Recently, I worked with a senior leader whose next promotion had stalled.
Two years earlier, she had accepted her current role because it was framed as the bridge to something bigger: a larger leadership position that had been outlined, discussed, and all but promised. She had done the work since, taking on difficult assignments, navigating ambiguity, and building influence with people who did not report to her. She was operating as a strategic partner and trusted advisor whose impact reached beyond her job description.
Two years later, very little had changed.
“I feel like I’m waiting around and burning daylight,” she told me.
That sentence said more in one breath than twenty minutes of context had. She was running out of patience for a process moving on someone else’s timeline.
I did not disagree with what she had shared. The circumstances were real. There were organizational constraints and legitimate reasons progress had been slower than she expected.
But partway through the conversation, she said something that alluded to the real issue. “There is no doubt in my mind that if there is some future leadership structure, I would have a senior position in it,” she said. “The issue is the time between now and then.”
That was the real admission. This was never a question of whether she was valued or capable. It was a question of what to do with the uncertainty in between. But her energy was going almost entirely toward what she could not control: the pace, the decision, the timeline, and almost none of it toward the role she was actually in. That gap mattered. Unfocused energy does not just sit still. It leaks into the work, and it can quietly delay the very outcome she wanted, whether that meant stepping up inside this organization or being ready for something outside it.
Coaching has taught me there is a significant difference between being right and moving forward.
So, I suggested something simple. Let’s make the most of where you are. The work she could do right now is not wasted time. It is proof, the kind that eventually gets noticed, internally or externally.
She pushed back. Not defensively or emotionally but logically. “I feel like that is all known and proven,” she said, “and nothing is going to happen.”
And maybe she was right. But the longer I work with leaders preparing for greater responsibility, the more convinced I become that growth stalls when attention becomes consumed by what is still uncertain.
The most capable leaders I meet are rarely blind to what is happening around them. They understand the politics and the delays and they can explain in detail why a situation is not moving.
What they spend far less time examining is themselves: whether their influence, their communication, and their self-awareness have grown to match the responsibility they are asking for.
This is where things get hard for accomplished leaders. Not because what comes next takes more effort, most high achievers already work hard. It is difficult because it means turning attention toward their own development instead of what they cannot control.
For various reasons, leaders don’t always have the opportunity to step into that next role immediately, and the frustration around that is real. But staying in that frustration undermines the very thing a leader is trying to build. I tell clients my goal is not to help them escape a situation. It is to help them build the leadership capacity the next level will require, starting right now, where they are.
Because the current situation is often the best practice ground for the next level of leadership.
In her current role, she still had daily opportunities to build capabilities at a higher level of visibility and stakes: influence without authority, executive communication with people well above her, and the ability to create momentum even when she was not the one setting the pace. Those opportunities did not look like the role she wanted. But they were the preparation for it, wherever it eventually showed up.
Waiting was real, and none of what she was waiting on was hers to control.
That may be one of the biggest shifts leaders have to make on the way to greater responsibility: staying focused on what is actually theirs to control, and continuing to ask what else needs to be learned or practiced in the role they are already in.
Some will hear this message and think it means settling in place or giving up on other options. That is not the message. The message is to direct that energy toward what comes next.
The leaders who navigate this well do not ignore the obstacles. They see the limitations clearly. But they refuse to hand those limitations responsibility for their growth.
Instead, they return to a much harder question:
Who do I need to become to operate at the level I am asking for?
Asked and answered honestly, that question rarely provides immediate comfort. What it provides is somewhere to start: something to build today, in the role now, instead of something to wait for.
