The next sixteen weeks will decide more about your title, scope, and budget next year than the eight months behind you.

Compensation calibration, headcount requests, succession conversations, and Q1 planning all happen between now and mid-December. Most of it gets settled in rooms you may or may not be in, by people repeating what they already believe about you and your work. What they believe in now is what they will say through December.

To set yourself up for success, I recommend choosing one of four areas. Here is what I have written on each. Save this one for your weekend reading list.

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1. Get into the promotion conversation before it is decided

By the time a calibration meeting happens, the discussion is a summary of opinions formed weeks earlier. If your skip-level cannot describe your case in two sentences without prompting, you have about ten weeks to change that.

How to Get a Threshold Promotion

The difference between performing well in your current role and being seen as already operating at the next one. Start here if you want a promotion in this cycle. https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/how-to-get-a-threshold-promotion

You Make the Call

A private exercise for building the judgment senior roles require, before anyone asks you to use it. https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/you-make-the-call

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2. Handle the review cycle without shrinking

Review season asks for two different skills. Taking criticism without absorbing it as a verdict on who you are. Disagreeing without becoming the person everyone finds difficult. Most people are strong at one and weak at the other.

Feedback Is Information, Not a Gift

How to separate what is useful in feedback from what says more about the person delivering it.

https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/feedback-is-information-not-a-gift

Being Agreeable Has a Ceiling

Why the reputation that got you to Director can quietly limit how far past it you go. https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/being-agreeable-has-a-ceiling

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3. Make the decision you parked in June

Every senior leader is carrying at least one decision that got deferred over the summer. August made the delay look reasonable. September removes that cover, and the cost of waiting is now visible to the people above you.

Make decisions that have impact

Making decisions and creating impact aren’t the same thing. https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/youre-deciding-now-ask-if-it-matters

Stagnation risk and creating clarity through action

How to tell whether your team is busy or actually moving. https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/leadership-isnt-about-certainty-its

4. Reconnect before everyone else does

Your network went quiet in August and so did you. People who reach out in the first weeks of September are remembered as having thought of you. People who reach out in January are remembered as having needed something. Use September to your advantage.

Up Your Networking Game

Originally written for a New Year approach, but useful this time of year. Segmenting your network by role so you know what you are actually asking for. It’s a three-part series.

Part 1: https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/you-want-to-up-your-networking-game

Part 2: https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/you-want-to-up-your-networking-game-11c

Part 3: https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/p/you-want-to-up-your-networking-game-23b

Pick one for highest impact

Choose one of the four. Pick the one that can have the greatest impact on your goals over the next few months. Most people arrive at December unchanged because they tried to fix all four in September and gave up by the second week of October. Working on one area for sixteen weeks changes what people say about you when your name comes up.

Which one are you picking? Reply and tell me. Your answers shape what I write this autumn.

The rest of the archive

These are the ones I would read first this month. There are considerably more, covering difficult managers, executive burnout, portfolio careers, thought leadership, and leading through crisis. Paid subscribers get the full archive along with every new article.

https://katrinaklierwisdom.substack.com/archive

New hires often assume their colleagues already understand the professional boundaries when moving from a competitor. Most don’t, or simply aren’t thinking about it in the moment.

In the U.S., the legal landscape on non-competes has shifted. In September 2025, the FTC voted 3-1 to drop its appeal and accept the court ruling that struck down its nationwide non-compete ban. More than 35 states have introduced over 150 bills restricting non-competes in the past three years. Several states, including California, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, ban them outright, with Washington joining in 2027. One GAO estimate puts 18% of workers under an active non-compete right now, and 38% have had one at some point in their career. If you haven’t encountered this yet, you likely will.

It’s important to note that confidentiality and trade secret obligations typically survive even where non-competes don’t hold up. The details matter here.

Please note this is general information, not legal advice. Talk to an employment attorney about your specific agreement.

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Because the legal landscape is complex, many people think these agreements won’t hold up in court or that their old employer won’t bother pursuing them. Enforcement decisions are inconsistent and hard to predict from outside the company.

You don’t know what will trigger your former employer to act.

The responsible move is to steer clear of anything that could look like a violation, regardless of how enforceable you believe the underlying agreement is or isn’t.

Just because your former employer doesn’t seek legal action doesn’t mean the damage to your reputation isn’t done anyway.

Before the first “so how did you all do it” conversation, review your employment agreement, your separation or severance paperwork, and any documents covering trade secrets or confidential information. Most problems start with people who never read their own agreement closely, then guess under pressure or simply get swept up in a conversation and don’t think.

Knowing your agreement is the easy part. The harder part is what to actually say when someone asks you something you shouldn’t answer, especially when they don’t realize they’re asking it. That’s what we’ll cover in the rest of this article.

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Your reviews are fine.

People like working with you and say so.

But your career feels like it’s stalling, and nobody has explained why.

When you ask, the answer is vague. They mention executive presence and advise you to show up differently with senior leaders. Be more strategic in the room. Few to no examples attached. Senior feedback often sounds like this. The people giving it are busy, and the real issue is awkward to discuss because it’s less task- or capability-related and more about presence and finesse.

What this really means

You are easy to work with, and yet nobody can name a decision you changed or shaped. It’s the pivot point between being great at operational strategy and business strategy. While that sounds like a nuance, it is the thing that often stalls careers at Director and VP levels. It usually happens to people who describe themselves as strong team players. Some would say people pleasers. Most would say they pick their battles.

Being agreeable is not a flaw.

Most writing on this subject treats it as one and tells you to push back more. That advice asks you to become someone you are not, and it ignores that being easy to work with stays a requirement at every level. It does not expire when you make VP.

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Being agreeable versus being impactful, you must be both

Good ideas come out of debate. Someone proposes a direction, someone else finds the weak spot, a third person reframes the problem, and what comes out is better than what went in. That is how a plan gets stress-tested and how a new idea gets clear enough to fund.

McKinsey’s work on CEOs and candor makes the same point. Robust debate followed by disciplined execution produces better decisions, and open disagreement sharpens the reasoning before commitment.

If you are agreeable in every meeting, you are not in the part of the process where the thinking improves, because you’ve not demonstrated that you have anything to add. You are there for the decision announcement and absent from the debate that produced it.

Senior roles are measured on three things, and all three happen inside decision-making debate.

1. Heading off problems before they get expensive.

2. Cleaning up mistakes without leaving damage.

3. Getting people aligned around something new before the case is obvious.

You can’t head off a problem without telling someone their plan has a hole. You can’t clean up a mistake without a direct conversation about what went wrong. You can’t align people around a new idea without disagreeing with the ones who prefer the current state.

Your manager can see you are absent from these moments. They do not have a precise word for it, so it comes out as executive presence.

Most people go quiet when the stakes rise. Staying in the debate without creating drama is rare and exactly what will recharge your career.

The problem won’t go away with a promotion

You might assume this sorts itself out higher up, where people are paid to have hard conversations. It doesn’t.

McKinsey studied what separates high-performing top teams and found that when a senior team stays overly polite through an important, difficult decision, the calm usually hides a problem because people don’t feel safe enough to debate the trade-offs.

The agreeable habit gets more expensive at every level. Fix it where you are now.

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Before you decide this is just who you are

Discomfort during disagreement is universal. Your pulse climbs when a peer challenges your numbers. So does theirs. Nerves say nothing about how well you will handle the next ten minutes.

What makes a difference is whether you walked into the conversation ready. People who look comfortable in hard conversations usually thought it through first and had some practice in these situations, so they have built the ability to think on their feet.

Avoiding conflict is a trait. Going quiet because you feel unprepared to choose and engage in a debate is a habit that you can change.

Here is how.

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That association is why sitting VPs and C-suite leaders skip past portfolio advice. They read it as written for other people, at a later stage, under worse circumstances.

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The term never meant that. Charles Handy coined the portfolio worker idea in The Age of Unreason in 1989 to describe a coming shift in which stable, lifelong jobs would fragment and people would carry a mix of different work at once rather than receive one job from one employer. The retirement association came later, in books written for a different audience.

Today, fewer and fewer people work in the field they studied or started in for their entire careers.

In the 2023 National Survey of College Graduates, 54% of employed college graduates of all ages said their job was closely related to their highest degree. Among those with degrees in management or administration, that number drops to 47%.

Most senior-level careers are assembled more than they are planned.

The question is whether you assembled yours on purpose, sometimes proactively and no doubt sometimes reactively.

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A portfolio career has three components.

Skills. Experiences. And venues, meaning the places where those skills get exercised and seen by people who do not sign your paycheck.

Venues are the part most people skip because they think only of their current job.

But diversifying your venues is what easily compounds your value.

Want a fast win here? Become active in some of the professional organizations you probably already belong to.

These three components, and the importance of venues, show up in the data like this:

• The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to be transformed or outdated between 2025 and 2030. That is down from 44% in 2023 and 57% in 2020. While the pace of disruption might be easing, the trend is inescapable.

• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put median employee tenure at 3.9 years in January 2024, the lowest reading since 2002. And note that tenure is time with a company, not time in a given job.

• Across the EU, adult learning participation reached 28.5% in 2024 against a target of 60% by 2030. That demonstrates that continuous reskilling is now assumed rather than optional.

Which brings us to the ongoing debate on career advice…

Niche down.

Go broad.

Pick one.

Both camps are describing different layers of the same career, and the answer is not a compromise between them.

Your expertise should stay singular and deep. Economic forecasting for one industry. Regulatory strategy in medical devices. Whatever you are actually known for. Depth is not the problem.

Your portfolio comprises four things around your expertise.

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Feedback is information. It tells you something about your work, and it tells you at least as much about the person delivering it.

What they chose to notice, how they framed it, what they left out. Everyone sees you through their own lens, shaped by their own experience, values, and motivations. No one knows you the way you know you.

So your job is not to accept feedback or reject it. Your job is to figure out what it is worth.

Here are three questions to run on any piece of feedback, whether you asked for it or it arrived uninvited, whether it stings or flatters. They take about thirty seconds, and they keep you from either swallowing everything or dismissing everything.

One person, or a pattern?

A single comment is one data point. The same theme from several people, even worded differently, is a pattern, and a pattern earns more of your attention than a one-off.

Volume of data points is not the whole story, though. Three people who barely see your work are weaker evidence than one person who works beside you every day. So weigh who is speaking alongside how many are saying it. One credible, close-up voice might matter more than a group at a distance.

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Does it touch what I’m trying to achieve?

Look at the feedback relative to your actual goals. For example, someone tells you to speak more loudly in meetings. If being visible and heard shapes where you are trying to go, that is worth acting on, and maybe you speak more loudly, or maybe you try some other communication tricks. If it is one colleague’s style preference, it is worth very little. Same words, different value, depending entirely on where you are headed.

This question does most of the sorting for where to focus any of your attention. A great deal of feedback is real, accurate, and completely beside the point for you right now.

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How much does this matter to me, and what’s driving the person who raised it?

Some feedback lands on things you care about, and some does not. Reading the person who gave it helps you interpret what they said rather than wave it off.

Take the advice to slow down. “That’s a rough team, you should avoid taking that role.” “They’ll never pick you for that project. They’ll go with their favorites.” “If you want people to like you, slow down. We just don’t move that fast here.” The same sentence can come from someone protecting you, someone protecting their own position, or someone protecting an unwritten rule about how quickly people are allowed to rise. You cannot judge the message until you have read the likely motive behind it.

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Praise runs through the same three questions

The instinct is to inspect criticism and simply enjoy praise. Be wary of that instinct. Warm feedback carries an agenda as easily as harsh feedback does. Someone building an alliance, softening you up before a request, or managing your reaction can hand you something that feels wonderful and still tells you more about them than about you.

Run the compliments through the same filter. Is one person impressed, or several? Does the praise attach to work that actually moves you forward, or to something incidental? And what might the person want from you feeling good right now? Praise you have examined is worth far more than praise you have only absorbed.

This is not a license to choose ignorance; rather the opposite

This is not a license to dismiss anything inconvenient that you really don’t want to hear. The real version of this practice is harder than the lazy version, because it means scrutinizing the feedback you like exactly as closely as the feedback that you don’t. If you only ever apply these questions to criticism you would rather not hear, you are not evaluating feedback. You are defending yourself.

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Let’s get to it…

Congratulations! You’ve done a lot of prep work and analysis so far. You’ve also done some personal reflection. Now you’re ready to empower your champions with your story, told honestly and reflecting the value you provide in words that are meaningful to the people in the promotion decision discussion.

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Let’s get to it…

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You’ve done your setup. You’ve calibrated your readiness. Now let’s get specific about the people who can champion you for that promotion you really want. To do this, we’ll build a champion map and skeptic’s case.

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Let’s get to it…

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The people in that room are confirming a recommendation that took shape weeks earlier. It formed in one-on-ones, calibration sessions, and conversations you never saw. If the executives in those side conversations have no direct experience with your work, you are counting on your manager, as your sole advocate, to carry you. That is rarely a strong position.

The leaders who advance to new threshold levels build champions across functions long before any promotion meeting is scheduled.

How Promotion Decisions Actually Get Made

Most companies run promotions through some version of a calibration or talent review process. Your manager submits a written rationale ahead of time. A group of leaders, usually from several functions, discusses the candidates against a framework that is defensible to the board, like the 9 Box Method. The most senior person in the room gathers input and makes the call.

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Notice what this means. Many people shape the decision, and most of them do not work in your function. They form their view of you from their own experience, from what your manager says and writes, and from what others say when your name comes up. By the time the formal meeting starts, those views are set. The meeting confirms them. If it does not confirm them, you are usually put in a “review again next time” bucket.

This is why capable people are so often surprised by the result. They prepared for a decision in a meeting, but the decision had already been made.

One Advocate Is a Bet

If your manager is the only person in that process who can speak to your work, your case rests on one voice. Your manager may be persuasive. They may also be new to pitching senior promotions, distracted, politically weak, generally disliked, or spending their capital on someone else. That is why you need sponsors.

The Center for Talent Innovation found that men with a sponsor are 23 percent more likely to reach the next step in their careers than peers without one. For women, the figure is 19 percent.

A mentor gives you advice. A sponsor advocates for you in rooms you are not in. The distinction matters because the promotion process happens almost entirely in rooms you are not in. At senior levels you need several sponsors, spread across the functions represented in that room.

Look Across, Not Just Up

Most professionals invest their relationship energy vertically. They manage up to their boss and lead down to their team. The horizontal relationships, with peers and seniors in Finance, Sales, Operations, Product, and HR, get whatever time is left over. Usually that is minimal or transactional at best.

Harvard Business Review found that most managers network operationally, within their function and around their current job. Very few build strategic networks that cross functional boundaries. The ones who do are the ones who rise.

The logic is simple. The executives who influence promotion conversations run other functions. If the CFO, the COO, or the CRO has no working knowledge of you, then in the conversations that decide your career, you are a name on a slide. They need to know you as a person and the value you bring to the company.

I have written before about building peer networks outside your company and why they compound over time. Those external relationships matter across companies. This article is about building sponsorship inside your own.

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The promotion decision is made before the meeting, in rooms you are not in. This short series shows you how to prepare for those rooms with a clear, evidence-based read on where you stand.

Most people enter a cycle with a rough sense of their position and a hope that their manager will make the case. You can do better. You can build a real map of your readiness and your relationships, then use it to cultivate the right champions on purpose.

A large language model (LLM like ChatGPT or Claude) is useful here because it can hold a lot of scattered information at once and find the gaps faster than you can on a notepad. What it gives you is a draft for your judgment, never a verdict. The quality depends entirely on what you feed it, so start by gathering these inputs.

• The job description or leveling rubric for the role one level above you, plus a few descriptions for other roles at that same level for calibration.

• Your company’s stated strategic priorities, taken from earnings calls, the shareholder letter, town hall decks, or whatever your CEO repeats most often.

• Your own results, written with real numbers and business outcomes rather than a list of activities. Promotions are about impact, not activity.

• Your manager’s priorities and goals, and the feedback they have given you. Your “why me” has to connect to what your manager is measured on.

• Your stakeholder map from the main article. Who sits in the room, their backgrounds, and how much you work with each today.

• The feedback you have gathered over time from meetings, one-on-ones, and emails, collected in one place.

Gather those before the next part. In Part 2, we turn them into an honest read on whether you are actually ready, and on which of your results the executive team will care about.

Parts 2 through 4 are for paid subscribers. If you are on the free list, upgrade to get the rest of the method.

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This summer feels nothing like summers used to.

Job markets are volatile. AI is reshaping roles faster than most organizations can absorb. Business targets haven’t softened just because it’s June. If anything, the pressure has intensified. The professionals I talk to aren’t looking for a break from the intensity of this market. They’re trying to figure out how to stay ahead of it.

That’s exactly why this challenge matters right now.

When everything is moving fast, most people default to reactive mode. They handle what’s in front of them and hope the bigger picture sorts itself out. The leaders who come out of periods like this with stronger careers and more valuable track records are the ones who stayed intentional while everyone else was just managing the chaos.

This is your moment to be intentional.

What separates good executives from great ones isn’t experience or industry knowledge. It’s the quality of their decisions over time. And that’s a skill you can build. Deliberately. Starting now.

June through August is roughly 90 days. That’s enough time to meaningfully shift how you think, how you decide, and how you show up. Not someday. By September.

Why Decision-Making Is the Right Place to Start

Every leadership challenge eventually comes back to a decision. Who to hire. Which strategy to pursue. When to act and when to wait. How to bring people along without losing momentum.

Most executives make dozens of decisions a week without ever deliberately studying how they do it. That’s like practicing a sport every day without ever working with a coach. You get reps, but you don’t necessarily get better.

This challenge is about getting better, intentionally, in the middle of everything else you’re already managing.

The Four Articles That Form Your Decision-Making Foundation

Work through one of these each month and spend the remaining weeks applying what you’ve learned in real situations at work. These aren’t theoretical frameworks. They’re built from real experience, tested in real organizations, and designed to shift how you think and act.

Start here if you’re building the skill:

📌 You Make the Call — A simple but powerful mental exercise I’ve shared with leaders from first-time managers to C-suite executives and board members. It trains your brain to think one level above your current role so that when the moment comes, you’re ready.

Read this if your organization is stalling:

📌 Risk vs. Stagnation — Waiting for certainty isn’t caution. It’s a quiet form of decline. This piece offers a practical model for moving forward with confidence even when the fog hasn’t cleared.

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Read this when decisions keep getting harder:

📌 The Hidden Psychology of Strategic Pivots — The biggest obstacle to better decisions often isn’t the data or the market. It’s your own thinking. This piece unpacks the psychological patterns that quietly undermine even the most experienced leaders.

Read this to make sure you’re solving the right problem:

📌 Executives Solve Problems — Making a good decision starts with correctly identifying what you’re actually deciding. This piece is a cautionary tale about what happens when that step gets skipped.

The Daily Practice That Makes It Stick

Reading alone won’t change how you make decisions. You need a daily structure that keeps you moving forward without adding another major commitment to an already full plate.

I’ve written about a framework I use myself and have recommended to many others: Restore, Reconnect, Ramp. Three things, one in each category, every day. Not a long list. Not a complicated system. Just three intentional actions that keep you grounded, connected, and making progress on what matters most to you. Try it for a week and see what happens.

Read: Stop Overthinking: Create Daily Success with this Simple Routine

The Bigger Picture

Better decisions are the foundation. But this challenge is also about the broader career you’re building in one of the most disruptive professional environments most of us have ever navigated.

The leaders who come through this period well, who get tapped for the most important roles and opportunities, tend to share one trait. They invested in themselves before circumstances forced them to. They built skills, deepened relationships, and strengthened their readiness during the hard stretches, not just the comfortable ones.

Become a paid subscriber before the end of June 2026 and receive a 67% discount plus the gifts mentioned later in this article.

As I wrote in Invest in Yourself Like Everything Depends on It, the one thing no one can ever take from you is your knowledge, your wisdom, and your determination. That investment pays off. Every time.

And if you’re thinking about what your career could look like in the near future given everything that’s changing, Taking Charge of Your Career in Volatile Times is worth a read. Building that readiness before you need it is one of the most valuable things you can do right now.

Your 90-Day Plan

Here’s how to approach this without creating more pressure in an already demanding season.

June

Read You Make the Call and start applying it at work. Every time your manager or leadership team faces a visible decision, write down what you would do and why. Compare your thinking to the actual outcome. Debrief yourself. No extra meetings required. No one even needs to know you’re doing it.

July

Read Risk vs. Stagnation and The Hidden Psychology of Strategic Pivots. Identify one decision in your own work that you’ve been sitting on. Apply the mental model. Make the call.

August

Read Executives Solve Problems. Before your next high-stakes recommendation, pressure-test whether you’ve correctly defined the problem you’re actually solving. Ask one trusted colleague to challenge your framing before you take it forward.

Every day, in parallel, do your three R’s. One restore. One reconnect. One ramp.

By September you’ll have sharper instincts, a more deliberate approach to decisions, and a clearer sense of where your thinking still has room to grow. In a market this competitive, that’s a gift for your current and future self.

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For Paid Subscribers

I’ve built a companion 90-Day Progress Tracker and Reflection Journal exclusively for paid subscribers. It includes:

• A baseline self-assessment at the start of June so you have a clear benchmark

• Weekly reflection prompts tied to each article in the series

• Monthly check-ins to track how your thinking is shifting

• A final end-of-summer assessment so you can see exactly what the three months built

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, upgrade here to get the tracker.

And if you become an annual paid subscriber before 30 June 2026, you’ll receive an annual membership for a 67% savings. Subscribe now.

Katrina’s Career Wisdom

This Substack is your virtual mentor for career success to excel at the Director and VP level to reach the C-Suite and have fun doing it.

By Katrina Klier

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The board sets strategy. It defines funding and investment priorities. It decides the big structural questions: whether the company goes public, stays private, gets sold, or makes acquisitions. It hires the CEO, sets the CEO’s priorities, and replaces the CEO when the direction needs to change. Everything your CEO does and the decisions they make happen inside a frame the board has set.

Yet for most people, their company’s board is a bit of a black box.

Looking into the board, to the people your CEO answers to, gives you expanded context. And context is what most separates executives who anticipate change from those who are surprised by it.

You may not present to your board. You may not report to your CEO. It does not matter. Understanding who sits on your board, what they have done, and what they care about lets you get inside your CEO’s head. You start to see what matters to them, why certain initiatives get attention, and where the company is likely heading. You can bring ideas that align with where the board wants to go. You can read strategy shifts, funding decisions, and risk conversations earlier than the people around you.

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That edge matters more now than ever. Even strong results no longer keep a CEO in place. In the S&P 500, succession at top-performing companies (the top three quartiles by total shareholder return) rose from 7% in 2024 to 12% in 2025. At privately held, PE-backed companies, the turnover is far higher, with more than 70% of CEOs replaced during the average holding period.

And much of this movement is not planned. Roughly 54% of CEO transitions are unplanned or unanticipated.

A CEO change usually indicates a shift in what the board believes the company needs. The board’s job is to do what is best for the company from the view of investors or owners, and that means adjusting priorities as conditions change. When the direction shifts enough, the board may decide a different leader is better suited to carry it out. Understanding the board tells you how it views the company’s direction, which helps you gauge where things are heading.

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Most senior leaders I know treat travel as either a reward or a logistical necessity. Few treat it as a discipline.

I’ve come to see it differently. I now split my time between the US and Europe, and I have family across multiple continents. That shift, and the travel that comes with it, has changed how I think. Not in a vague, inspirational way. In a concrete, practical way that shows up in my work and in how I advise clients.

There’s a reason the most effective leaders tend to have broad worldviews. Exposure to different cultures, environments, and ways of working does something that no book, course, or conference can replicate. It forces you to engage differently, solve differently, and see differently.

Research supports this. A study by researchers from INSEAD and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found a meaningful link between international experience and creative problem-solving. The key wasn’t time logged abroad. It was genuine engagement with a different environment. Leaders who adapted to new contexts, rather than just passing through them, showed measurably greater cognitive flexibility.

A packed itinerary with your laptop open the whole time doesn’t count. The benefit comes from being present and curious enough to let a new context actually sink in.

And the distance doesn’t have to be dramatic. A weekend somewhere you’ve never been or a day in a place you haven’t visited close to home can shift your thinking just as much as an international trip. The variable is intention, not miles.

I believe this: Once you genuinely broaden your perspective, you can’t shrink it. And that expanding view is exactly how you expand what’s possible in your career.

Related reading: What To Do When It’s Time to Reorient and The Hidden Psychology of Strategic Pivots

For paid subscribers, below is a travel intention guide to make the most of your travel experiences in your career and life.

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You know the pattern. A new leadership book lands on the bestseller list, so you read it. A compelling course on AI strategy appears in your feed, so you enroll. A podcast on executive presence gets recommended three times, so you subscribe. A conference in your sector is coming up, so you register.

All of it feels like progress. None of it actually is. Not yet, anyway.

I call this the Learning Trap, and it catches some of the smartest, most ambitious professionals I know.

What the Learning Trap Actually Is

The Learning Trap is what happens when continuous learning quietly shifts from a development strategy into a delay strategy. The calendar fills with inputs: reading, courses, webinars, certifications. Meanwhile, the decisions that need to be made, the conversations that need to happen, and the moves that need to happen in your career keep getting deferred.

It feels like progress. That’s what makes it so effective at hiding.

Learning feels virtuous. It feels responsible. It gives you something concrete to point to when someone asks what you’re doing to grow as a leader. And unlike the hard conversations and real decisions that carry actual risk, learning carries almost none. That asymmetry is exactly the problem.

Motion and action are not the same thing. Motion is preparation. Action is the move itself. The trap is when preparation never ends.

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Why High Performers Are Most Vulnerable

The Learning Trap doesn’t catch people who are coasting. It catches people who care. People who want to be prepared before they act. People who believe that getting it right matters and who, somewhere along the way, turned “getting it right” into a condition that has to be met before they can move.

This is especially common at the Director and VP level, where the stakes feel higher, the visibility is greater, and the cost of a misstep feels very real. In that environment, learning becomes a rational-sounding reason to not yet commit.

The internal logic usually sounds something like this:

I need to understand this better before I can speak to it confidently.

Once I finish this program, I’ll have the credentials to make the case.

Let me learn more about how others have approached this first.

All of these sound reasonable. And sometimes they are. The problem is when the bar keeps moving, and there is always one more thing to learn before it feels safe to act. That is not development. That is sophisticated procrastination.

How Would You Know?

If you’re not sure whether you’re in the Learning Trap, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Can I name a specific decision or action that my current learning is directly preparing me for? If the answer is vague, that is a sign.

2. Have I been “preparing” in this area for more than 90 days without a meaningful move? Preparation beyond that window usually has more to do with fear than readiness.

3. Would I be embarrassed to admit out loud how long I’ve been studying this before acting? Your instinctive answer to that question is usually the honest one.

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What Learning Should Actually Do

Learning is not the destination. It’s the input. The output is a decision made with more clarity, a conversation had with more credibility, a risk taken with more confidence. If learning is not producing any of those outputs, it isn’t development. It’s accumulation.

The most effective senior leaders I’ve worked with are not the most well-read ones. They’re the ones who learn just enough to move, then let the experience teach them the rest. They treat learning as a catalyst, not a prerequisite.

That distinction matters enormously. Because in the time it takes to feel fully ready, the opportunity rarely waits.

If this is hitting close to home, you are not alone. I see this pattern regularly in otherwise high-performing senior leaders.

Paid subscribers, I will walk you through a short Learning Audit below that will show you exactly where your learning is building momentum and where it is keeping you stuck.

If you want the practical tools, consider becoming a paid subscriber. That is where the real work happens.

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This summer feels nothing like summers used to.

Job markets are volatile. AI is reshaping roles faster than most organizations can absorb. Business targets haven’t softened just because it’s June. If anything, the pressure has intensified. The professionals I talk to aren’t looking for a break from the intensity of this market. They’re trying to figure out how to stay ahead of it.

That’s exactly why this challenge matters right now.

When everything is moving fast, most people default to reactive mode. They handle what’s in front of them and hope the bigger picture sorts itself out. The leaders who come out of periods like this with stronger careers and more valuable track records are the ones who stayed intentional while everyone else was just managing the chaos.

This is your moment to be intentional.

What separates good executives from great ones isn’t experience or industry knowledge. It’s the quality of their decisions over time. And that’s a skill you can build. Deliberately. Starting now.

June through August is roughly 90 days. That’s enough time to meaningfully shift how you think, how you decide, and how you show up. Not someday. By September.

Why Decision-Making Is the Right Place to Start

Every leadership challenge eventually comes back to a decision. Who to hire. Which strategy to pursue. When to act and when to wait. How to bring people along without losing momentum.

Most executives make dozens of decisions a week without ever deliberately studying how they do it. That’s like practicing a sport every day without ever working with a coach. You get reps, but you don’t necessarily get better.

This challenge is about getting better, intentionally, in the middle of everything else you’re already managing.

The Four Articles That Form Your Decision-Making Foundation

Work through one of these each month and spend the remaining weeks applying what you’ve learned in real situations at work. These aren’t theoretical frameworks. They’re built from real experience, tested in real organizations, and designed to shift how you think and act.

Start here if you’re building the skill:

📌 You Make the Call — A simple but powerful mental exercise I’ve shared with leaders from first-time managers to C-suite executives and board members. It trains your brain to think one level above your current role so that when the moment comes, you’re ready.

Read this if your organization is stalling:

📌 Risk vs. Stagnation — Waiting for certainty isn’t caution. It’s a quiet form of decline. This piece offers a practical model for moving forward with confidence even when the fog hasn’t cleared.

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Read this when decisions keep getting harder:

📌 The Hidden Psychology of Strategic Pivots — The biggest obstacle to better decisions often isn’t the data or the market. It’s your own thinking. This piece unpacks the psychological patterns that quietly undermine even the most experienced leaders.

Read this to make sure you’re solving the right problem:

📌 Executives Solve Problems — Making a good decision starts with correctly identifying what you’re actually deciding. This piece is a cautionary tale about what happens when that step gets skipped.

The Daily Practice That Makes It Stick

Reading alone won’t change how you make decisions. You need a daily structure that keeps you moving forward without adding another major commitment to an already full plate.

I’ve written about a framework I use myself and have recommended to many others: Restore, Reconnect, Ramp. Three things, one in each category, every day. Not a long list. Not a complicated system. Just three intentional actions that keep you grounded, connected, and making progress on what matters most to you. Try it for a week and see what happens.

Read: Stop Overthinking: Create Daily Success with this Simple Routine

The Bigger Picture

Better decisions are the foundation. But this challenge is also about the broader career you’re building in one of the most disruptive professional environments most of us have ever navigated.

The leaders who come through this period well, who get tapped for the most important roles and opportunities, tend to share one trait. They invested in themselves before circumstances forced them to. They built skills, deepened relationships, and strengthened their readiness during the hard stretches, not just the comfortable ones.

Become a paid subscriber before the end of June 2026 and receive a 67% discount plus the gifts mentioned later in this article.

As I wrote in Invest in Yourself Like Everything Depends on It, the one thing no one can ever take from you is your knowledge, your wisdom, and your determination. That investment pays off. Every time.

And if you’re thinking about what your career could look like in the near future given everything that’s changing, Taking Charge of Your Career in Volatile Times is worth a read. Building that readiness before you need it is one of the most valuable things you can do right now.

Your 90-Day Plan

Here’s how to approach this without creating more pressure in an already demanding season.

June

Read You Make the Call and start applying it at work. Every time your manager or leadership team faces a visible decision, write down what you would do and why. Compare your thinking to the actual outcome. Debrief yourself. No extra meetings required. No one even needs to know you’re doing it.

July

Read Risk vs. Stagnation and The Hidden Psychology of Strategic Pivots. Identify one decision in your own work that you’ve been sitting on. Apply the mental model. Make the call.

August

Read Executives Solve Problems. Before your next high-stakes recommendation, pressure-test whether you’ve correctly defined the problem you’re actually solving. Ask one trusted colleague to challenge your framing before you take it forward.

Every day, in parallel, do your three R’s. One restore. One reconnect. One ramp.

By September you’ll have sharper instincts, a more deliberate approach to decisions, and a clearer sense of where your thinking still has room to grow. In a market this competitive, that’s a gift for your current and future self.

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For Paid Subscribers

I’ve built a companion 90-Day Progress Tracker and Reflection Journal exclusively for paid subscribers. It includes:

• A baseline self-assessment at the start of June so you have a clear benchmark

• Weekly reflection prompts tied to each article in the series

• Monthly check-ins to track how your thinking is shifting

• A final end-of-summer assessment so you can see exactly what the three months built

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, upgrade here to get the tracker.

And if you become an annual paid subscriber before 30 June 2026, you’ll receive an annual membership for only $49.50, which is a 67% savings. Subscribe now.

Katrina’s Career Wisdom

This Substack is your virtual mentor for career success to excel at the Director and VP level to reach the C-Suite and have fun doing it.

By Katrina Klier

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There’s a well-documented principle in cognitive psychology called the Peak-End Rule. First articulated by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson in 1993, it fundamentally changed how researchers understand human memory.

Their finding was counterintuitive: people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its most intense point and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment. Duration barely registers. The middle fades. What sticks is the peak and the close.

A companion phenomenon, the Primacy Effect, tells us the opening moment carries equal weight from the other direction. At the beginning, cognitive load is low. New information is actively processed and encoded in long-term memory, an advantage often no longer available to information that comes later.

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Together, these two principles create a clear picture of how people experience you as a leader: the beginning anchors perception, the end cements it. Everything in between, however solid, tends to blur.

This isn’t philosophy. It’s the architecture of human memory.

Now stretch that across a career. Think about how you showed up in your first real leadership role and what impression those early weeks made. Think about how you’ve left jobs, ended working relationships, and closed out major projects. The moments you’re probably least deliberate about are the ones people remember most.

Paid subscribers receive a reflection framework and guide to better managing the bookends of one’s career.

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Few phrases have become more embedded in workplace culture over the past decade than bring your whole self to work. The intent behind it is genuine. Organizations that encourage people to show up without fear of judgment tend to build more honest, creative, and resilient teams.

But the phrase has a problem. Most people hear it as permission to bring everything about themselves to work… every habit, every mood, every unfiltered impulse. That is where this well-meaning guidance goes sideways.

Authenticity at work does not mean unfiltered. It means intentional and curated.

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Authenticity Is an Overloaded Word

Authenticity has become an overused word in business. It gets applied to personal branding, leadership style, and hiring conversations, often without much precision. The result is that people conflate being authentic with being unguarded, as if true self-expression means potentially surfacing every trait, regardless of context.

If your authentic self tends toward disorganization, that does not mean you lead with it in a high-stakes client meeting. If you are easily bored, or prone to impatience, or need to process emotions out loud, those are real parts of who you are. They also require judgment about when and how they belong in a professional space.

The real distinction is not whole self versus work self. It is the unfiltered self versus the deliberate self.

Former U.S. Secret Service agent Evy Poumpouras makes this point directly. On the Diary of a CEO podcast, she said: “Don’t bring your authentic self to work. I want your professional self. I want your respectful self. I want your empathetic self. I want your competent self. You can bring your authentic self to a Thanksgiving meal with your family if you’d like to.” Poumpouras served for twelve years protecting four U.S. presidents. She knows something about performing under pressure without the luxury of leading with whatever she happened to feel that day.

That is a strong position, and a useful one. It raises the question: if you leave your authentic self at the door, what exactly are you bringing in?

The answer is not a performance. It is not a suppression of who you are. It is a better-calibrated version of the same person.

Suppression is genuinely harmful. Research on “covering” in the workplace, the practice of hiding aspects of one’s identity to conform to perceived norms, shows that it erodes trust, reduces engagement, and produces the kind of burnout that is hard to see coming. Deloitte’s research found that 61% of employees cover some aspect of their identity at work, often at significant personal cost.

Filtering is different. It is not hiding who you are. It is making deliberate choices about which parts of yourself serve the people and the work in front of you.

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Your Professional Self Is Also Genuinely You

Your professional self is not a mask. It is also authentically you.

The version of you that prepares for a presentation, listens carefully during a difficult conversation, or chooses measured words under pressure is not performance. That is character. It reflects your values, discipline, and respect for the people around you.

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Harvard Business Review has written about the risks of taking the authenticity ideal too far. When people use authenticity as a rationale for behavior that is simply inappropriate or unhelpful, it stops being a virtue and becomes a liability. For example, saying “I’m just being honest” before saying something damaging and opinionated rather than factual. The goal is not radical transparency. It is intelligent self-awareness.

The best leaders bring themselves to work fully. They bring their values, their perspective, their experience, their humor. What they do not bring is the expectation that everyone else should accommodate their least-disciplined tendencies.

Paid Subscribers continue below: Five specific attributes that define a strong, authentic professional self, with practical guidance on how to develop each one.

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Sound familiar?

It should. Because many managers do exactly this at work. They move fast, decide often, and stay busy. And yet, weeks pass without meaningful progress on what actually matters.

Being decisive and creating impact are not the same thing. Confusing them is one of the more common and costly mistakes ambitious managers make.

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What Decisive Actually Means

Decisiveness is a process skill. It means you gather relevant information, make a call without unnecessary delay, and communicate it clearly. Done well, it’s genuinely valuable. Done in isolation, it’s just velocity.

According to a 2019 McKinsey survey of more than 1,200 managers, 68% of middle managers say most of their decision-making time is spent inefficiently. Think about that. Not too slowly. Not too quickly. Inefficiently, meaning the time spent deciding is not producing the best possible outcomes. More decisions do not fix this. Better decisions do.

What Impact Actually Means

Impact is an outcomes skill. It means your decisions move something real forward: a goal, a team, a result. Impact can be fast or slow. A well-timed conversation with a struggling team member can shift momentum in an afternoon. Building a culture of accountability takes quarters, not days. Both create impact. Neither is just activity.

The same McKinsey research found that organizations making high-quality decisions quickly are twice as likely to report superior financial returns. Speed alone does not create that advantage. Quality does.

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Where People Get It Wrong

The trap is that decisiveness feels like progress. You resolve issues, you close loops, you clear your inbox. But if those decisions are not tied to outcomes that matter, you are busy but not necessarily impactful.

The inverse problem also exists. Some managers are deeply thoughtful and genuinely impactful, but slow to decide. They sit on choices too long, lose momentum, and frustrate the people waiting on them. I’ve written about the real cost of that pattern in Risk vs. Stagnation: Why Waiting Is the Most Dangerous Decision. [Read more here: link]

The goal is to be both intentional with your decisions and to move at an appropriate speed.

Some Examples

An operations manager is fielding constant requests from her team such as process questions, vendor approvals, and scheduling conflicts. She resolves each one quickly and clearly. But her quarterly goal of reducing onboarding time by 30% has not moved in six weeks. She’s decisive. She is not yet impactful on the thing that matters most.

A team lead inherits a group with low morale and inconsistent performance. He resists the urge to quickly restructure and instead spends two months in one-on-ones, adjusting his coaching approach and rebuilding trust. Progress is slow and invisible for a while. Then, in month three, engagement scores rise and output improves measurably. He wasn’t fast. He was impactful.

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The Most Successful Managers Do Both

They don’t delay, but they don’t rush. They seek useful information without falling into analysis paralysis. They make mistakes and learn from them. And critically, they know which decisions deserve urgency and which deserve depth.

That awareness is the real skill. It is part art, part science. Some of it can be measured. Much of it has to be developed over time, through honest reflection.

Start here. Ask yourself two questions:

When you look back at your last ten decisions, how many moved something meaningful forward?

Are you more proud of how quickly you decided, or what actually changed as a result?

If the answers make you uncomfortable, that is useful information.

Want to go a step further? Paid subscribers receive a full diagnostic tool with recommendations to be both decisive and impactful.

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Most senior leaders know their brand matters. Few take the time to actually audit it. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t have a clear way to do it that doesn’t feel like a vanity exercise or a giant project.

This is neither.

What follows is a single, focused exercise you can do in the next 30 minutes. It uses AI to show you how you come across to the audiences that matter most to your career right now. Not how you think you come across. How you actually land.

When a recruiter is sizing you up, a board member is doing background research, or a potential investor is vetting you before a meeting, they aren’t calling your references first. They’re searching for your name. What they find, or don’t find, shapes their first impression before you’ve said a word.

An AI model does something similar. It searches, synthesizes, and forms a view based entirely on your publicly available digital footprint. That makes it a surprisingly useful mirror, much more so than your standard search engine approach of the past.

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The output won’t be perfect. AI models have limitations and gaps. But it will show you your signal from the outside in, which is exactly what’s hard to see on your own.

I’ve written before about why visibility is a strategic asset and how to start building yours if you haven’t yet. Visibility Isn’t Vanity. It’s Strategy and Build Your Brand to Accelerate Your Career are good companion reads to this exercise.

How to Use This Prompt

Before you run the prompt, save your LinkedIn profile as a PDF and have your current resume ready. Add both documents directly to your AI chat session along with the prompt. This gives the model the correct spelling of your name, your current title, and your professional context as a foundation. The prompt instructs it to look beyond these documents to your broader public digital presence, which is where your brand actually lives.

A quick note on AI tools and web access: some free tiers of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have limited or no real-time web search capabilities, which will yield fewer results for this exercise. For best results, use a paid tier of your preferred tool, or run it in Perplexity, which has strong real-time web research built into its free version and is particularly well suited to this kind of exercise.

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Run the prompt in at least two different AI tools and compare the results. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity will each approach this differently, and the variations produced can be insightful. You may be surprised by what surfaces, or what doesn’t, depending on the tool.

Customize the prompt for your name, title, and the specific audience you most want to understand. Then run it again with a different audience role. A PE investor reads your brand differently than a Fortune 500 CEO does. A board chair looks for different signals than a peer in your industry. Each variation will teach you something different.

The details of the prompt and how to use it are for paid subscribers. Please subscribe for all the really good info.

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Now What? is a series that tackles the significant career moments that make you stop and think, “Now what do I do?” Part 1 of this acquisition series covered being acquired by a larger company. Part 2 addressed the merger of equals. This final installment is about what happens when a private equity firm or private capital investor takes ownership of your company — a scenario that is increasingly common and operates by a different set of rules entirely.

This one is different. Not harder, necessarily, but genuinely different. When a private equity firm or private capital investor acquires your company, you are not joining a combined organization. You are not navigating a contested power structure between two teams. You are entering a relationship with an investor whose goal is a return on capital within a defined window of time. That changes almost everything about how the situation works and what success looks like.

Private equity has become a dominant force in global dealmaking, and activity has rebounded sharply in the last two years. According to Bain & Company, buyout investments (capital that PE funds deploy to acquire controlling stakes in companies) surged to about $904 billion in 2025, a 44% jump from 2024. McKinsey estimates that broader private equity deal value, which includes buyouts, growth equity, and other strategies, reached roughly $2.6 trillion in 2025, with global buyout dealmaking alone approaching $1.8 trillion, its second‑highest year ever.

That scale means the odds of working in a PE‑backed business at some point in your career are not just high; they are rising as private equity continues to reshape more of the corporate landscape.

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I’ve worked across many PE-backed companies in my career and have seen what differentiates the executives who thrive in this environment from the ones who don’t. It is almost never about skills or intelligence. It’s about understanding the game you’re in. This article is about that.

The Game Is Different Here

In the scenarios covered in Parts 1 and 2, the acquirer is an operating company. They have customers, products, employees, and a culture that pre-dates the deal. The integration, however complex, is ultimately about combining two operating businesses.

A PE firm or any other private capital investor is not an operating company. It is a fund manager with capital to deploy, a thesis for how to create value, and a timeline for returning that capital to its investors. Your company is a portfolio asset. Clearly understanding this is the starting point for everything else.

The typical PE hold period has historically been 4 to 6 years, though recent market conditions have extended it further. EY research shows that 81 percent of PE executives said holding periods have been extended by up to three years beyond the historical average. PitchBook data confirms that median hold periods stretched from 3.0 years in 2022 to 3.9 years in 2025. The direction, however, is still toward an exit. Every decision is made with that exit in mind.

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What this means for your career is significant. Leadership tenure in PE-backed companies is shorter than in public or other privately-held companies. A study by Slayton Search Partners found that 58 percent of PE-backed CEOs are replaced within two years of the firm’s investment, and nearly 75 percent are replaced before the firm exits. This pattern applies across the leadership team, not just the CEO.

None of this is necessarily bad news. PE-backed environments can be among the most professionally accelerating of a senior leader’s career. The pace is faster, the accountability is higher, and the rewards for people who create real value are often significant. But you need to go in with open eyes.

The Same Principles Apply — With One Addition

The fundamentals from Parts 1 and 2 hold here: stay calm, don’t editorialize about the deal, communicate early and factually with your team, and read your contracts before anything else. All of that applies.

The one thing that is specific to this scenario: if you had any advance knowledge of the deal, and in PE transactions involving existing management teams, this is more common than in a straight acquisition, be very careful about how much you signal that. The employees who find out through an announcement, while their managers had known for weeks, will notice the gap. Handle it with care.

Another practical reality of the announcement moment is that a PE deal often comes with a lot of financial jargon that most of your team won’t be familiar with. EBITDA, leverage ratios, return multiples, investment thesis. Don’t assume people know what any of this means or how to translate it into their day-to-day work. Part of your job in the early days is to be that translator. More on that shortly.

The section above is free for all subscribers. What follows is for paid subscribers and includes a proven playbook to navigate being acquired by a PE firm. Please subscribe for all the inside the C-Suite, Boardroom, and Investment Conversation scoop.

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