Position, not potential: what actually gets you the next role

Promotion decisions are made on position — what decision-makers can see, verify, and defend in a room you are not in. Potential is what people say about you when the decision has already gone to someone else.

The five position variables

Visibility, leverage, pricing, network, and time allocation. Score each one to five. The lowest score is your next quarter's work; the rest is noise.

Visibility

Who outside your immediate team can name one thing you shipped this year? If the answer is nobody, no amount of output changes your position.

Time allocation

If most of your discretionary hours go to reactive answering, you are being paid to maintain, not to move. Reclaim one block per week for net-new output and defend it like a client meeting.