They Said She Needed More Experience. That Wasn’t the Problem.
The feedback sounded reasonable, but it didn’t explain what was actually missing.
She had been at the company for six years. Led a product launch that brought in $4M in new revenue. Managed a cross-functional team through a reorg without losing a single person.
And when she asked about moving into the VP conversation, the answer came back: “You need more experience.”
She didn’t push back. She didn’t ask what that meant. She did what most high performers do, she took on another initiative. Volunteered for another committee. Started showing up earlier and staying later, trying to close a gap no one had actually defined.
Six months of that, and nothing changed. Not the feedback. Not the trajectory. The only thing that changed was how she felt about the work. The launches she used to get energy from started feeling like obligations. The extra hours stopped feeling like investment and started feeling like proof that none of it mattered.
I’ve seen this play out dozens of times now, and here’s what I know to be true.
What “More Experience” Actually Means
“More experience” is rarely a diagnosis. It’s a placeholder. It’s what people say when something feels unclear to them about your readiness, but they can’t, or won’t name what it is.
I’ve sat in rooms where promotion decisions get made, and I can tell you that sometimes “more experience” means they don’t see you operating at the next level yet. Sometimes it means they see someone else more clearly. And sometimes, more often than you’d think, it means they simply don’t have enough information about you to make the case.
Because the issue isn’t usually your track record. It’s how your track record is being interpreted in the rooms where decisions get made. And those are rooms you’re probably not in.
The Question That Changed Everything
When she and I first sat down, I asked her something that stopped her mid-sentence:
“Who in leadership can describe the scope of what you’re actually doing right now?”
Long pause.
“My direct manager, probably.”
“Probably?”
That was the moment. She had been working harder to close a gap that had nothing to do with effort. The people making decisions about her future didn’t have a clear picture of the scope she was already operating at. Her results were strong, but the story around those results wasn’t reaching the right people in the right way.
It was a visibility problem, not a performance one.
Why This Happens to High Performers Specifically
Here’s the cruel irony: the better you are at your job, the more invisible you become.
When you’re good at what you do, people trust you to handle things. They stop checking in as often. They stop asking for updates because they know you’ll deliver. And over time, the very competence that should be building your case for promotion is actually making you disappear to the people who matter.
Your manager knows what you’re doing. Your team knows. But the VP two levels up? The cross-functional leader who has a voice in calibration? They might know your name, but they don’t know your scope. They don’t know you led that reorg transition. They don’t know the $4M launch was your strategy, not just your execution.
And in a promotion conversation, what they don’t know about you is treated the same as what doesn’t exist.
What Changed for Her
Once we identified the real gap, the work shifted completely. We stopped focusing on accumulating more accomplishments and started focusing on making her existing accomplishments legible to the right people.
The “more experience” feedback disappeared. Not because time passed. Not because she accumulated more wins. Because the people evaluating her finally understood what she’d been doing all along.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If you’ve been hearing feedback that sounds reasonable but never seems to move you forward, this is worth paying attention to. The gap might not be in your experience. It might be in how your experience is being read.
Here’s the question. Who beyond your direct manager could articulate the scope and impact of what you’re doing right now? If the answer is “I’m not sure,” that’s your signal.
The work isn’t to do more. The work is to make what you’re already doing visible to the people who have a say in what happens next.
Want to go deeper? The Career Readiness Series is a free 5-day email series where you’ll diagnose how your experience is actually landing — and reposition one thing in 15 minutes.
Not ready for that yet? Subscribe to the free edition, and I’ll send you the next one.
Onward, Laurie