#48 When your scope can't take you there

You've stopped caring about the work. Not all work — this work, the problem in front of you right now. And you've started to wonder if that's a you problem. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this anymore.

It usually isn't that. You know the direction you want to head — a different kind of work, a domain you're drawn to — and your current role can't take you there. The scope doesn't reach. So you keep grinding on a problem you've checked out of, and that's exhausting in a way overwork never is.

Two things usually keep people stuck here. First, the obvious move — leaving — doesn't actually fix it. You change companies hoping it'll feel different, and twelve to eighteen months later you're in the same spot: checked out of a role that can't take you where you want to go. The scope problem wasn't the employer. It travelled with you.

Second, you won't let yourself admit what you actually want — because saying it out loud means facing what it might cost. A level. A pay band. Being junior again where you were senior everywhere else. So the want stays vague, and you never build toward it.

It doesn't have to cost you the seniority. When I talk about it with clients, I call it a gap role – it's a deliberately chosen activity built to close the distance between where you are and where you're going. It doesn't have to be a different job title. A lot of times it's a background project. A stretch assignment. Learning on the side. Anything that manufactures the evidence you're missing, so you can move into the new domain at your seniority, not a rung below it.

Two real examples. A senior TPM who wanted into AI spent a stretch between roles building a stack of real Agentic AI projects — then moved across into AI engineering without dropping a level to do it. And a senior leader whose real destination is leadership coaching repositioned into an internal L&D role as the bridge — a genuine step toward the new domain that didn't cost her the standing she'd built.

Building your own evidence, unassigned, off the corner of your desk, is a completely different muscle — and it asks the most of you right when you're most drained. It's also the part that's hard to do alone, because the reps aren't obvious. Which experiment actually tests the direction before you commit to it? Which of the things you've quietly been doing already counts as proof, if you framed it right? That's most of what I'm doing with clients here — not "go build a gap role," but working out the specific one that closes your specific gap.

One thing to try this week: write your three-to-five-year direction at the top of a page. Underneath it, the one capability you'd need to prove that you can't evidence yet. Then find the smallest version of that work — the rep you could start this month. That's the beginning of a gap role.

To be clear — plenty of these people should leave, and do. I'm not telling anyone to stay put. The exit just works better, and lands you somewhere you actually want, once you've closed the gap first.

Chat soon,

Mel

P.S. The ones who pull this off aren't the patient ones waiting for the right moment. They got specific about the destination and started building toward it — no permission, no title change, no big leap required.