About
For twenty years I was the HR business partner inside calibration and succession meetings — at NBCUniversal, Baxter, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Virgin Hyperloop and Aerojet Rocketdyne. I ran those sessions. I wrote the talent slates. I watched accomplished people get moved to the “not yet” column for reasons that had nothing to do with their results — and I watched the room struggle to say why.
I coach Directors and Senior Directors, most of them women in technology, to be read as executive before the decision, not after it. Not confidence work. Signal work: scope language, framing, sponsor activation, and where your evidence sits when someone else is arguing for you in a room you are not in.
Almost never for performance. In the rooms I sat in, the deciding factors were whether the person’s scope was described in the language the committee used, whether someone senior could make their case without them present, and whether their visible evidence matched the level they were being considered for. Results get you discussed. Signals get you chosen.
A slate, a set of talent cards, and whatever the room remembers. The written record is thinner than people imagine and the verbal advocacy matters more. That is why a sponsor who can argue your case in your absence outperforms any amount of individual effort — and why the work is to build that argument for them, in their language, before the meeting happens.
No. It is a repeatable set of signals, which is why it can be coached. Presence gets taught as charisma; in practice it is how you frame scope, where you place evidence, and how close you sit to the decisions that matter. Personality is not the variable.
The Readiness Score is free and takes two minutes. It names how the room currently reads you, and the one signal costing you the most.