I came across a podcast conversation recently that I haven't stopped thinking about. On Don't Let The Smile Fool You, Elsie Akinsanya was asked a question worth sitting with: what do you wish you'd known at 40?
Elsie spent almost twelve years at Citi, reaching Managing Director in HR leadership. She has sat in the rooms where senior careers are actually decided, not the rooms where performance reviews get written, but the rooms where the real conversation happens afterwards, about who gets sponsored, who gets remembered, who gets the next call. So when she talks about what she wishes she'd known, it isn't theory. She'd lived the version most people are still walking towards without realising it.
The part that stayed with me: she had signed the contract for a new role. Done the medical. Three weeks from starting. And she walked away. Not because the offer was wrong, but because somewhere in that process, she saw clearly what she'd actually built over more than a decade, and what she hadn't. Decades of experience. An impressive title. A genuinely successful career. And still, gaps in what she'd need for whatever came next.
That's the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath this whole conversation: you can do everything right, by every measure your industry hands you, and still not have built what you actually need. And there's a line from that conversation I keep returning to. Performance is the baseline. It is not enough.
I see this exact pattern in my own coaching practice. I worked with Emmanuel, a Senior AV Engineer at Vodafone UK Head Office, who came to me after being passed over for promotion three times. He had done everything he believed the role required: long hours, constant availability, taking on every request from peers without hesitation, and he was, frankly, burning out under the weight of it.
What we uncovered together was not a competence problem. Emmanuel was excellent at his job. The problem was that confidence and hard work, on their own, are necessary but not sufficient for progression. He had assumed, as most capable people do, that if he simply did well, he would be noticed. He would not have been, not on that path. Performance was never going to be the question for him either. The open question was whether he could make his judgement visible, deliberately, before the room's perception of him settled on its own without his input.
Two very different careers, two very different rooms, and the same lesson sitting underneath both of them.
Why Jeffrey Pfeffer's research explains what's actually happening
Jeffrey Pfeffer has spent his career researching how power and influence genuinely operate inside organisations, not how they're supposed to operate on paper. His work maps closely onto both of these stories, and it gives us something more useful than a lesson: it gives us a set of principles you can actually build from. Here's how I think about his seven rules of power, and how they show up in the coaching room.
Get out of your own way. Most capable people are held back less by external barriers than by a quiet, internal story about what they're allowed to claim credit for, or ask for, or expect. Emmanuel had years of genuine expertise and had still convinced himself that visible effort was the thing that would eventually be noticed. That's not a competence gap. It's a self-permission gap, and it's usually the first thing worth coaching through.
Be willing to break the conventional path. The cautious, wait-your-turn approach to career progression rewards patience over impact. Elsie's own story is a version of this: she was willing to walk away from a signed contract because the conventional next step wasn't actually the right one. Breaking from what's expected, when what's expected isn't serving you, is a form of power in itself.
Show up with visible confidence. Authority is read by a room before a single word of expertise is spoken. This is the part people mistake for the whole solution, when it's actually just the entry ticket. Presence gets you heard. It doesn't, on its own, get you sponsored.
Build your personal brand deliberately. What people say about you when you're not in the room is the actual currency, and it's rarely accidental for the people who rise fastest. Most capable professionals leave this entirely to chance, assuming good work will speak for itself. It speaks. It just doesn't speak loudly enough on its own.
Network relentlessly, and with intention. Not networking as a transactional exercise, but genuinely building relationships across every level, peers, supervisors, senior leadership, rather than only managing upward. This is precisely where Elsie's insight about sponsorship lands hardest: sponsorship isn't handed to the best performer. It's handed to the person whose name a sponsor is comfortable putting forward, which requires a relationship that already exists before it's needed.
Use the power you already have. Hard-won expertise, sitting unused out of caution, helps no one, least of all you. Most under-recognised professionals aren't short of credibility. They're simply not deploying what they've already earned.
Understand that perception, not just reality, determines opportunity. This is the principle that unsettles people most, and it's the one Elsie's story makes unavoidable. Being genuinely excellent at your job and being seen as ready for the next one are different projects. The second one has to be built on purpose. It doesn't follow automatically from the first, however unfair that feels.
The distinction that changes how this gets built
There's one further distinction I bring into every coaching engagement built on these principles: the difference between effort signals and judgement signals. Effort signals are the things that feel like progress while you're doing them, staying visible, being available, working hard to prove the technical case. Judgement signals are different. They're the moments where someone trusts your read on something genuinely uncertain, where you're the person others come to before a decision, not after one's already been made. Most capable people are rich in the first and quietly short of the second, and it's the second that Pfeffer's research, and Elsie's own account of those rooms, both point to as the real currency.
Who this is for
If you're a career-minded professional aiming for the next level, the work is precise: identify the points of influence that actually decide your next move, usually peers, direct leadership, and senior stakeholders, and build deliberate, visible judgement at each of them before the room's perception of you sets without your input.
If you're an entrepreneur or founder trying to move your business into a stronger position, the same principle holds in a different shape. A business doesn't get chosen, trusted, or recommended on the strength of quiet competence either. It's chosen because the person behind it has built visible authority in the spaces that matter, with clients, with partners, with the people whose word carries weight in rooms the founder isn't in.
Performance got you here. It was never going to be the plan for what comes next. That part has to be built, deliberately, while you still have the title, the income, or the momentum to build it properly, rather than under pressure once you need it most.
If any part of this sounds like where you are right now, whether you're stepping into a bigger role or building a business into its next stage, that's exactly the conversation I'd want to have with you.