Corporate Leadership: Moving from Director to VP

A client of mine, a director at a global tech company, told me recently about the moment she understood why her VP promotion kept not happening. Her team had prepared a partnership proposal, and she rewrote it herself the night before the executive review because it was faster than explaining what she wanted. The proposal landed well. Her leadership praised the output. And her name still didn't come up when the VP seat opened three months later, because everyone in that room had her filed in the same category: the person who produces excellent work. Not the person who should be deciding what work happens.

That distinction decides this promotion, and most directors find out about it too late, usually after being passed over once or twice with feedback vague enough to be useless. 

"Keep doing what you're doing." 

"It's a timing thing." 

"You're so valuable where you are." 

Vague feedback like this almost always hides something specific, and after coaching many leaders through this move, the hidden part is usually one of a handful of things: 

1. Understand what the promotion decision actually looks like

Here's the mechanical reality. VP promotions are not decided in your performance review. They're decided in calibration and succession conversations you will never attend, where a group of senior leaders discusses a shortlist, and someone either argues for you with conviction or nobody does. Your metrics get you onto the shortlist. A sponsor gets you chosen from it.

The research on this is blunt. Studies from the Center for Talent Innovation found that sponsorship, far more than mentorship, correlates with real advancement, and that sponsored employees earn up to 11.6% more than their unsponsored peers. A 2026 study published in the Academy of Management Journal, based on interviews with senior leaders at a global consulting firm, found that sponsorship shapes who reaches senior leadership largely because sponsors pass on the informal promotion rules, the ones that never appear in any competency framework. The same research found that fewer than 25% of sponsor-protégé relationships involve the active advocacy that actually moves careers.

Most people who think they have a sponsor have a mentor who likes them.

With coaching clients I treat sponsorship as a project with concrete steps, because leaving it to organic relationship-building is how you end up over-mentored and under-sponsored. Identify the two or three people whose voice carries weight when your promotion gets discussed. Work out the intersection between what they're on the hook for and what you can genuinely deliver. Then create repeated, firsthand exposure to your judgment, not your effort.

A sponsor doesn't advocate for you because you work hard. They advocate for you because they've personally watched you make a good call under ambiguity, more than once, and they'd stake a piece of their reputation on you doing it again.

2. Start doing the VP job selectively, before anyone gives it to you

The most reliable pattern I've seen across promotion cases: the people who get the VP title were already visibly operating at that level in specific, chosen moments, well before the promotion. Not by working more hours, and not by doing their director job harder. By borrowing behaviors from the level above.

One client of mine, a commercial director at a logistics company, had spent years being the fiercest advocate for his team's budget and headcount. He was proud of it, his team loved him for it, and it was quietly capping him, because the executive team read that advocacy as functional thinking. The single change that shifted his candidacy: in a quarterly planning meeting, he argued for moving budget away from his own function toward another team, because the enterprise logic genuinely called for it, and he made the case better than the receiving team did. The CFO messaged him afterwards. He told me later that one meeting did more for his promotion case than two years of hitting his numbers, and I believe him, because it was the first time the room saw him think like an owner of the whole business rather than a defender of his corner of it.

If you want a practical version of this: find the next moment where your function's interest and the company's interest genuinely diverge, and take the company's side, out loud, with reasoning. It costs you something short-term. That cost is precisely why it signals so strongly.

3. Fix the dependency problem before it becomes the argument against you

There's a specific objection that kills director promotions in those closed-door conversations, and it's usually phrased as a compliment: "We can't move her, the function would fall apart." If your organization slows down when you take two weeks off, that fact will be used against your promotion, not for it, because it tells the decision-makers that promoting you creates two problems: an unfilled VP need and a suddenly rudderless team.

A finance director I coached ran into exactly this. She could spot errors in her team's models in thirty seconds, so she checked everything, and her function was famously reliable because of it. The math she was running: fixing it herself takes an hour, coaching them to fix it takes a week. What that math ignored was that every time she caught the error first, her team's growth stayed at zero, and her own promotability stayed capped, because she was structurally irreplaceable in the wrong way. The work we did was uncomfortable and slow: she stopped pre-checking, let some imperfect work reach her boss with her team's name on it, and spent the recovered hours on the forward-looking analysis her CFO actually wanted from a future VP. Within two quarters, her review mentioned strategic contribution for the first time in four years. Nothing about her talent changed. What changed was what she let people see her spend herself on.

You have to become replaceable in your current job to be considered for the next one. Directors instinctively build indispensability, because it feels like job security. At promotion time it reads as a flight risk to the function and a gap in your leadership development, both at once.

4. Make your judgment visible, because that's what they're actually assessing

When senior leaders assess VP readiness, they are rarely assessing output. They already know your output is good, that's why you're a director. What they're trying to predict is your judgment: what you'll do with ambiguity, which trade-offs you'll make, whether you'll stay steady when something breaks publicly. The tricky thing is that judgment is invisible unless you deliberately expose it.

DDI's Leadership Transitions Report, drawing on more than 15,000 leaders, found that 35% of internally promoted executives are considered failures by their own HR functions. Decision-makers know this number in their bones, even if they've never seen the study, because they've all watched a great director become a struggling VP. So they look for evidence of the specific capacities that transition demands, and they discount functional excellence heavily, because functional excellence is exactly what the failed promotions also had.

A product director I coached in Asia was preparing for a VP case and kept asking me for frameworks in our early sessions. What she actually needed was rehearsal: a place to work through live, messy decisions out loud, with the ambiguity left in, before taking a position in front of her executive team. The transformation wasn't dramatic. It happened gradually. She stopped treating every decision like something that needed approval. Instead of presenting options, she started presenting recommendations. She became comfortable taking a position, even when there wasn't complete certainty. At the end of the year, her CEO summed it up perfectly: "She shows up like the answer is her job now." That's when people start seeing you as VP material.

5. Have the direct conversation, earlier than feels polite

Finally, the simplest step and the one most directors avoid the longest: tell your leadership, explicitly, that you're working toward VP, and ask what specific evidence they'd need to see to champion you. Not "what should I improve," which invites the vague feedback loop, but "what would need to be true for you to argue for me in that room."

The question does two things. It converts your boss from an evaluator into a potential sponsor, because now your promotion is partly their project. And it forces specificity, which flushes out the real objection early enough for you to do something about it. If the answer is "we'd need to see the team stand on its own," you know your dependency problem is the case against you. If it's "the exec team needs more exposure to you," you know it's visibility. Every one of those objections is workable, but only if you hear it eighteen months before the decision instead of in the consolation meeting after it.

Many Directors believe the next promotion will come if they just keep delivering. Sometimes it does. More often, though, the expectations have already changed. You're no longer being evaluated only on what you deliver, but on how you think, how you influence, and how you lead across the business. Once you internalize that, the path to VP becomes much clearer.

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Merve Kagitci Hokamp is the founder of Leadrise Coaching & Consulting, a global executive coaching firm working with leaders, teams, and organizations. She has coached leaders across 37 nationalities, holds an MBA from INSEAD, and spent 11 years in senior roles at Google before founding Leadrise.

If you are building your case for the VP move and want a thinking partner who has seen what works, let's connect for a conversation.