself, but how long it took her to recover, and how much it affected her ability to move forward.

Senior leadership doesn't ask you not to feel these things. Things will not always go well. People will not always accept the change you want to make. You will not always get what you go for, and it's right that it stings when you don't. What the role asks is that you can feel it, make sense of it, and still decide what happens next. She felt it deeply, which is human. What she hadn't yet built was the ability to hold herself together and carry on.

The second was a man who badly wanted a leadership position. He was a very guarded individual. Years into working with him, I discovered he was carrying a good deal of resentment. He was convinced other people had held him back and denied him opportunities. He was an excellent classroom teacher and a strong head of a small department, and he had plenty of creative ideas, which he brought up in interview after interview, describing what he would do if only someone gave him the chance. The thing was, he had been given the chance. He'd been encouraged to put those ideas into practice more than once. In his head, though, that work belonged to a role he didn't have yet, something he'd do once he had the title and was being paid for it. So the ideas stayed as interview answers, with no evidence of impact behind them.

At senior level, potential counts for something. Evidence counts for more. He had come to see himself as someone other people had held back, rather than someone who still had choices about what he did next.

The third was a colleague who wanted to move onto the senior leadership team but hadn't let go of her place among the staff she wanted to leave. She'd gossip with colleagues about the leadership team's decisions and their mistakes, with a steady undertone of negativity. She wanted to join that team while still positioning herself, socially, as one of the people commenting on it from the outside. That's an identity problem before it's ever a competence one. She wanted the role, but hadn't yet made the move from commenting on leadership to taking responsibility for it. And that made it much harder for the people already on the team to see her as someone they could trust within it.

What separates readiness from waiting

Each of them had some growing to do before the next step was right, and none of it was about skill. The recovery, the agency, the shift in where you belong, these are things that start well before anyone hands you the title.

Two of the three did eventually get there. It took years longer than it needed to. The wait had less to do with the opportunities available to them and more to do with how long it took them to grow into the leader the role was asking for. Had they started that work sooner, I suspect the title would have followed sooner too.

The third took a different path. After a long time chasing the step up, she realised it wasn't what she actually wanted. She'd been doing what she assumed a successful head of a large department was supposed to do next, rather than what she truly wanted for herself. Stepping back from it was its own kind of clarity, and arguably the most honest of the three outcomes.

That's the part worth paying attention to. Growing into your next level of leadership, and working out whether you even want it, both start well before the promotion does, not after it.

If you're the one making the appointments

There's another side to this, if you're the one making the appointments. Some of the most capable people on your team won't step forward, or won't quite land it when they do, for exactly these reasons. It isn't always a gap in ability. Sometimes it's something in how they're holding themselves that hasn't caught up with the role yet. Part of leading well is spotting that.

Spotting it is one thing. Acting on it is harder. People don't always want that kind of help from their own boss, and even when they do, you don't always have the time to give it while you're spinning a dozen other plates yourself. This is exactly why I do the work I do, supporting leaders to make a bigger impact, whether that's in the role they're already in or the one they're growing towards.

A few questions worth asking yourself

When something doesn't go your way, how long does it take you to recover, and what helps you get back on track?

Where might you already be able to act like the leader you want to become, without waiting for the title to arrive first?

Are you chasing a next step because it's genuinely what you want, or because it feels like what you're supposed to do next?

And if you lead a team, who on it is more ready than they realise, and what might help them grow into it sooner?

Recovering well after a knock

A setback takes something out of you, and pretending otherwise just drives it underground. So before anything else, let the feeling move through you. A short walk, some exercise, an early night, an hour away from the thing. That state change has to come first, because you can't think clearly about something while you're still churning over it.

Once things have calmed down, that's when the useful questions come in. What did I take from this? What did I learn? What would I do differently next time? And then, the hardest one, letting it go. For me, it always comes back to treating a knock back as an opportunity, and accepting that sometimes a thing just wasn't meant to be.

Recovering well isn't about brushing it off quickly. It's about not letting one disappointment set the tone for everything that follows it.

Where this work continues

If you're thinking about your own next level of leadership, or about the people you're helping towards theirs, it's worth looking beyond what you know and what you can do to who you're becoming in the role. That's the ground I cover in the Resta Forte Leadership Academy, alongside strategy and vitality, the three things I believe leaders need to expand their impact without expanding their exhaustion.

About the author

Johanna Urquhart is a leadership coach, mentor and the founder of Resta Forte. With 25 years of senior leadership experience including 12 years as a school Principal, she supports leaders to step fully into their leadership, expand their influence and make a meaningful impact, while continuing to nurture their health, relationships and sense of self.