This is Article 3 in the Succession Readiness series. Missed the start? Begin with Article 1. New here? Subscribe to The Ready Set so you don’t miss what’s coming.
Somewhere in your organization, a group of leaders sits down once or twice a year and talks about people. Who’s strong. Who’s stuck. Who could take a bigger role, and who should probably be left alone.
You aren’t in that room. Your name almost certainly comes up. And what gets said in about ninety seconds of discussion can shape the next three years of your career.
Most people never find out what was said. Some never find out the meeting happened.
What Actually Gets Asked
These conversations are less sophisticated than you’d hope. Strip away the grids and the jargon and a leader is usually answering three questions about you.
Can this person handle more? Do they want it? And what’s standing in the way?
The first question gets answered with whatever behavioral evidence your leader has collected. Not your resume. Not your last performance rating. The stuff we’ve been talking about all along: how you handled that deadline crunch, what happened when someone challenged you in a meeting, whether you ever do anything nobody asked you to do.
The second question gets answered with a guess. Unless you’ve said something, your leader is filling in your ambition from scraps. A person who never mentions wanting more is assumed to be content. That assumption costs people years.
The third question is where careers quietly stall. “She’s strong, but she’s not great with executives.” “He’s ready technically, but I’m not sure how he’d handle the pressure.” Those are real sentences said in real rooms. They go in the notes. Nobody tells the person they were said.
On the Plan, Labeled, or Developed
Here’s a distinction almost nobody makes. There are three different ways your name can be in that conversation, and they are not the same thing.
You can be on the plan. Someone wrote your name next to a role. That’s it. That’s all it means.
You can be labeled. Someone assigned you a rating, “high potential” or “ready in two years,” and it follows you around. You may or may not know about it and nothing in your daily work has changed because of it.
Or you can be developed. Someone is deliberately giving you harder work, telling you the truth about your gaps, putting you in front of people who matter, and checking in on how it’s going.
Only the third one gets you anywhere. The first two feel like progress and produce a nice story to tell yourself.
Here’s a quick test. Think about the last six months. Did anything about your work change because someone believed you could do more? A different kind of assignment, a seat at a table you hadn’t sat at, a conversation that was uncomfortably honest? If the answer is no, you’re on the plan or labeled. You are not being developed. The difference matters, because you can do something about it.
How to Find Out
You have to ask. I know that sounds too simple but it’s the single most skipped step in careers.
Pick a one-on-one with your leader and say something close to this: “I’d like to understand how you see my path here. Are you thinking about me for bigger roles, and if so, what would you need to see from me to feel confident?”
Then stop talking.
What you get back is information. If your leader lights up and gets specific, good. If they get vague, “keep doing what you’re doing,” that’s information too, and honestly it’s the more common answer. It usually means one of two things. Either they haven’t thought about it, or they have and there’s something they don’t want to say.
Follow up with a second question that’s harder to dodge: “What’s the one thing that would most change your read on my readiness?”
That question has a way of producing the real answer. People will often give you a sentence they’ve been holding for a year.
The Part Your Manager Can’t Do
Even a great manager only holds one vote in that room. Often less, because they’re advocating for several people and the room has limited patience.
The people who move are rarely the ones with one champion. They’re the ones several people can speak about with specifics. A peer leader who saw you handle a crisis. A director in another function who got value from something you shared. Someone two levels up who watched you ask a sharp question in a meeting.
When your name comes up and three different people say “oh, I’ve seen her work, she’s solid,” that’s a different conversation than one manager saying it alone. Nobody has to like you better. They just need to have seen you.
So build that on purpose. Work visibly across a boundary now and then. Say yes to the cross-functional project that puts you next to people who don’t know you. Be useful to someone outside your chain. None of this is politics. It’s making sure the people who speak about you have something real to say.
Don’t Wait to Be Told
The most common mistake is treating the succession conversation as something that happens to you. It isn’t. It’s something you feed.
Your leader can only report what they’ve seen. If they haven’t seen you operate at the next level, they’ll say they don’t know. And “I don’t know” in that room is worse than a mild criticism, because it ends the discussion.
So make the next level visible. Take a problem a step above your role and bring a thought about it. Offer to cover a piece of work your leader does. Bring a decision to them with your recommendation already attached instead of a question. Do it in small ways, repeatedly, until the evidence exists.
And say what you want, out loud, to someone with a vote. You’d be surprised how many highly capable people have never once told their leader they want the next job.
Somebody is going to be named when the role opens. The only real question is whether the people in that room can picture you doing it, or whether they’ve never seen you do anything but your current job.
Honest question for this week: If your name came up in a talent conversation tomorrow, what’s the one sentence you’d most want someone to say about you? And does anyone in that room have the evidence to say it?
If the answer is no, you know where to start. I’d love to hear what comes up in the comments.
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By Ryan Carnes | A data-backed development experience
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