Signal Forward is a series inside The Ready Set. Same publication, different altitude. The Ready Set is for leaders. Signal Forward is for everyone else: the individual contributors, specialists, and practitioners whose behavioral patterns determine whether their contribution gets seen, valued, and rewarded, regardless of title or tenure.
New here? Start with the first article. In People or HR? Pass this along to your team.
Every promotion decision answers a question. Most people assume it’s this one: has this person mastered their current role?
It’s not. The real question is whether this person has already demonstrated the behaviors of the next role.
Sit with that for a second, because it reframes a lot of career frustration that otherwise has no good explanation. Talented people master their current role. Get strong reviews. Put in the time. Watch someone who looked less accomplished on paper get the role they wanted. Assume it’s politics, or timing, or some invisible favoritism they can’t see.
Sometimes that’s true. More often it’s altitude.
The person who got promoted was already operating at the next level before the title changed. Thinking at a higher level. Communicating at a higher level. Taking ownership of problems that weren’t technically theirs yet. The promotion didn’t change what they were doing. It just made it official.
The Four Rungs
The Altitude Ladder is not about doing someone else’s job or performing ambition for an audience. It’s about expanding how you think about your work while you keep doing your work well. Four rungs. Each one is a shift in orientation, not a shift in job description.
Rung 1: Task. The work directly in front of you. Your assignment, your deliverable. You have to execute here. The problem is when it’s the only place you ever operate.
Rung 2: Team. How your work connects to what your teammates need. Where the handoffs are. What breaks down when you don’t do your part well. Solid contributors live here, and it matters. But it doesn’t differentiate you.
Rung 3: Function. How your team’s output connects to what the broader department or function is trying to accomplish. What the priorities are at that level. Whether your contribution is actually serving those priorities or just completing tasks. Most promotions require you to demonstrate this rung consistently before anyone will seriously consider you for a role that operates here.
Rung 4: Organization. How the function connects to strategy, competitive position, direction. Individual contributors who operate here regularly tend to end up in conversations and meetings nobody expected them to be in. Because they’ve made themselves useful at an altitude the organization didn’t know was available to them.
Most people stay at Rung 1 or 2 indefinitely. Not because they lack capability. Because nobody told them the game was being played at a different level.
Why Alicia’s Story Fits Here
In the last article, Alicia’s manager had made a cryptic comment about “strategic thinking” that she couldn’t decode for seven months. When she finally asked directly in a CPP conversation, the translation was plain: she was solving tactical problems without connecting her solutions to business context. Rung 2 thinking in a role that needed Rung 3.
Her solutions were good. Her altitude was wrong. And no one said so clearly until she created the conditions for an honest conversation.
That’s how altitude gaps usually surface. Not as performance problems, but as vague feedback that feels personal but is actually structural. You’re operating well at the level you’re at. However, the organization needs someone operating at the level above it. And nobody has figured out how to say that without it sounding like criticism.
The Version Nobody Talks About
Kenji was a data analyst at a healthcare organization. Technically strong, reliable, well-liked on his team. He’d been watching a senior analyst role for two years. When it opened, he applied. He didn’t get it.
The feedback was vague. It usually is.
What actually happened was simpler than the feedback suggested. In two years of working alongside Kenji, the people making the decision had never seen him operate above Rung 2. He talked about his projects. He delivered clean work. He helped his immediate teammates. But he never demonstrated any awareness of what the department was trying to accomplish, how the data his team produced connected to decisions being made further up, or what problems were keeping the function leadership awake at night.
The person who got the role had been doing all of that. Not loudly. Not in a way that felt like she was campaigning for anything. She just consistently framed her work at a higher altitude. Asked questions in cross-functional meetings that showed she understood the bigger picture. Flagged trends relevant to adjacent teams because she was paying attention to what mattered beyond her own deliverables.
Same technical skill. Different altitude. Different outcome.
Kenji’s problem wasn’t performance. It was that the behavioral evidence he’d been generating for two years answered the wrong question.
How to Actually Move Up the Ladder
None of this requires a new project or anyone’s permission. It requires asking different questions about work you’re already doing.
Before a meeting, add one question to your prep: what does the person two levels above me need to be true coming out of this conversation? Not what do I need to present. What does the organization need from this room. That question alone changes how you show up before you’ve said a word.
When you deliver work, connect it to something above the task level. One sentence. “Here’s the analysis, and based on the Q3 pattern, this will probably affect how we think about capacity planning going into next year.” Ten seconds. Rung 3 signal.
When problems come up, frame them at one level higher than where they started. “We’re seeing this pattern in our team, and based on what I’m hearing in cross-functional conversations, I think it’s showing up elsewhere too” is a different contribution than “here’s my problem and here’s how I fixed it.” Same information. Different altitude.
The ladder doesn’t require more time. It requires a different orientation to the time you’re already spending.
One More Thing Worth Saying
Poor leadership doesn’t make this harder. It actually makes it more available.
When leaders are unclear, checked out, or just overwhelmed, gaps open up. The function still needs to run. Priorities still need to be communicated. Work still needs to connect upward to something that matters. The person who steps into that space, not as a power grab, but to be useful at a higher altitude than their role requires, becomes someone the organization leans on.
And an organization leaning on you is one of the strongest career signals there is. You don’t need a great manager to climb the ladder. All you need is the discipline to keep asking what the view looks like from one rung higher than where you’re standing.
Honest question for this week: Think about your last three significant contributions. What rung were you actually operating at? And if the answer is mostly Rung 1 or 2, what would it look like to reframe just one of them at Rung 3?
Start there. I’d love to hear what comes up in the comments.
One more thing before you go.
Everything in this series (the signal, the three I’s, the disciplines, the traits) is being built into something larger.
Later this year, we’re releasing a significant update to The Ready Set experience. What’s coming is an extension of the AI Ready Set Coach that will meet you exactly where you are, whether you’re two years into your first real role or two levels from the executive suite, and grow with you as you move.
For individual contributors, that means the full Signal Forward framework: the behaviors, the disciplines, the trait development, and guided content built specifically for people who are doing excellent work and trying to make sure it doesn’t stay invisible.
For emerging leaders and managers, it bridges the gap, the moment when your contribution shifts from personal performance to collective performance, and the skills that got you here stop being sufficient for where you’re going.
For experienced leaders, it’s the full Ready Set framework: the ten behaviors, the diagnostic, the coaching, and the development architecture that drives what leadership actually looks like at scale.
One experience. Every level. Built to progress with you.
We’ll have more details as we get closer. If you’re already a paid member, you’ll be among the first to know, and the first to access it.
More Signal Forward coming soon. Stay with us.
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By Ryan Carnes | A data-backed development experience
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Very good points in this article Ryan. Promotion systems often mistake the evidence they have seen for the ability someone has. I agree, the answer is giving people a seat in more cross-functional meetings and it is teaching them what to notice once they are there. How their team’s work affects the function, the customer, and the organization’s priorities. Give people the opening, then help them learn to see that bigger picture. Almost all the strategic mistakes my managers make seem to occur because they just can't see the field. Great thinking in this article.