5 Actions to Take to Secure Your Next Promotion
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
Written by Brittanni Hendricks, Leadership Coach
Brittanni Hendricks is an ICF-certified leadership coach and mother who helps professionals and parents navigate toxic dynamics so they can thrive at home and work with confidence, peace, and resilience. She is the author of It's My Turn and the founder of the Playful Power Method for coaching through emotional intelligence and positive psychology.
Picture this. You're in a talent review conversation you're not in the room for. Your name comes up. A senior leader pauses. "She's great," someone says. "Really dependable." Then the conversation moves on. No one fights for you. No one names you for the open VP role. No one draws the picture of what your readiness actually looks like at the next level. You'll never know that moment happened. But it did and it cost you. If that scenario felt uncomfortably plausible, this article is for you.
The myth holding high performers back from promotion
There is a belief that lives in almost every high-performing woman I have worked with inside investment management. It rarely gets spoken aloud, but it shapes every career decision.
If I keep delivering at this level, the right people will eventually notice, and the promotion will come. It is a belief rooted in fairness. It is the belief most of us were taught, explicitly or by example. Work hard. Exceed expectations. Be the one people can count on. Stay consistent and be patient.
For the early stages of a career, this largely works. Performance does get recognized. Reputations do get built. But in investment management, an industry where women represent close to half of entry-level employees and just 19% of the C-suite,[1] the rules shift somewhere in the middle. Quietly. Without announcement and without anyone handing you the new playbook.
That shift is not theoretical. It is structural and understanding it is the first step to moving through it.
What the research actually shows
In financial services and asset management specifically, advancement at the mid-career level is not primarily governed by performance ratings. It is governed by visibility, sponsorship, and positioning, three things the industry's informal architecture systematically makes harder for women to access.
Consider what the data tells us:
For every 100 men promoted to their first manager role, only 81 women make the same leap. For women of color, that number drops to 74.[1]
This "broken rung" has persisted largely unchanged for 11 consecutive years.
Only 31% of entry-level women in financial services have a sponsor, compared to 45% of men at the same level. [2]
Women hold just 26% of global line roles, the P&L-generating, high-visibility assignments that most directly accelerate advancement.[3]
When women receive equal career support and sponsorship, the ambition gap between men and women disappears entirely.[1]
The gap is not a pipeline problem. The talent is there. The gap is a positioning problem, and positioning, unlike the broken system, is something you can act on.
Here are five specific actions that research and real organizational experience confirm move promotion decisions.
1. Get radically specific about what you're positioning for
Most high performers are working hard in a general direction they haven't fully named. Ask yourself the question I ask every client in our first session, "What, specifically, are you positioning for?"
Not "I want to get promoted." Not "I want to move into leadership."
The specific title. The specific scope. The specific timeline. The specific gap between where you are today and what the next level actually requires at your firm.
Research on goal-setting confirms what practitioners have long observed, vague goals produce vague behavior. Specific goals change how you show up in every meeting, what you say yes to, and which opportunities you actively pursue versus passively watch pass by.[4]
Clarity is not just motivational. It is strategic. It determines which three leaders need to know your name. It tells you which cross-functional project to raise your hand for. It shapes how you frame your work in every conversation upward.
In investment management, where succession conversations can begin 12 to 18 months before any announcement, specificity is not optional. It is the foundation everything else is built on.
The question to answer this week, "If you were promoted in the next 12 months, what title would it be, what would your scope include, and who in your organization would need to have advocated for you to make it happen?"
2. Build strategic visibility before you need it
Visibility in investment management is not about being louder. It is about being legible, to the right people, at the right level, in the right way. As I mentioned in my last article, waiting to be chosen feels like patience. But over time, it carries a cost most people do not fully account for.
Here is what the research on sponsorship and advancement consistently shows, the professionals who advance are not necessarily the highest performers. They are the professionals whose strategic value is already understood by the people with decision-making authority before the formal promotion conversation begins.[5]
In practice, this means three specific things.
Identify the two or three senior leaders beyond your direct manager who will be in the room when your name comes up, and begin building a strategy to get your thinking in front of them, consistently, not transactionally.
Communicate your work in a way that surfaces the judgment behind it, not just the output. The difference between "I completed the analysis" and "I identified three risk factors the team hadn't priced in, which changed our recommendation" is the difference between performing at your current level and demonstrating the next one.
Volunteer for the high-visibility assignment before it is offered to you. Research on stretch assignments confirms that high-visibility, cross-functional projects are where promotion decisions are actually made, not in performance reviews.[6] The women who are named for those assignments are rarely the ones waiting to be asked.
Strategic visibility is not self-promotion. It is a strategy and in an industry where informal networks systematically exclude women, building visible intentional sponsorship is not optional, it is the mechanism by which the broken rung gets repaired, one career at a time.
3. Close the sponsorship gap on purpose
The difference between a mentor and a sponsor is one of the most consequential things nobody teaches high-performing women in financial services.
A mentor gives you advice. A sponsor uses their influence to advocate for you in rooms you cannot see.
The data on this gap is unambiguous. In financial services, having a sponsor increases the likelihood of promotion by 23% for women, but women are sponsored at dramatically lower rates than their male peers at every level.[7] That 14-point sponsorship gap at entry level compounds against women every single year.
Sponsorship does not happen accidentally. It happens when you have made it strategic and easy for someone to advocate for you.
In practice, closing the sponsorship gap requires three things:
Identify who in your organization has the positional authority and the inclination to put your name in a room you're not in. This is not your direct manager. This is a senior leader who has seen your work, respects your thinking, and has the standing to move conversations.
Give potential sponsors something specific to say. A sponsor cannot fight for you if they cannot articulate your strategic value at the next level. Your job is to make that articulation easy, through the quality of work you surface to them, the thinking you share together, and the clarity with which you communicate what you're positioning for.
Understand that sponsorship in investment management is most often built through proximity to revenue, visibility on high-stakes projects, and consistency of presence in rooms that matter. If you are not in those rooms, getting into them is a strategic priority, not an organic accident.
The question worth sitting with, "Who in your organization, above your direct manager, could say your name in a succession conversation right now and back it up with something specific?" If the answer is no one, that is the gap to close first.
4. Translate "be more strategic" into concrete behavior
If you have ever been told to "be more strategic" and left the room without understanding what that means, you have experienced one of the most common and most expensive feedback failures in corporate advancement.
"Be more strategic" is not vague feedback. It is a specific signal, and once you know how to read it, it becomes something you can act on immediately.
Here is the translation:
Stop solving only what is in front of you. Start thinking about what is coming before it arrives.
Stop waiting to be assigned the work. Start proposing it based on where the organization is going.
Stop reporting results. Start framing implications. What do these results mean for what we do next?
Stop operating at your current level. Start demonstrating the next one, in every meeting you are already in.
Research on executive presence and promotion readiness consistently shows that leaders are evaluated not just on what they deliver but on how they frame what they deliver. The ability to connect your work to organizational strategy, to show that you are thinking at the altitude of the level above you, is one of the most powerful signals of succession readiness.[8]
In investment management, this means understanding the business well enough to connect your contributions to outcomes leadership cares about, AUM growth, risk management, client retention, regulatory positioning, competitive differentiation. When you bring that frame consistently, you stop being seen as an excellent executor and start being seen as a strategic contributor, which is an entirely different succession conversation.
Strategic thinking is not a personality trait. It is a practice and it can be built deliberately.
5. Make your succession readiness undeniable before anyone asks
Succession conversations in investment management begin 12 to 18 months before any announcement. The professionals who get named in those conversations are not the ones who got ready when the role opened. They are the ones who had already been building the picture of their readiness for months.
Research on succession planning and advancement outcomes shows that organizations with deliberate succession pipelines are 2.7 times more likely to be top financial performers, and that the women who advance into senior roles in financial services are disproportionately the ones who had a sponsor actively advocating for their succession readiness, not just their current performance.[9] [10]
In practice, positioning yourself for succession readiness means four things:
Building your personal board of directors. Not a mentor. Not a single sponsor. A portfolio of relationships, people who can speak to your strategic thinking, your leadership under pressure, your readiness for the next scope, across multiple levels of the organization.
Making your leadership philosophy legible. Can you articulate in one clear sentence what kind of leader you are and what you stand for? Succession conversations are partly philosophical. Organizations are asking not just who can do the job, but whose judgment they want shaping the organization's future. If you cannot answer that question crisply, no one can answer it for you.
Tracking your strategic contributions. Not just your deliverables, but your strategic contributions. What did you see that others missed? What did you propose before it was asked for? What outcome changed because of a decision you shaped? This is the material that succession conversations are made of, and most high performers have never assembled it.
Voluntarily signaling readiness upward. The research on high-potential identification is clear. Leaders more often sponsor the people who make their ambition visible, professionally and strategically, than the ones who wait patiently for their turn.[6] Silence reads as comfort, not readiness.
A note for women of color in this industry
The five actions above apply to every high-performing woman navigating advancement in investment management. But for women of color, the data demands an additional layer of acknowledgment.
Women of color face the broken rung at compounding rates. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 74 women of color make the same step.[1] The sponsorship gap is wider. The P&L assignment gap is wider. The informal network exclusion is more systematic.
None of this changes the validity of the strategy. If anything, it raises the urgency of building it deliberately, because the margin for ambiguity is thinner and the cost of waiting is higher.
Positioning is not a concession to an unfair system. It is the most powerful tool available inside one and the women of color I have coached inside this industry who have broken through have done so not by working harder than everyone else, they were already doing that, but by getting strategically intentional about who knew their name, who was advocating for their readiness, and what picture they were drawing for the people making decisions.
The work underneath the actions
All five of these actions are learnable. None of them require you to become someone you are not.
What they require is clarity about where you are going, courage to advocate for yourself in the rooms that matter, communication that lands at the level above you, and consistency that makes your readiness undeniable over time.
That is the Playful Power Promotion Model and it is built to work specifically inside organizations like yours, where the informal rules are real, where succession conversations happen without you, and where the gap between performance and advancement is wide enough to stall even the most talented professionals for years.
The system is not going to fix itself while you wait. But you can absolutely build a strategy that moves through it.
This week's coaching question, "Which of these five actions are you already doing deliberately, and which one has been missing entirely from your advancement strategy?" That missing action is where to start.
The invitation
If something in this article landed, if you recognized yourself in the pattern of high performance without advancement, I want you to know that this is not a permanent condition. It is a positioning problem and positioning can be changed, deliberately, with the right framework and the right partner.
The Promotion Readiness Audit is a 60-minute 1:1 strategy session designed to identify exactly what is standing between you and your next level and to begin building the strategy that closes that gap.
If you are ready to stop waiting and start positioning, book your Promotion Readiness Audit here. Your promotion is not a gift. It is a strategy and it is buildable. Go where you are valued.
Read more from Brittanni Hendricks
Brittanni Hendricks, Leadership Coach
Brittanni Hendricks is a certified leadership coach and playful professional who helps parents and mission-driven leaders lead with emotional intelligence, confidence, and clarity while navigating toxic patterns at home and work. She is the author of It's My Turn and the founder of the Playful Power Method for coaching through emotional intelligence and positive psychology.
With 15+ years of leadership experience, she offers coaching, facilitation, and speaking rooted in emotional intelligence and positive psychology.
References:
[1] McKinsey / Lean In, Women in the Workplace, 2025
[2] Lean In, 2024
[3] Oliver Wyman, Women in Financial Services, 2024
[4] Locke & Latham, Goal Setting Theory, 2019
[5] Hewlett, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor, 2013
[6] Catalyst, High Potentials in the Pipeline, 2023
[7] Center for Talent Innovation, Sponsor Effect, 2019
[8] Harvard Business Review, "The Elements of Good Judgment," 2020
[9] DDI, Global Leadership Forecast, 2025
[10] Korn Ferry, Women CEOs Speak, 2023
