The succession process most directors ignore has nothing to do with performance — and everything to do with how executives actually make promotion decisions.
A director at a Fortune 500 tech company hit every target for three consecutive years. Promoted her team members, expanded her function's revenue contribution by 40%, and earned top marks on every leadership review. When the VP role above her opened up, she didn't even make the shortlist.
The role went to a peer whose numbers were objectively weaker but who had spent two years positioning himself differently inside the organization. He'd been showing up in board prep meetings. He'd built a visible successor. He'd cultivated sponsors among the C-suite who were willing to spend political capital on his behalf.
She was devastated. He was strategic.
This pattern repeats across industries with such regularity that calling it unfair misses the point. The Director-to-VP transition operates on a completely different evaluation system than the one that got you to Director in the first place. Performance is your entry ticket. It is not the thing that gets you through the door.
The Promotion Decision Lens Nobody Shares With You
When senior executives sit in a room debating VP candidates, they are not reviewing performance dashboards. They're asking a set of questions that most directors have never considered, let alone prepared for.
Can this person operate beyond their function? Can the business run without them? Is there a successor ready to step in? Do we trust them to think in enterprise-level trade-offs? Are they visible in the right forums? Could they represent us externally?
Read that list again. Not one of those questions is about hitting quarterly targets. Every single one is about readiness for a fundamentally different kind of role.
The gap between Director and VP isn't a performance gap. It's an identity gap. Directors execute brilliantly within a defined scope. VPs shape organizational direction across scopes. Most directors trying to get promoted are perfecting the wrong game.
The first shift is the most disorienting. You've spent years becoming the best person in your function. Your depth of expertise is what earned every promotion up to this point. Now that expertise is actually working against you.
At the VP level, nobody cares that you know more about supply chain optimization or product analytics than anyone in the building. They care whether you can connect your function's work to revenue impact, market positioning, risk mitigation, and the company's strategic bets. The language changes entirely. Instead of presenting what your team accomplished, you need to articulate how your function's decisions affect the enterprise's trajectory.
A head of engineering I worked with made this shift by doing something uncomfortable: she started attending finance and commercial team meetings as a listener. Not to contribute engineering expertise, but to learn how those teams thought about the business. Within six months, she was framing engineering investments in terms of customer retention economics and competitive moat. Her peers in the C-suite started treating her like a strategist rather than a specialist.
That reframing didn't happen by accident. She stopped leading with what she knew and started leading with what the business needed.
The Indispensability Trap
Here's an uncomfortable truth that goes against everything you've been rewarded for: if the business can't function without you in your current role, you will not be promoted out of it.
Most directors have built their reputation on being the go-to person. The one who fixes the hard problems. The one whose judgment everyone relies on for the daily decisions that keep things running. That reputation feels like strength. From the perspective of the executives making promotion decisions, it's a liability.
Promoting you creates a vacuum. If no one can fill it, promoting you is an unacceptable risk.
This means the counterintuitive work of getting promoted involves making yourself less operationally central. Delegate more aggressively than feels comfortable. Elevate your direct reports into decision-making roles they're not quite ready for, and coach them through it. Build systems that run without your daily involvement. The goal isn't to become irrelevant. It's to shift from being the person who runs the operation to the person who architects how the operation runs.
Build Your Successor Before Anyone Asks You To
This one catches directors off guard because it feels premature. Why would you build a successor for a role you haven't been promoted out of yet?
Because succession readiness is one of the strongest signals executives evaluate. When a director has someone clearly developing beneath them who could step into the role within six to twelve months, it removes the biggest objection to promoting that director. The risk disappears.
Start by identifying two or three people on your team with VP-track potential. Give them increasing decision-making authority, not just bigger projects, but actual authority to make calls that used to require your sign-off. Let them present to senior leadership. Let them own relationships with cross-functional partners. When they stumble, resist the urge to step in and fix it. Coach from behind instead.
One VP I know says she got promoted specifically because her CEO told her: "We knew we could move you up because your team didn't flinch when we floated the idea of you changing roles." That's not luck. That's years of deliberate development work.
Sponsors Are Not the Same as Supporters
Most directors have supporters. People who think well of them, who would say positive things if asked. Supporters are nice to have. They are not what gets you promoted.
Sponsors operate differently. A sponsor is a senior leader who spends political capital on your behalf when you're not in the room. They advocate for you in promotion discussions. They tie their own reputation to your success. They don't just endorse you; they campaign for you.
You cannot ask someone to be your sponsor. Sponsorship is earned by demonstrating enterprise value in ways that make senior leaders look good by association. When you deliver work that advances a C-suite executive's strategic priority, you're not just doing your job. You're building the kind of trust that converts a supporter into a sponsor.
The practical difference matters enormously. In a promotion discussion, a supporter says, "She's great, I'd support that." A sponsor says, "I'm putting her name forward, and here's why this is the right move for the company." One of those statements carries weight. The other is background noise.
Visibility at the Right Altitude
Being visible isn't the same as being visible in the right places. Plenty of directors are well-known within their function. They present at all-hands meetings, they run the biggest projects, they're the face of their department. None of that registers on the VP promotion radar.
The arenas that matter are the ones where enterprise strategy gets shaped. Board preparation sessions. Investment committee reviews. M&A due diligence. Cross-functional initiatives that report directly to the CEO or COO. These are the rooms where executives observe whether someone can operate at the altitude the VP role requires.
Getting into these rooms takes intentional positioning. Volunteer for enterprise-wide initiatives, even if they're outside your core expertise. Offer to prepare board materials or competitive analyses. When you're in those rooms, contribute at the strategic level, not with functional details, but with perspectives that connect dots across the business.
Something shifts in how people perceive you when they see you operate outside your home territory. You stop being "the best director in marketing" and start being "someone who thinks like an enterprise leader." That perceptual shift is what you're after.
External Credibility as a Trust Signal
The final piece is one that many internally-focused directors overlook entirely. Can this person represent our company to the outside world?
VPs frequently serve as the company's face in industry forums, customer negotiations, partner discussions, and media interactions. If executives can't imagine you in that role, it creates hesitation, even if everything else lines up.
Building external credibility doesn't require becoming a thought leader with a massive LinkedIn following. It means demonstrating that you can represent the organization's interests credibly beyond its walls. Speak at an industry conference. Publish a perspective piece in a trade publication. Lead a partnership negotiation. Participate in an industry working group. Each of these signals that you operate with the kind of judgment and gravitas that the VP role demands.
It also de-risks the promotion decision from the executives' perspective. They're not just promoting someone to lead internally; they're choosing someone to carry the company's brand in external settings where the stakes are real and the margin for error is thin.
The Real Work Starts With a Different Question
If you're a director eyeing a VP role, stop asking "What do I need to accomplish?" and start asking "What do executives need to believe about me before they'll make this decision?"
Those are two very different questions, and they lead to very different daily choices. The first keeps you optimizing within your current scope. The second forces you to think about succession, sponsorship, visibility, enterprise thinking, and external presence as an integrated strategy rather than a list of nice-to-haves.
Pick the one area from this framework where you have the biggest gap. For most directors, it's either the succession piece (they haven't built anyone ready to replace them) or the sponsorship piece (they have supporters but no one willing to spend political capital). Whichever it is, make it your primary focus for the next quarter. Not in addition to your current work. As a fundamental shift in how you allocate your energy and attention.
The directors who make VP don't just perform better. They position differently. And that positioning work starts long before the role ever opens up.
If you recognized yourself in this article, two pieces worth reading next: executive presence — because the signals that earn promotions are often invisible — and managing up strategically, because your relationship with leadership is half the equation.
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