All my career I wanted to be a Vice President. Everything I did professionally drove toward that goal, including:

• Lateral moves from engineering to supply chain (which also had a bunch of other factors I won’t go into here)
• Earning a technical master’s degree, two undergraduate degrees, and later an MBA
• Actively seeking professional contacts in high places in my organization and inviting them to lunch or coffee
• Being involved in non-work organizations (professional organizations or hobbies)

While all of these are good and align with the advice I was given by more senior leaders, I think they got me into people leader/management positions. They did not get me the last step from a Director to a VP. This article is about what I think did get me to that last step, as well as some thoughts for ambitious people who are also laser focused on executive career goals. Note my experience comes as a VP of Supply Chain in a corporate world, so apply to your own situation as you see fit. 

Strategic Thinker

To move from a Director role to a VP role, you need a plan. The biggest gap I see in people who feel “stuck” in a Director-level role is a lack of an answer to the question, “What would you do with the team if you were leading it?” This doesn’t mean picking apart a current leader’s approach or becoming someone who is only about saying no, it’s about having a clear direction, being able to articulate that direction, and having the skills to execute on that plan. My transition from Director to VP was to fill a VP role that wasn’t even created until I proposed a plan for what a supply chain at my business could and should look like. Note that it took months or years for me to come up with and polish my plan, and I had extensive help from a mentor to elevate it to the right level (more on mentors in a moment). I first started formulating my plan on a plane back from a leadership conference in September 2017. I didn’t present it to the company’s C-suite until September 2020. 

When I started the plan, I was not trying to reach for a VP role, I was trying to articulate what I saw needed to happen at my organization and where I thought it needed to go. The morning I presented the final plan to the C-suite was the first time I received confirmation that I would be the one to lead the plan–until then there was a real possibility that it would be handed to someone else to execute. Have a plan, build and articulate that plan in the language of your audience, and make it the right plan even if you’re not the one leading it. If it is the right plan and you articulate it well, the senior leaders in your organization will see that and will choose you to execute it. 

Allies and Mentors

The advice about having good allies and mentors is all true. Your allies, network, and senior leader mentors are critical to moving into executive circles. What you need is a group of people who will say your name in the rooms where you’re not present. I have personally sat in rooms of vice presidents when one of them announces they are retiring or leaving the organization. The next question they are asked is “who is your successor?” Good leaders have at least one if not two or three successors ready or nearly ready to take over their roles. Great leaders have people who are ready to take over their peers’ roles. If you do not currently work for at least a good leader, consider lateral moves until you work for someone who is. You can spot them by looking for those who are constantly “losing” direct reports to take promotions into other departments. The conversation among C-suite peers is almost always where the next VP is chosen, long before any roles are posted. Figure out who at that level is putting forth names for consideration, and find ways to show that person what you bring to the table (and maybe see if they would provide input to your plan!). 

Empathy

Empathy and emotional intelligence are the hallmarks of the modern-day leader. This has not always been true, and really hasn’t even been true until the last ten years or so. Previously leaders were supposed to be impervious, invulnerable, and have all the right answers. Now executive leaders must care about their teams, show vulnerability, and have the right questions if they want to maximize their team’s performance. The research of Brené Brown and her team has at least corresponded with this shift in approach, if not helped cause it. The result is that VPs must care about and want to serve their teams. Team members are also network contacts who can say your name in rooms where you aren’t present, and they often have more power to do so than they know. 

If your motivation to be a VP comes from wanting to “be on top”, have the perks of executive leadership, or simply achieve a certain pay level, think twice before aiming for an executive role. Being a corporate vice president is hard, and you are accountable for your team’s actions. A VP is the iron umbrella that keeps the garbage and politics from the C-Suite from raining down on their team. No one steps into a VP role without playing corporate politics, although some do play differently than others. I had an executive leader once who would tell me he didn’t play politics. He absolutely did, but he did it by building a reputation for being blunt and not mincing words. He could back that up because he had forgotten more about the area he led than 90% of the company would ever know. If corporate politics and pouring vast quantities of emotional energy into your team do not appeal to you, take a moment and rethink your ambitions. 

Experiences and Attitudes

The next thing to think about is your experiences and attitudes. The 70-20-10 rule says that 70% of learning happens through on-the-job experience, 20% through colleagues and friends, and 10% through formal training experiences. This means you must seek challenging projects and assignments, not loads of extra education or spending all day in training classes. I always say that an MBA raises your career ceiling, not your floor. Getting an MBA or technical Master’s does not get you a promotion to the executive team. What it does do is help you build a network among your classmates, and it can help you spot which projects are the right ones to go after. An MBA especially teaches the larger view of an organization, which you can then use to look at the options before you and pick the ones that have high visibility and importance to your CEO. Then go knock them out of the park. 

Note that the highest visibility or most important projects aren’t always the prettiest or shiniest, and they tend to be the long-term impact projects, maybe with short-term wins to keep them going. Starting our e-Auction program was this project for me, and all the time I was building that team I had multiple colleagues tell me they didn’t envy the task or my position. Yet building that team brought me huge visibility to senior leaders, put me in conversations I would not have otherwise joined, and started me on a path to my career goals. Which brings me to a discussion of attitude.

I often say that the only thing I have control over is my attitude. The older I get, the more true this becomes, and the more I see the effect of poor attitudes in those around me. Stuck in an airport in Dubai for 12 hours due to record flooding? Being grumpy about it solves nothing and doesn’t make gate agents want to make exceptions for you. Feeling stuck in your position? Whining about it doesn’t make anyone want to help, and gains you a reputation as a whiner. Ask yourself (or even ask your trusted colleagues and mentors) if your attitude is holding you back in your career, and start working on adjusting it. 

Do it Your Way

At the end of most Dare to Lead podcast episodes, Brené Brown asks her guests: “What is a hard leadership learning or lesson that the universe keeps putting in front of you and you have to keep learning it and re-learning it?” My answer to this question would have to be: Do it your way. In engineering school, I spent many years not wearing pink because I didn’t want to stand out and be “the girl”. Then I started working full time as an engineer and tried hard to be “one of the guys” in a very similar fashion. It was only when I started doing things my way (going to research things in books instead of banging on machines with wrenches when they broke) that I started to find my footing. I encountered this again as recently as my last corporate role, where I never felt like I was doing things the way I thought they should be done (for a variety of reasons) and so never really became successful in that role. It’s hard to see when you’re in it, but ask yourself what you currently do because you think it’s how things should be done or because you’re trying to conform to culture instead of doing things with your own integrity and conviction. 

In summary, the gap from a Director role to a VP role can be a large one. Directors are half strategic and half tactical, while VPs are much more strategic. With a little attention to making and articulating a plan, cultivating the right allies and mentors, building empathy, seeking experiences, setting your attitude, and then doing things your way, you may find your path to the executive levels moving forward. If you’d like to chat about what you’re seeing where you are, let’s schedule a meeting.