Whether it is an exit, a promotion, or the next role. Three different decisions, one question underneath all of them: what are you actually worth to somebody, and can you say it out loud.
Most people arrive believing this is a CV problem. It is a positioning problem, and the two need completely different work.
A year of somebody's work gets settled in about ninety seconds. Not because anybody is careless. Because by the time the discussion reaches the room, the case has already been made or it has not, and what is being argued is a view, not a number.
That is the part almost nobody outside those rooms believes. Reward and promotion are not decided on output. They are decided on performance, which is a subjective view formed by a line manager and then defended in front of peers. Judgement gets weighed. The consequences of your decisions get weighed. Neither is scored.
Which means the person who can describe their own value in the language the room uses has an advantage that has nothing to do with working harder. And most senior people have never had to build that description, because the organisation was doing it for them.
Head of Technology HR at Credit Suisse, working to a Chief Technology Officer who sat on the Executive Board. Then technology reward at UBS, during the integration. Sixteen years in banking, across a technology population of more than 24,000, and a great deal of it spent in rooms where senior people were being discussed while they sat somewhere else, waiting.
I did not decide who went where. I watched it get decided, which is a narrower thing and a more useful one, because it is where you learn what the description actually has to do.
A course is right when you have time and the question is broad. It is the wrong instrument when there is a specific decision in front of you with a date attached.
A Decision Call
CHF 550
Sixty minutes on one decision. I read what you send before we speak, so the hour is spent on the decision rather than on the background. Written observations follow within 48 hours, which is the part people keep and re-read.
One decision, one call, nothing ongoing.
Monthly Advisory
CHF 550 a month, minimum three months
For a decision that is going to take a while and keeps changing shape. Every month you get a Decision Call, plus two things a single call cannot give you: async check-ins between calls, and Executive Companion access.
Three months minimum. You are reminded seven days before every renewal, and the next call is booked inside the current one.
If you want more than one conversation in a month and are not on Monthly Advisory, that is another Decision Call rather than a favour I quietly absorb. I would rather say that here than be vague about it later.
Pick the one you are actually in. Each is self-paced, each is CHF 395, and each ends with you holding a written position rather than a set of finished exercises.
If you are leaving
CHF 395
For the exit you chose and the one you did not. What the institution is optimising for, what is actually negotiable, where the leverage sits before you have signed anything, and how to describe the leaving without it becoming the whole story.
You leave with your position written down, in language that survives being repeated by somebody else in a room you are not in.
If the promotion has not come
CHF 395
Promotion is decided the same way reward is: a view, formed by one person, argued in front of others. This is what that view is built from, who is carrying it for you, what they need in order to carry it, and what to do about the year where nothing moved.
You leave with the case your manager would have to make, written as they would have to make it.
Opens shortly. Reply and I will tell you the day it does.
If you are choosing the next role
CHF 395
Twenty-four lessons on the decision itself rather than the application. What you are the person for, which of the credible paths is genuinely open to you, what each one costs, and how to compare offers on something other than the number at the top.
You leave with a primary direction, a secondary, and the ones you have rejected on the record so you stop reopening them at midnight.
I am a chartered management accountant, not a tax adviser, and I am not a lawyer. What happens on this page is your arithmetic on your own numbers, and I will not tell you what your number should be. If the answer needs somebody who knows your country's rules, get one.
Everything else, what the institution wants, what is negotiable, what your position actually is and how to say it, I have watched from the inside for sixteen years.
Reply and tell me which of the three you are in. Two lines is plenty. I answer these myself and I will tell you if the answer is none of them, which it sometimes is.
lisa@nextpositionadvisory.com, with Next Move in the subject line.
I write a weekly newsletter now, mostly about people leaving corporate to build something of their own. It is a different subject from this page and you are welcome to it. Notes on Corporate to Solo.