As performance review season gets underway in many places now & through Q4, here’s a rough model to help you think about how you are perceived in almost every mid-sized to large company. Your work is generally observed and perceived [0] by others along the following 3 dimensions: 1) Content: this is about the insights & ideas you have, the proposals you make, how you solve problems, the things you ship, the metrics you move in the short-term, the business impact you create in the long-term, etc. 2) Confidence: this is about the image you project as you do your work, do you seem to have things under control, do you seem to be able to tackle tough tasks, how you communicate, do you come across as “leadership material”, are your peers and people above / below in the hierarchy confident in you, etc. 3) Context: this is about your sensibility around your company’s implicit culture, how you adapt your approach to your org’s power structure, that important exec’s quirks & preferences, general biases of important peers & stakeholders, etc. Now, here are some crucial observations to consider as you think about how you’re perceived and how that affects your odds of getting promoted: A) In most companies, if you are extremely good at just 1 of these and average / below average at the other 2, you are going to “get stuck” beyond certain levels (usually Manager / Sr. Manager will be your ceiling). This is unfortunately the cause of a lot persistent frustration for otherwise-talented people who are GREAT at Content, but repeatedly get passed over for promotion to higher levels. They don't understand why this keeps happening. And usually no one explains to them the perception side of things i.e. no one explains that it is usually because they are not projecting as much Confidence as they ought to for the next level and they are not as attuned to the Context of the org & the company [1]. B) To have a chance of getting Director / VP level scope, you must be very good at a minimum of 2 of these and you must not suck at the 3rd one. And btw, this is how you get different types of leaders at the mid / upper management level of a company. e.g. a leader who spikes on Content + Context but not on Confidence is going to have a VERY different style than a leader who spikes on Confidence + Context but not on Content. This observation alone will explain a lot of confusing promotions, where someone seems not competent-enough to be a senior leader, but yet they somehow are the one chosen for the VP job [3]. C) Employees who get promoted to and show longevity at the highest levels (Executive / CEO) in top tier companies tend to be very good at all 3, especially Context. Last but not the least: as with any model, this is by no means a perfect predictor of how things will always work everywhere. But hopefully this helps clarify some perpetually confusing things that happen in our career & in the careers of people around us. ~ Footnotes: [0] If you haven’t already noticed, everything here — Content, Confidence, Context — is about how you are perceived i.e. how Optics plays a role in who gets ahead in midsized & large companies. Now naturally, no company will ever admit or explicitly tell you that this is directionally how things work. They will point to the career ladder and give you some technical reason why the committee’s interpretation was that you did not fulfill one or more of the promo criteria. [1] This is not to say that this is right. IMO it is quite wrong. However, me just saying THIS IS WRONG isn’t going to change the long-held opinions and dogmas of the members of your org’s promo committee in November 2024 or January 2025. [2] In an ideal world, it’s your true Impact & your Execution that should dictate how you get recognized & rewarded. Unfortunately though, in any sufficiently large group of humans the idea of “just do good work and let your work speak for itself” doesn’t work optimally. In good companies it will work for you early on, but even in those companies it will stop working at some point, at some level. When you reach that level, it is fine to decide to opt out of this game (I did that at some point, just before I started this next chapter of my career). But if you do that, be clear on the reasons why you’re doing it so you can remain steadfast while others seem to be playing silly games to get ahead. And even if you want to opt-out at some point, the onus is on you to make sure you’re able to create the life you want to create for yourself from that point forward. [3] This is very likely the most interesting observation in this post for those of you who pay attention to why certain people get promoted / selected for certain senior roles.