Melody Wilding 1:09

How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It's by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you're not. I'm Melody Wilding, best-selling author, human behavior professor, and award-winning executive coach. Get ready and let's put psychology to work for you. There are four things you need to master to be executive ready and to succeed once you get there. That's what we're getting into today. By the end of this episode, I want you to be able to test yourself against the criteria so you know where you stand, where you're strong, and what needs to change. And this is crucial right now because the next six months are invisible prime time that 99% of people completely overlook. This is when leaders start making decisions about who gets staffed on the most valuable and visible projects, who is trusted with more headcount, who gets endorsed for the bigger role versus who gets passed over, or worse, especially in this market, eliminated altogether. This can be great news if you choose to see it that way, because you don't have to be beholden to your performance review or the reorg that already happened, and then try to reverse engineer why you are passed over. You have a window before year end to become much more deliberate about how you are showing up, what you are known for, where and how you are building influence and converting that to opportunity. Having a tight grasp of this and a clear plan, you are working week to week, month to month. It is a non-negotiable when there are fewer opportunities and there are a lot more qualified people chasing them. Before I get into what the four pillars are and how you can evaluate yourself against each of them, we have to be on the same page about what we mean here by executive ready. That phrase gets thrown around a lot with this kind of mysterious, untouchable luster. And honestly, that's a big part of the problem. Just think about all of the things you have been told you need to do in order to be executive ready. You need to operate strategically, see around corners, drive transformation, have presence, be more visionary, demonstrate gravitas, challenge the status quo, but bring everybody along, be data-driven, but also trust your gut. You hear all of these phrases, they sound sophisticated. They sound like they have gravity behind them. But when you actually try to put any of these into practice, you realize, oh, I have no idea what to literally and tangibly do here, because there is nothing actionable underneath any of those phrases. There's no behaviors. The other problem is the sheer volume. You're told you need to do this and don't forget that. And you also need to develop these five other things. And oh, by the way, do all of it while still hitting your numbers, managing your team, and don't drop any balls. It's overwhelming. And that is when the very tempting and familiar gravitational pull of going back toward the tactical work comes in. Because that tactical work, it has a tangible payoff. It has a clear definition of done. So let me describe what we mean by executive ready as the difference between when you are operating at a manager level versus an executive level. So we can really illustrate the attitude and altitude we're talking about when we say executive readiness. A manager's time is mostly about execution. You're shipping things, you're running projects, hitting milestones, solving the problems right in front of you. The bulk of your week is operational. You are meant to keep things moving and be responsive. An executive's time is mostly about strategy. What gets funded next quarter? What the organization's priorities should be, who's on the right team for the right problems, how is the C-suite thinking about you, your function? Executives are operating one or two layers removed from the implementation. Your posture has to be anticipating things sometimes months or even a year or more out. You are doing the intangible campaigning and relationship building. And a big part of the value you bring at the executive level is deciding what should or shouldn't be done in the first place. A manager's stakeholders are mostly internal to their function. So your direct reports, your peers, your immediate boss. Your decisions and your mistakes are more contained. Your job is to coach the people you manage, your direct reports, who are usually individual contributors, maybe they are earlier career managers. So you develop them, you hold them accountable, you unblock them as needed. Your relationship is fairly direct. You set the expectations, give feedback. Now compare that to an executive's stakeholders. They are spread across the organization and even beyond it. You have the C-suite, the board, regulators, major clients, cross-functional peers whose decisions directly affect your function. That really ups the complexity significantly. You have a whole different universe of power structures and incentives to navigate. Your decisions are much more far-reaching and have much more visible effects. And as an executive, you also, generally speaking, tend to find yourself in a position where you are now leading other leaders. Your direct reports are themselves managers, senior managers, sometimes directors who have their own teams, their own organizational politics that they have to navigate. So your job becomes more about coaching leaders on how to lead. The messy, the ambiguous parts. How do they make judgment calls under pressure? How do they handle their own underperformers? How do they develop a bench so that the organization isn't dependent on any one of them? You are no longer just developing individual talent. You are shaping an entire layer that has to operate without you. Now, the question is: what are those four pillars of executive readiness that determine whether you get the bigger scope and seat at the table in the first place, and whether you make it look effortless once you get there? Our four pillars revolve around four Ps. And this is the entirety of what we coach around in my advisory program, Lead from Within. And so our four pillars, our four Ps. They are number one, nail your personal brand, number two, win at workplace politics, number three, grow your people, and number four, pitch your promotion. So let's break each of these down so you can test where you stand. And by the way, if you want in-depth support, if you want us in the trenches with you on any of this, doors for lead from within are open, but only for about 48 more hours at the time this is airing. They close for all of 2026 on July 26th. So make sure you head to the show notes, take five minutes to apply before then. All right, starting with number one, nail your personal brand. My definition of this is the perception you deliberately engineer in the minds of people who influence your outcomes and decide your future. Things about what you and your team deliver, what you stand for, what you should be trusted with. And I say deliberately engineer because most definitions of personal brand are something along the lines of, well, it's what people say about you when you're not in the room. But I think that lets us off the hook. It lets us be too passive, and our brand can almost feel like it's out of our control. When in fact, what we see is our most successful clients are planting. They are campaigning for their brand. They are very intentionally but organically creating it. And a perfect example of someone who did this organically, again, not forcefully, is one of our clients in Lead from Within. I'm going to call her Juliana. She was leading a field marketing function at a growing electronics company, very strong performer, well respected within her team, delivering above and beyond on every metric. But she came to us with a very specific frustration, you may also share. They were the people you called when you needed swag. And that perception was wildly out of step with what her and her team were delivering. Juliana's people were coaching subject matter experts before these big client conversations. They were orchestrating relationships with huge dollar amount enterprise accounts that drove millions in revenue. They are analyzing business intelligence that really informed the entire company's growth strategy. But none of that was the brand. The brand was field marketing does our events. So we got to work engineering her a new one. And here is how she deliberately made that shift. And notice how organic each of these can look from the outside. So she engineered visibility moments where executives could experience the brand she wanted firsthand, not just hear about it. So when their company president was actually attending an upcoming industry conference, Juliana organized a dinner the night before with him and the leadership team. And during that, she started chatting about the strategic work her and her team was doing. And so the president walked away with a completely different picture of what field marketing was. And now he had in his head what he could call on them for or loop them into. She also created tangible assets that could travel without her. Juliana knew she could not be in every conversation where her function was being talked about. So we coached her and helped her to start building documents around her team's narrative that could travel. And she submitted those to me and my team inside of Lead From Within, which is one of the big perks and advantages you get inside of the program. We give you weekly communication reviews where we do these types of deep dives with specific edits. So we reviewed them, we tightened everything up. And out of this, she developed a value report, which was essentially an internal white paper. And with that, she explicitly connected what her team was doing on the ground to numbers: the clients' gain, the revenue that they had acquired, the executive conversations they had supported by name. And she knew the busy people she was handing this to would not really read the white paper. So she directed their attention. When she sent it over, she handed it to them and said something like, There's a stat I highlighted for you on page, blah, blah, blah, that I think is very relevant to your work. And guess what? That got circulated. And Juliana gave people the exact script for what to call on her and her team for. And I can remember when she brought this up on one of our lead from within advisory calls, she was feeling very frustrated about people going to others for things she wanted them coming to her team for. And what I could quickly see was the root cause underneath this, because I have seen this so many times. It was not that these colleagues were sidelining her, they were intentionally cutting out. But rather, she had not told people how to categorize her function. She had not told them what the personal brand was. And this is the value of having a seasoned direct coach and consultant in your corner, pattern recognition that compresses what could have taken you months of frustration into a 10-minute solution. So on that call, we arrived at the very specific scripts she could use with people. Things like the next time you need some customer intelligence on this type of enterprise account, come to us in field marketing because we love nothing more than digging into that kind of data. So notice how everything Juliana did made her brand more memorable, actionable for the people around her, and how she took control. She didn't say, sit back, she didn't wait for her boss to advocate for her for people to just notice what they were doing because they weren't going to. So the key test here I want you to evaluate yourself on is what I call visibility ladders. If you think of your most important stakeholders right now, your skip level, certain C-suite execs, people whose other decisions affect your scope. I want you to ask yourself, which level of the following visibility ladders does each one sit on with respect to you? Level one is the lowest. They know your name, your title, who you report to, the basics. That's it. They could probably place you in the org chart if they had to. They might recognize your face, but they can't really articulate your contribution. Level two of the visibility ladder is they know what you do, and more importantly, they know why it matters to the business. So they understand the impact of your work, not just the function or the responsibilities you lead, but the outcomes you are driving and why and how that is moving the department or the company forward. And level three, the most advanced, is your stakeholders know exactly what to call on you and your team for. They know also where you want to go personally next in your career, within your function or within the organization. They could finish the sentence, when I need X, I go to her for this. They've heard you talk about your perspective on where the business should be heading. They know your points of view. They know what you're hungry to take on. Level three, this is the level where you activate championship from others, where people say, Oh, actually, so-and-so is the right person for this. She already told me she wants to take that on. So the test here, think about your own high-interest, high-influence stakeholders. And on a scale of one to 10, how many sit at level three, that most advanced level, knowing exactly what to call on you and your team for and what you want personally. 10 is the best. All of your stakeholders are at a level three, and one is none. All right, moving on to pillar two of our four P's of executive readiness, win at workplace politics. At your level, advancement does not come down to competence. It comes down to mastering the dynamics that surround the work, the personalities, positioning yourself among them. What will separate you is whether you have learned to operate within the invisible psychology happening around you. Can you win over skeptics? Can you circumnavigate blockers? A lot of executives fail because they were never taught how human motivation works inside of power structures. Nobody sits you down in your MBA program or business school. Nobody explains how status is protected, how alliances form, how people unconsciously work to preserve their own standing, how incentives, ego shape every decision that happens around you. So instead, we keep our heads down and we tell ourselves, I'll rise above the politics. I don't play games. It sounds noble, but if you do this, you are ignoring reality and you will suffer for it. Because every group of humans, whether we are talking about a team at work, a church group, a volunteer organization, whatever, each naturally organizes itself around status and self-preservation. People are wired to protect their slice of resources, their expectations of how things should be and how they want it to be. And I want to be very clear here that winning at politics does not mean backstabbing, gossiping, does not mean assuming the worst about human nature. Rather, this is just very clearly seeing how do webs of incentives interact? How do you adapt when those alliances and relationships start to shift? How do you know how to pull out people's unspoken interests? And you do that with integrity, the way almost like a skilled diplomat navigates a very delicate negotiation. So that when change hits, because it will, you get a new executive, there's a merger, there's a turf war, you are never blindsided or just completely paralyzed. And speaking of turf wars, we had a client, I'll call her Leona. She found herself up against this when she stepped into a new role as chief medical officer. Her predecessor, I'm going to call that person Dr. T, had moved into this vague consultant position. So her predecessor had gone from being the chief medical officer to now this consultant, but she wasn't letting go. And this person, Dr. T, was asking to be CC'd on emails. She was back channeling with the CEO, who my client reported to, and who Dr. T happened to have a very close, friendly relationship with. And Dr. T was also making it seem like new hires were going to report to her that she was going to be their boss, not Leona. And Leona couldn't tell Dr. T to take a hike, back off. She couldn't complain to the CEO, who was Dr. T's friend, because that would have backfired and made her look petty, like she couldn't handle things. So in Lead from Within, our approach to coaching her was to strike a balance between respecting Dr. T while also protecting Leona's own authority and establishing her more strongly as the leader. So a couple things she did. First, she honored Dr. K's history of supporting her. Leona knew that Dr. Ka was the one who had actually originally championed for Leona to take on this role. So she acknowledged that directly when she would talk to her. She said, You know, you advocated for me to be in this position, and you talked about how important it was that I lead this team. I really appreciated that support at that time, and I appreciate it now. So what we know from behavioral science is that as humans, we have a deep tendency to want our current behavior to match our past commitments, called consistency bias. So by re-bringing this up, by thanking Dr. T, reminding her of her own past endorsement, Leona was inviting Dr. T very subtly to live up to the version of herself she had already committed to, which was actually supporting Leona being the face of this team. Leona also framed her boundaries around Dr. T's expertise, not around exclusion. So instead of saying, I don't want you in this meeting, Leona would say something like, these meetings are focused on some nitty-gritty operational details, and I want to make sure we are saving your input for the conversations where it's going to be most needed. And that worked because it protected Dr. T's status. And she then had less of a need to feel like she had to insert herself to prove her importance to hang on to that. And Leona established formal authority before it could be challenged. When she would chat with the CEO, we coached her to explicitly use language that signaled she was in charge and that she was only pulling in Dr. T as a consultant. So she would say, I'm leading the decision on X. I'll be getting Dr. T's input on this one piece, which guided how the power structure would run. And Leona created subtle accountability and transparency by then, going back to Dr. T, letting her know what Leona had discussed with the CEO, and that, hey, the CEO was on board with me leading this, you consulting on these pieces, which leveraged social proof. So your test for this P, Win Workplace Politics, is on a scale of one to 10, how often are you ahead of the politics versus reacting to them? One means you regularly find yourself blind. By a peer who makes a move, a new executive's priorities, a decision that got made without you. You feel like all of these dynamics are happening to you. A 10 means you are consistently, almost always anticipating what is coming. You are able to navigate the underlying psychology that is driving the most charged situations you face right now so that you can come out ahead and you can find those win-wins. Our third P in the pillars of executive readiness is grow your people. Or said another way, grow your team. This one's interesting because it's a lever for everything else. You can be brilliant at engineering your brand. You can be a master at political navigation. But if your team can't operate without you, none of that matters because you will never have the bandwidth to deploy those other skills. You will be stuck in the weeds, putting out fires, fixing other people's work, answering questions that should have never come to you. I did an entire recent episode on this show about the idea of being caught in hero mode and how to escape the overfunctioning leader trap. So make sure you scroll back a few episodes, listen to that as well. If your team can't function without you doing everything, you will fail at the next level because of the scale that is required. More headcount, bigger budgets, more stakeholders, more tasks to execute, assign out, report on, track across every vertical and function. If you can't already build a team that runs without you at your current size, there is no way to build bigger systems you'll need at twice the capacity. And this is exactly what happened. We had someone in Lead from Within, I'll call him Danny. And he's actually a director at an international nonprofit who is being groomed by his boss to step onto the executive team. So it was an exciting inflection point for him that also came with a lot more interaction with the board. Now, in Lead from Within, we have every client start by creating a custom 90-day plan. And in Danny's plan, he said he wanted to focus on executive presence in those board sessions. Here's where Lead from Within coaching tends to be different. We're not just taking your 90-day plan at face value and saying, K looks great. We review it very carefully. We push back, we help you refine it. We are looking for the things you cannot see. And in Danny's case, the red flashing light was immediate. He was telling us he wanted to focus on his presence in front of the board. But in that same plan, saying a blocker was that he was working until midnight, redoing his team's work, sitting on 10 internal committees, so he had zero time. The value of the type of advisory we give you is having expert eyes on your blind spot so you avoid months of spinning your wheels. And instead, we can tell you with laser focus the number one most important thing you need to do, the domino you need to topple to make everything else easier and possible. So we coach Danny through each step of scaling his team's capacity. He had a vision for building this comprehensive racy matrix. And if you haven't heard of Racy, it is about clearly defining who is responsible for what across the team. Now, the old version of Danny would have built all of that himself. But we coached him to ask who, not how. Who else can support me with this, not how can I get this done? And he handed the vision to a staff member, told her, I'm getting out of your way on this. You own this, flesh it out, come back to me when you have something for me to walk through. And when it came back, it was about 75% of the way there. Now, when he was ready to announce the rollout of this racy, we gave him detailed feedback on how to run the meeting so the change did not feel punitive to the team. We flagged specific things he needed to put in place before that session and after to make sure it ran smoothly to the point that, yes, one person was a little disgruntled about this change, but everyone else said, thank God, this is exactly what we need. They were so excited and relieved they took to it right away. In all of this, all of these efforts, the result was within 90 days, he handed off nearly all of those 10 committees, freeing up hours of time each week. These new structures also allowed Danny to travel to conferences across Asia without feeling like he had to check in with the team in the middle of the night, grew his profile extensively, external to the organization. And then he took a totally unplugged two-week vacation, which he hadn't done in years. So the test here is: could you do that? Could your team run without you for two full weeks without any intervention from you? Number one is a heck no. Under no circumstances would that be possible. And number 10 is absolutely, I have zero concerns that could be the case. If you scored below a seven, you need to be thinking seriously about things like how am I externalizing the standards and into institutional knowledge that lives in my head? Am I identifying a second in command? Because if you are indispensable, you are not promotable. And you have to remember you will be judged at the executive level on your ability to build capacity within a scaling team. Can you nurture talent? Can you retain people? Okay, our fourth and final pillar of executive readiness, pitch your promotion. The senior leaders who advance are following everything we've already talked about. They become top of mind through their personal brand and they're brought into bigger opportunities. They navigate political blockers so they can get results and wins. They extricate themselves from dependency that their team has on them. And because of all of that, they have relationships, access, clout. They have political capital and respect from decision makers to pitch themselves as a solution and have that taken seriously so that they get more scope, authority, comp attached to it. If you take nothing else from this episode, take this piece. The senior leaders who are getting the coveted roles right now, even in this doom and gloom job market, they are not waiting for the perfect role to open up. They are pitching it. They are making the case so compelling, so tied to an imperative for the company, something people are already worried about, that creating that opening becomes a no-brainer. Now, do not make the mistake of making your pitch all about you. I say this with kindness. Nobody cares that you personally are ready to grow and want to grow. You need to show them that a business need already exists because executives will make exceptions, they will create new openings, they will reshuffle things for someone who can solve an urgent and expected problem. Now, on the surface, I know pitching your promotion sounds easy, straightforward, like just do it. But there is so much nuance in how you time the ask, how you reduce perceived risk for the decision maker, how you work through the different layers of decision makers and approvals, how you build that chorus of supporters. And then, of course, once an offer is on the table, how you negotiate it. I'll give you a little pro tip here around that because very few people do this well. When you are making your pitch, too many people over-index on what they've already done. Instead of making the case for what they can do next, they spend a lot of time proving their wins. But decision makers don't pay you for your past. They pay you for, yes, a track record, but also the future potential ROI they can get. So you have to paint a clear picture of what else you will deliver if you are given the role and the resources. This is what we have been helping our client, I'll call him Nick, who came into lead from within, wanting to take his role in logistics and formalize it into a VP function. His manager would say things that were very vague, like, yes, we really should think about your growth here, but nothing would ever move forward. And worse, Nick kept getting pulled into these side projects that made him look busy and frankly did keep him busy and a bit distracted. And most people would just get resentful. They would be like, you know what, I'm not being supported here, peace out. Or they would wait it out until they got a new leader and say, I'll just wait for the next reorg when this blocker of a boss gets out of my way. Or they would go around their manager in a way that would cause a ton of fallout and make their lives a lot more difficult. But inside Lead From Within, we helped Nick devise a specific plan and steps to pitch that new VP of global operation strategy to his skip level. And the key, going back to what I said earlier, he did not make it a personal ask. He showed how the company was losing time, how they would save more money, increase revenue by having these centralized logistics leadership. So we helped him put together, reach out, prep for those meetings where he would go to other department heads to get them on board. He would tactfully enroll them in putting a good word in with the COO. And with his boss, we framed all of this as to how Nick working with the COO was elevating their entire team, which also had this halo effect of making his manager look good. And now that proposal is making its way through different layers for evaluation for approval. With Nick every 30 days, we reviewed his action steps as part of our 30-day sprint process. So his own advancement goals never fell by the wayside, even when those urgent requests would pile up. He was inside of our private community multiple times a week as things were developing in real time. When a giant re-org came down pretty much overnight, totally shook up the leadership structure. We helped him recalibrate immediately because the stakeholders changed. So this balance of responsiveness plus the mid-to-long-term career planning, that's what makes the biggest difference here. We also overhaul our clients' resumes so that they are ready to put their name forward the moment an internal role or an external role comes along. We give you line-by-line feedback on your performance reviews so you can put your best foot forward in those calibration discussions because your performance review will be passed around. We are coaching you every step of the way, giving you guidance on what to do or say, whether it's in your cover letter, how to generate referrals through your network, how to create and giving you feedback on fully optimizing your LinkedIn, nailing your interview responses. And when an offer comes back, we negotiate. We help you with that negotiation. And our clients regularly land 20 to 50K more than the original number. And so many tell us that they are now making the highest compensation of their entire careers. So to test how strong you are on this pillar of pitching your promotion, on a scale of one to 10, rate yourself. How prepared are you to proactively pitch yourself for your next role? Could you articulate the specific business problem, the new responsibility or scope you want? What does that solve? Have you identified and started enrolling lateral stakeholders or leaders whose support you'll need? Do you have a draft of the actual case tailored to your decision maker style and issues? So there you have it. Those are our four pillars of executive readiness and success. Our four Ps are number one, nail your personal brand. Number two, win at workplace politics. Number three, grow your people. And number four, pitch your promotion. Now, I consider this show a two-way street, so I expect to hear from you. Come on over to LinkedIn, message me, let me know your scores on each of these tests. I will be waiting to hear from you. And remember, Lead from Within closes for all of 2026 at about 48 hours at the time this is airing. Doors shut July 26th. That is your last day to apply, and they will not open again until about eight, nine months, well into 2027. Now, since 2022, Lead from Within has shown hundreds of mid and senior level professionals worldwide how to unlock their next level title, the wider scope of influence, the life-changing comp that actually matches their caliber and what they deliver. And this particular enrollment window is very special because to make it a total no-brainer for you, I have added three additional months in the program at no extra cost. That's a $3,500 value. And this means you will work directly with myself and my team for a full nine months instead of just six. So we will be side by side with you between August 2026 through May 2027. Now, the level of advisory and hands-on service with me and my team, you get inside of Lead From Within, this is typically reserved for C-suite execs and often runs over $2,000 a month easily. But for this enrollment only, your investment in Lead From Within is 60% less than that. It's just $800 a month. So if you want to get on a private one-on-one decision call with me, these slots are very, very limited. You will need to apply first. Takes five minutes. It gives me the information I need to assess if it makes sense to have a call. We take cohort curation very seriously. I want to make sure that the people who are in this room are right for it, can be successful. So I personally review each application and I invite only those who are the best fit. And on that decision call, we'll talk one-on-one through your specific situation, your goals, and a plan for you to achieve them inside of Lead From Within. All right, that is all for now. I hope today's episode was eye-opening and helpful for you. And I will catch you in the next one. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Psychology at Work. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening. It's how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you'd like to see even more content on how to feel more self assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.