How to Get Promoted to a Senior Leadership Role

When There’s No Clear Path

Getting promoted to a senior leadership role when the path is unclear requires more than stronger performance — it requires a deliberate strategy: building the right visibility, securing sponsorship, and expanding your leadership presence beyond the lane your current role defines. The absence of a visible path is not a sign that one does not exist. It is a signal to start building it consciously.

She has done everything right. She has delivered results, developed her team, grown her capabilities, and built a reputation as someone who can be trusted with increasingly complex work. And yet the next step — the senior leadership role, the people-leader position, the expanded mandate — remains stubbornly out of reach.

Sometimes there is a structural explanation: the organisation is flat, the industry is contracting, or the specific role she is ready for simply does not exist yet in her current structure. Errol, a high-performing professional at a global pharmaceutical company, named it directly: ‘I’ve been in an individual contributor role and I’m aspiring for a people-leader role — but I don’t foresee one opening up anytime soon because of the way the structure is.’

Amrita, equally accomplished, had a different version of the same challenge: a gap between her capabilities and what was available. ‘There’s a huge gap right now between my capabilities, what I aspire to do, and what I see available.’

The absence of a visible path is not evidence that no path exists. It is the invitation to stop waiting for one to appear and start building one deliberately.

First: understand why the path feels unclear

The experience of being ready for senior leadership but not advancing is not simply a personal frustration. It is a structural pattern, documented at scale.

According to McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s most recent Women in the Workplace research, women remain underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline — particularly in senior leadership, where they hold just 29% of C-suite roles.¹ More specifically: only 31% of entry-level women have a sponsor, compared with 45% of men. Four in ten entry-level women have not received a promotion, stretch assignment, or leadership training opportunity in the past two years. And at the senior level, women are significantly more likely than men to say they don’t see a realistic path to the top.²

The broken rung — the specific and persistent point at which women fail to advance at the same rate as men into management and senior leadership — is not primarily a confidence problem or an ambition problem. Research shows the ambition gap disappears entirely when women receive the same career support, sponsorship, and stretch opportunities as their male peers.³ The gap is structural. But its consequences are personal. And while organisations need to change, the women navigating these structures right now cannot wait for that change to arrive.

Six strategies for creating a path when one does not exist

• Make your ambition visible and specific. This is the step most high-achieving women skip, and its absence costs them more than almost anything else. Many senior women assume that their performance speaks for itself — that the right people know they are ready and that the opportunity will come. It often does not. The research is clear: women are less likely to be promoted on perceived potential; they are expected to demonstrate readiness first. Which means the burden of making ambition legible falls disproportionately on them. Have a direct, specific conversation with your manager: not ‘I’d like to grow,’ but ‘I want to move into a people-leader role in the next 12 months. What would need to be true for that to happen, and how do we work toward it together?’ Name the role. Name the timeline. Make it a shared agenda, not a private hope.
• Find a sponsor, not just a mentor. Mentors give you advice. Sponsors use their capital to advocate for you in rooms you are not in. The distinction matters enormously. McKinsey research identifies sponsorship as one of the single biggest drivers of advancement — and one of the areas where women are most consistently under-resourced compared to their male peers.⁴ A sponsor is a senior leader who believes in your potential and is willing to say your name when opportunities arise. They are built through genuine relationships, through delivering visible results in contexts they can see, and through explicitly asking: ‘When the right opportunity comes up, would you support my name being in that conversation?’ Most people never ask. That is why most people never have one.
• Expand your footprint beyond your current role. When a formal promotion path is blocked or unclear, the most effective move is to grow your leadership presence in every available direction. Joti, a DEI professional at a global company, created her own leadership programme within the organisation. It became so successful that her role expanded from APAC to global scope — a promotion in everything but name, created through initiative rather than waiting. Cross-functional projects, internal task forces, industry forums, professional communities outside your organisation — each of these builds the visibility and relational authority that gets you known to the people who make decisions about leadership roles. The formal promotion often follows the informal expansion of influence, not the other way around.
• Build visibility at the level above your current one. One of the most consistent patterns among women who successfully advance to senior leadership is that they had cultivated genuine relationships with leaders two levels above their current position — not transactionally, but through visible contributions to conversations that mattered at that level. Attend the cross-functional meetings where senior leaders are present. Write the internal paper or present the analysis that gets seen upward. Find authentic ways to make your thinking and your judgment visible to the people who have a say in senior appointments. Your promotion is rarely decided by your direct manager alone.
• Say yes to stretch before you feel ready. One of the defining mindset shifts for women who break through to senior leadership is the willingness to say yes to stretch assignments, new responsibilities, and visible opportunities before they feel fully prepared. Errol articulated this shift clearly: ‘Five years back I would doubt myself and say I’m not ready. Now I say yes first, and then figure out how to make it work.’ Research supports this: women who take on stretch assignments — even when they feel unready — advance significantly faster than those who wait for certainty. Readiness is not a prerequisite. It is built through the doing.
• Consider whether the path is in your current organisation. Sometimes the honest answer is that the specific role you are ready for does not exist within your current structure — or that the culture, the timing, or the leadership above you will not create the conditions for it to emerge. This is not a failure. It is information. McKinsey research found that senior women are leaving organisations at the highest rate ever recorded — and at a higher rate than men at the same level.⁵ The women who are thriving are often those who made deliberate choices about which environment to build their next chapter in, rather than waiting indefinitely for a structure that was not designed to advance them. Knowing when to stay and build, and when to move and grow, is itself a form of leadership wisdom.

The inner work that makes the outer strategy possible

All of the strategies above require something that is harder to talk about but just as necessary: the willingness to lead from your own authority rather than waiting for an institution to confer it.

The women who navigate the absence of a clear path most effectively are not the ones who simply work harder or wait longer. They are the ones who have done enough inner work to know — clearly, not arrogantly — what they are worth, what they are ready for, and what they are willing to do to get there. They have moved from hoping to be chosen to actively creating the conditions for advancement. That shift is not primarily strategic. It is psychological. It requires the kind of self-knowledge and inner authority that cannot be given by a title — and cannot be taken away by the absence of one.

You do not need a clear path. You need a clear sense of where you are going — and the willingness to start building the road.

The absence of an obvious next step is not a closed door. It is the beginning of the most interesting leadership challenge you will face: the one that requires you to lead yourself first, before anyone else grants you the permission to lead others.

About the Author

Bhavna Toor is the founder of Shenomics, a conscious leadership platform for high-achieving women. Shenomics works with women across India and globally to develop the inner mastery and outer leadership capabilities that turn ambition into real-world impact.

Explore programmes and resources at shenomics.com

References & Further Reading

[1]  McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org. “Women in the Workplace 2025”  McKinsey & Company, 2025 — women hold 29% of C-suite roles; sponsorship gap data.

[2]  McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org. “Women in the Workplace 2025 — Key Findings”  LeanIn.Org, 2025 — senior women more likely to say they don’t see a realistic path; passed-over data.

[3]  CNBC / McKinsey & LeanIn. “Growing Ambition Gap Between Men and Women at Work”  CNBC, December 2025 — ambition gap disappears when women receive equal career support.

[4]  McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org. “Women in the Workplace 2024”  McKinsey & Company, 2024 — sponsorship as a driver of advancement; broken rung data.

[5]  McKinsey & Company. “Women in the Workplace 2023”  McKinsey & Company, 2023 — Great Breakup; director-level women leaving at higher rates.

[6]  Ibarra, H. “A Lack of Sponsorship Is Keeping Women from Advancing into Leadership”  Harvard Business Review, 2019.

[7]  Mohr, T.S. “Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified”  Harvard Business Review, 2014.

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