Latest / Executive Careers with Fexingo: VP, C-Suite, and Senior Leadership Career Strategy / How Senior Leaders Use the Career S-Curve to Time Their Next Move
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've ever felt like you're still delivering solid results but the professional thrill is gone — your calendar is full, your comp is fine, yet something in your gut says you should be doing something else — you might be past the peak of your career S-curve. Luna: Career S-curve. That's a term I usually hear in product adoption or technology cycles. How does it apply to a senior leader's trajectory? Lucas: The same logic. The S-curve describes the pattern of learning and impact over time in any given role. You start at the bottom — steep learning, low output. Then you hit the middle section where everything clicks: your relationships are strong, you're delivering big results, you have influence. That's the sweet spot. Lucas: But eventually you reach the upper plateau. You're still competent, but you're no longer growing. Your network is saturated, your projects are variations of things you've already done, and the challenge is gone. That's where leaders get stuck for two or three years longer than they should. Luna: So the framework is essentially: identify where you are on the curve and time your next move before you hit the flat tail. What's the telltale sign that you've passed the peak? Lucas: I think the clearest signal is when your learning velocity drops below your output velocity. Early on, you're learning constantly — new stakeholders, new industry dynamics, new internal politics. You're absorbing. At the peak, you're mostly applying what you already know. The ratio flips. Lucas: A second signal is when your calendar stops surprising you. Every meeting is predictable. You know what everyone's going to say, what the objections will be, what the outcome is. That comfort is dangerous for a senior leader because it means you're no longer building new mental models. Luna: But isn't there value in riding the plateau for a while? I mean, you're still delivering. The company benefits from your steady hand. Why leave early? Lucas: Fair question. The counterargument is that the market values your curve's trajectory, not just your current output. When you interview for your next role — whether internal or external — the people making the decision want to see upward momentum. They don't want a leader who's been treading water for three years, even if the water is calm. Lucas: I've seen this play out with a VP of Product at a mid-stage SaaS company. Let's call her Sarah. She joined when the product had fifty employees and led it through hypergrowth to two hundred. By year three, she could run the product review in her sleep. Her team loved her. But when she started looking for a CPO role, recruiters kept asking, 'What have you done in the last eighteen months that's different from the first eighteen?' She didn't have a great answer. Luna: Ouch. So the very competence that made her valuable internally made her less externally marketable because she'd stopped accumulating new peaks. Lucas: Exactly. The S-curve of her role had flattened. She was delivering value, but the growth-rate of her value had plateaued. And in the senior leadership market, trajectory matters more than absolute level. A VP who grew revenue from $50 million to $200 million over four years is often seen as less interesting than a VP who grew revenue from $20 million to $80 million in two years and then moved to a new challenge. Luna: So the framework suggests you should aim to leave the role roughly at the inflection point between the peak and the plateau. How do you identify that inflection point in real time? Lucas: I'd recommend a quarterly personal audit. Ask yourself three questions. First: Am I learning something new about the business, the industry, or myself at least every two weeks? Second: Am I still being asked to solve problems that stretch me, or am I mostly executing known playbooks? Third: If I were to describe my role to a peer at another company, would the story have a new chapter since last quarter? Lucas: If you get an honest 'no' on any of those for two consecutive quarters, you're likely past the apex of your S-curve. And you should start actively exploring your next move — internally or externally — within the next six months. Luna: That's a very disciplined timeline. Most senior leaders I've seen don't act that fast. They rationalize the plateau as 'steady state' or 'strategic patience.' Lucas: Yes, and that's precisely the trap. Strategic patience is real, but it's often a mask for inertia. One way to test whether it's genuine patience or just comfort is to ask yourself: If your role were eliminated today, would your next move be obvious? If you can't answer that within a week, you've probably waited too long. Luna: That's a brutal but good litmus test. Let's talk about how the S-curve applies differently to operators versus portfolio executives. An operator in a single company might have a longer curve — say three to five years — whereas a portfolio executive rotating through divisions might have shorter curves. Lucas: Exactly. For operators, the curve tends to be slower because the scope of the role expands organically. You start managing a team, then a department, then a function. Each expansion resets the curve slightly. But for portfolio executives — someone who moves between subsidiaries or special projects — the curve is compressed. They often peak in twelve to eighteen months because they're brought in for a specific transformation, and once that's done, the growth drops sharply. Lucas: The key is to recognize which type you are and calibrate accordingly. If you're an operator who keeps getting promoted internally, your S-curve might look like a series of overlapping smaller curves — each new role resetting the learning phase before you fully plateau. That's actually a healthy pattern. Luna: Right. So it's not just one curve for your entire career, but a series of them. And the skill is in managing the overlap — leaving the old curve while the new one is still ascending. Lucas: That's the ideal. In practice, most people leave too late. They wait until they're bored, frustrated, or their comp has flatlined. But by then, the external perception has already shifted. You're seen as a leader who's been in the same seat too long, not someone who's proactively managing their trajectory. Luna: I want to push back a little. Doesn't this framework assume that growth is linear and visible? What about roles where the impact takes years to compound — like building a culture or developing talent? Those aren't always visible on a quarterly audit. Lucas: That's a fair nuance. I'd argue that culture-building and talent development do follow an S-curve, but the curve is longer and the plateau is less obvious. For a CHRO or a head of talent, the early phase is about diagnosing and designing. The middle phase is about implementing and seeing early signals. The plateau comes when the organization's culture is stable and the team is self-sustaining. At that point, the leader's marginal contribution diminishes. Lucas: But you're right — it's harder to measure. That's why the audit questions should focus on learning, not just output. Are you still learning how the organization works? Are you being asked to solve new types of people problems? If those answers are 'yes,' you're probably still on the upward slope. Luna: Let's bring it back to concrete action. Suppose a listener is a VP of Sales in a B2B company, three years in, feeling that plateau. What's the next step after the audit says 'leave'? Lucas: First, don't resign impulsively. Use the next six months to set up your next S-curve while still delivering on your current one. Start by expanding your network outside your current industry vertical — that's the fastest way to reset the learning curve. Second, seek a project that is visibly different from your day-to-day, like a cross-functional initiative or a new market entry. That creates evidence of a new curve before you leave. Lucas: Third, and this is counterintuitive: consider a lateral move within your company that gives you a new curve, rather than a promotion. A bigger title on a plateaued curve is still a plateau. A smaller title on an ascending curve is more valuable. Luna: That's a subtle but important point. The title is the market's shorthand, but the curve is the substance. I've seen leaders take a 'step down' in title to run a new business line and then leapfrog their peers two years later. Lucas: Exactly. And speaking of substance — this is exactly the kind of career thinking that we try to bring to every episode. We deliberately don't run ads on these shows. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It helps us keep the episodes focused on frameworks like this one, without interruption. Luna: Yeah, that's a big part of why we can go deep on something like the S-curve instead of rushing to a break. It matters. Lucas: Alright — back to the framework. One more nuance I want to mention: the S-curve applies not just to your role, but to your entire career arc. Every five to seven years, the industry context shifts enough that the old curve's peak becomes the new baseline. If you're not building a new curve proactively, you're effectively declining. Luna: So in a way, the career S-curve is a tool for forced reinvention. It's a structured way to avoid complacency. Lucas: Yes. And the best senior leaders I know run this analysis on themselves every six months, not every five years. They treat their career like a portfolio of curves, and they're always looking for the next one to start before the current one peaks. Luna: That's a great closing thought. Thanks, Lucas. And to our listeners — try the quarterly audit this weekend. You might be surprised where you land. Lucas: We'll see you next episode.