Latest / Executive Careers with Fexingo: VP, C-Suite, and Senior Leadership Career Strategy / How Senior Leaders Recover from a Stalled Career
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a moment in a senior leadership career that almost nobody talks about publicly, but everyone who's been in a C-suite long enough recognises instantly. It's the third quarter of your third year in a role you were sure would be a stepping stone, and you realise the phone has stopped ringing. Headhunters aren't reaching out. Board opportunities you were 'under consideration' for have gone silent. And inside your own company, the CEO keeps giving the big transformation project to someone else. Luna: Right, the stall. Not a firing, not a scandal — just the slow, quiet feeling that your career has stopped moving forward while everyone else seems to keep climbing. Lucas: Exactly. And what's dangerous is that senior leaders are especially bad at diagnosing a stall in themselves, because they've been successful for so long that their default explanation is 'the market is tough' or 'the timing isn't right.' But there's a structured way to recover from this that I've seen work in real cases. Luna: Before we go deep on this — and I know this is a big topic — I want to mention something quickly. Lucas and I do these episodes every day because we genuinely believe senior leaders need practical, no-fluff career strategy. And the reason we can keep this show ad-free is that a small group of listeners chips in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, it's a pretty straightforward model. A handful of people who find value in what we do here decide to support it, and that's literally what keeps the lights on for a 300-show network. So if you've ever gotten a useful idea from one of these episodes, that's the place. But let's get back to the stall. Luna: Right. So you mentioned a structured recovery. What does that actually look like in practice? Lucas: The best framework I've come across is from Anna Richter — she's an ex-McKinsey partner who now coaches C-suite executives, and she calls it the 'career torque' method. It's built around three moves that you execute in sequence over about 90 to 120 days. The first one is a visibility audit. Luna: A visibility audit. I like that. Most senior leaders assume everyone above them already knows what they do, but that's often not true. Lucas: That's exactly the problem. Richter asks her clients to map out every decision-maker who influences promotions, board seats, or stretch assignments in their ecosystem — then honestly assess whether that person has seen the executive's best work in the last six months. In her experience, for about 70 percent of stalled leaders, the answer is no. Their reputation is built on past wins from two or three roles ago. Luna: So the work is happening, but it's invisible to the people who matter. That's a hard pill to swallow for someone who's used to being the star. Lucas: It is. But the audit gives you a concrete list of gaps. The second move is what Richter calls 'skill re-anchoring.' You identify one capability that is both highly valued in the role you want and genuinely underleveraged in your current position — then you rebuild your narrative around it. Not a full reinvention, just a repositioning. Luna: Can you give a real example? I think that would help. Lucas: Sure. There's a case Richter discussed at a conference last year — a chief marketing officer at a Fortune 500 consumer goods company. She'd been passed over for the C-suite twice. Her peers saw her as a brilliant brand builder, but the CEO wanted someone who could drive operational efficiency across the supply chain. That wasn't her strength, but during the audit she realised her team had run a direct to consumer pivot that cut logistics costs by 18 percent. She'd never framed it as an operational win. Luna: So she re-anchored her narrative from 'brand marketer' to 'growth leader with operational impact.' That's a totally different conversation with a CEO. Lucas: Exactly. And the third move is the '90-day sprint portfolio.' Richter tells clients to pick two or three small, high-visibility projects that can be completed within a quarter and that directly demonstrate the re-anchored skill. Big enough to matter, small enough to finish fast. The CMO in that case volunteered to lead a pilot consolidating three regional distribution centres into one — a six-month project that she framed as a test of her operational leadership. Luna: And did it work for her? Lucas: It did, but not at her current company. She used the sprint portfolio to generate concrete results she could talk about externally. Eleven months after starting the torque method, she landed a president role at a mid-cap competitor. The CEO who hired her said the deciding factor was her ability to 'translate marketing insight into operational process' — exactly the re-anchored narrative. Luna: So the recovery didn't come from waiting for her current employer to recognise her. It came from repositioning herself for a different audience. Lucas: That's a crucial point. One of the psychological traps Richter identifies is what she calls 'earned entitlement' — the belief that because you've delivered results in the past, the next opportunity is owed to you. The most dangerous word in a stalled career, she says, is 'deserve.' Because it keeps you passive. Luna: Ouch. That one stings a little. But it's also liberating — if you stop waiting to be recognised and start actively repositioning, you regain control. Lucas: Right. And the torque method isn't about faking a new identity. It's about surfacing something that was already there but undervalued, then creating the evidence trail that makes it undeniable. The visibility audit tells you where you're invisible. The skill re-anchoring tells you what story to tell. The sprint portfolio gives you the proof. Luna: How long does the whole process typically take? You mentioned 90 to 120 days, but for a senior leader, that feels fast. Lucas: Richter says the first two steps — audit and re-anchoring — can be done in about two weeks if you're disciplined. The sprint portfolio takes the full quarter because you need real outcomes. But she's seen leaders generate a new offer, an internal promotion, or a board seat within four to six months. The key is not to half-step. If you do the visibility audit but skip the re-anchoring, you end up just networking harder with the same old story. Luna: And that rarely works. I've seen people double down on coffee meetings and LinkedIn posts, but if the underlying narrative hasn't changed, it just feels desperate. Lucas: Exactly. So the question I'd leave listeners with is: when was the last time you did a real visibility audit on yourself? Not a casual reflection, but an actual list of the ten people who control your next move, with an honest grade on whether they've seen your best current work. If the answer is no for more than half of them, the torque method might be worth a serious look. Luna: And maybe the hardest part is admitting you're stalled in the first place. Because the ego doesn't want to see it. Lucas: It doesn't. But the best senior leaders I've known have a surprisingly high tolerance for uncomfortable self-diagnosis. They catch the stall early, before it becomes a crisis. And that's what separates the ones who keep moving from the ones who just stay in place.