#30 When your signals don't match your seniority

I've been on a lot of clarity calls this week. Unsurprisingly.

Different functions, different companies, different levels — but a pattern that keeps repeating: people whose experience is genuinely executive-level, but whose signals in interviews aren't landing that way.

Not because they're bad at interviews. Because they've never had to describe their leadership to someone who doesn't already know them.

I worked with a VP of marketing last year who'd done extraordinary work. Marquee launches. Major brand partnerships. Decisions that shaped how a company showed up in the market for years.

But when she talked about it in interviews, she led with the partner names. The campaign details. The logos.

What she didn't lead with — and what would have changed how she was read in the room — was how she'd evaluated the tradeoffs. What she'd decided not to do. Why her call was the right one and how she'd known it at the time.

She had all of that. She just wasn't saying it.

That's the pattern. Not a capability gap. A signal gap. And once you see it, it's everywhere.

The person who can run a $50M program but describes it like a project update. The person who rebuilt a team's operating model but talks about it like they were just "helping out." The person who made a bet that changed the trajectory of a product line but frames it as "we kind of figured it out."

The experience is director-level. VP-level, even. But the way it's being communicated reads two levels below that.

And here's the thing — this isn't something you can see clearly from the inside. You're too close to your own work. The language that feels accurate to you often undersells you, because you've been in environments where everyone already had the context. You didn't need to spell it out. Until now.

I built something to help you find the gap yourself.

The Senior-to-Director Positioning Diagnostic is 12 questions across six dimensions — how you describe your work, how you talk about decisions, how you frame your impact under ambiguity.

It takes about 15 minutes and it will show you, specifically, where you're still being read as execution-level when you're actually operating at director or above.

Most people who take it can see the pattern clearly by the end. And that's the first step to fixing it.

​[Take the diagnostic →]​

Chat soon,

Mel