Readiness Is a Lie

Why capable leaders get stuck waiting for promotions that never come

Most people don’t stall because they aren’t capable.

They stall because they’re waiting for a signal that never arrives. Or at least it doesn’t arrive cleanly or clearly.

This shows up most often around promotions, expanded scope, and senior-level visibility, when expectations feel real but never quite stated.

This is about what happens when you’re already doing the work at the next level, but advancement stays just out of reach anyway. When year-end review feedback is unhelpful hand-waving at best or requires a complete rethink of your identity and values at worst. When you don’t get the role you applied to, or worse, never even get the interview.

It feels like the next step is right there, but blocked off with caution tape and guarded by an angry rattlesnake. It’s in sight, but off limits. Not because you’re failing. Because the standard you’re trying to meet keeps quietly shape-shifting.

When progress starts to feel unstable at the next level

By the time this tension shows up, you’re not new anymore. You’re doing the work. The scope is bigger. The decisions carry more weight. People come to you because they trust your judgment and your ability to keep things from going sideways.

From the outside, it probably looks like momentum.

And yet, when the conversation turns to what’s next, the answer is still “not yet.”

Sometimes the feedback sounds official but says almost nothing.
“Be more strategic.”
“Executive presence.”
“We just need to see a little more.”

Other times there’s no feedback at all, just a polite delay or a decision made somewhere in a meeting you weren’t invited to join.

That’s usually when things start to wobble internally.

You replay conversations. You reexamine how you show up. You wonder whether you missed something obvious, or whether the rules were quietly revised while you were busy doing the actual work.

What should feel like progress starts to feel like standing on one of those airport moving walkways that abruptly shuts off without warning.

The story we’ve been sold about readiness at work

Most of us were taught that readiness is something you eventually achieve.

Get good enough.
Get confident enough.
Get polished enough.
Get noticed.
Then you move.

The more damaging version of the story is sneakier. It’s the belief that there is a clear, objective standard of “ready.” That the bar is visible. That it’s applied evenly. And that if you hit it, someone rings a bell and the next door opens.

In real organizations, that’s about as accurate as a job description that says “other duties as assigned.”

Readiness is contextual. It’s subjective. And it’s applied inconsistently, often without anyone admitting that this is what’s happening.

Some people are promoted on potential. Others are required to prove they can already do the job before being allowed into it. Some are coached through gaps. Others are quietly evaluated almost entirely on perceived risk.

The same behavior can read as leadership in one person and as a liability in another, usually without explanation.

When we pretend this is a meritocratic checklist instead of a human system with bias, history, and politics baked in, we turn a structural issue into a personal failing.

Readiness often functions less like a standard and more like a story the organization tells itself about who it trusts.

Why this confusion isn’t a personal failure

The hardest part of this experience is that it refuses to collapse into a single clean explanation.

You can be confident and still have that confidence rattled by being passed over.
You can receive vague feedback and still have real blind spots.
You can be genuinely ready in one area and still have legitimate gaps in another.
You can experience gatekeeping and still need to grow.

All of that can be true at the same time.

This isn’t you being inconsistent. It’s the system being opaque.

And the confusion that follows isn’t a mindset problem or a resilience gap. It’s what happens when expectations are unclear, consequences are real, and no one is particularly motivated to clarify how decisions are actually made.

When doubt fills the silence

When clarity goes missing, doubt happily steps in to do the interpreting.

You start internalizing everything. Feedback becomes evidence. Silence becomes meaning. Normal learning curves start to feel like character indictments.

Impostor syndrome shows up not because you lack confidence, but because you’re trying to reverse-engineer a black box while people keep telling you to “just trust the process.”

In situations like this, self-doubt isn’t irrational. It’s adaptive. It’s your nervous system saying, “I’m missing critical information, and that seems important.”

The questions people wrestle with here aren’t dramatic. They’re painfully practical.

Am I actually not ready, or is this bias?
Is this feedback pointing somewhere real, or is the goalpost on wheels?
Am I being asked to develop, or to cosplay someone else’s leadership style?
Does struggling mean I’m behind, or does it mean I’m learning in real time?

There are no tidy answers to these questions. Anyone who claims otherwise is either selling something or hasn’t been in this position themselves.

The part almost no one says out loud

There’s another reason people get passed over that doesn’t get talked about much, mostly because it makes everyone uncomfortable.

Some people are waiting to be noticed.

They’re hoping there’s some kind of executive draft committee in a boardroom somewhere, with every employee’s stat sheet projected on the wall while senior leaders quietly trade favors to get the talent they want.

So they wait.
They hold their tongues.
They don’t want to look pushy or political.
They don’t want to ask for something they haven’t “earned.”

Not because they’re disengaged.
Not because they lack ambition.
But because they were taught that good work speaks for itself.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the desk, a senior leader is scanning a crowded mental whiteboard thinking, “Who’s ready, who wants this, and who will be a low-drama move?”

And if only one of the strong candidates has ever said, even awkwardly, “I’d like to be considered for the next step,” that person suddenly looks like the safest bet.

Not the best. The safest.

Silence doesn’t read as humility in most organizations. It reads as contentment. Or worse, uncertainty.

That doesn’t make the system fair. It does make it human.

A very familiar dilemma

Consider a strong performer who’s told that advancement requires more visible presentations.

She’s capable. Trusted. Consistent. She also happens to be an introvert who dislikes presenting and has never aspired to be a TED Talk personality.

So what is this requirement actually asking for?

Is it a necessary skill for the role? Possibly. Is it performance theater designed to delay promotion another year? Sometimes. Is it a stand-in for confidence or influence? Often. Is it a rewrite of “you need to be more visible to senior leaders,” filtered through a boss who used presentations to build their own profile? Entirely plausible.

The more useful question isn’t whether the requirement is fair in theory. It’s how to engage it without abandoning who she actually is.

She doesn’t need to become someone else. She may never love presenting. But she can build a version of the skill that is clear, grounded, and authoritative. One that fits her leadership voice instead of replacing it.

That’s development. Not a rebrand. And not a betrayal of her leadership style.

Development that requires self-betrayal isn’t growth. It’s conformity with better marketing.

Where you actually have leverage

You don’t control whether feedback is coherent.
You don’t control whether standards are applied consistently.
You don’t control how invested the organization is in developing you versus quietly sorting you.

But you’re not powerless.

You can press vague feedback toward concrete examples, because specifics turn vibes into something usable. You can distinguish between development and performance theater by asking whether a skill is required to do the work well or simply matches an unspoken template. You can grow in ways that align with who you are, because skill-building does not require becoming a different person. You can be intentional about visibility, understanding that being seen practicing the right things matters. And you can learn to tell the difference between a door that’s heavy and a door that’s locked, even though they feel frustratingly similar at first.

That last one alone can save you years of banging your head against a wall that some joker put a doorknob on.

Moving forward without waiting for a hall pass

You don’t need perfect clarity to move. You don’t need to resolve every gap before you’re allowed to take up space.

What you do need is honesty about what’s worth working on, discernment about what isn’t yours to carry, and enough self-trust to build competence in motion instead of waiting for certainty to magically appear.

Readiness isn’t a gate you pass through once. It’s built through action, feedback, adjustment, and the willingness to move before the picture is fully in focus.

If you wait for absolute clarity before you act, you may wait forever. Not because you’re incapable, but because that clarity is often a myth used to keep things comfortably unchanged.

The better question isn’t whether you’re ready.
It’s what you’re willing to do next, even without a guarantee.

That’s what leadership actually looks like. It’s not pretty, but at least it’s true.