My Work Is Good. But Why Am I Still Not Being Promoted?

Making sense of vague feedback when you're trying to break through to more senior roles.

You've probably spent years becoming the person people trust with the difficult assignments. You know your work, you follow through, and the skills you've built are a big part of why you've moved up this far.

Then, somewhere around middle management or a senior technical role, the feedback starts to change. You hear that you need more executive presence, be more strategic, or increase your visibility. Someone says they want to see you operating at the next level.

If you work at U.S. tech companies, you may hear this more often than you'd like. Either way, it's frustrating. The comments sound important, but nobody tells you what to do on Monday morning. If someone says your presentation skills need work, you can practice. If you need a certification, there's usually a clear path. "Be more strategic" doesn't come with a path.

If you're a multicultural professional, you may also be working out how leadership is expressed in a workplace culture that's different from the one you grew up in. In my work with immigrant professionals, this is often the part that nobody talks about.

The rules get less explicit as you move up

Earlier in your career, good work was easy to recognize. You hit the target, solved the problem, or built deep expertise in your area.

At more senior levels, people start paying attention to how you think when the answer isn't obvious. They notice how you make decisions, whether you connect your work to the bigger picture, how you influence people outside your team, and how clearly you communicate your judgment. Often, nobody mentions that the criteria have shifted.

So you do what has always worked. You take on another project, put in more hours, or earn another qualification. You prove again that you can deliver. But delivering may no longer be what people are wondering about. They may be asking whether they can already picture you handling a bigger scope.

Vague feedback needs to become specific

This is why I wouldn't take phrases like "executive presence" or "be more strategic" at face value. I'd go back to your manager and ask what they're actually noticing.

You could ask what someone at the next level would do differently in the same situation. You could ask for a recent example. You could also ask what they'd need to see from you over the next six months to feel confident recommending you for a more senior role. In my experience, those questions tell you far more than the original comment did.

Once you start asking, the feedback often becomes quite concrete. "Be more strategic" might mean you do excellent analysis but rarely offer a recommendation. It might mean you stay close to the details and don't connect your work to wider business priorities. "Executive presence" often has less to do with charisma than with how clearly you make a point, how you handle disagreement in meetings with American clients or senior leaders, or how you respond when someone challenges your thinking.

It's also fair to ask whether the comment is about your thinking or about your accent. Executive presence with an accent is entirely possible, and if the feedback is really about clarity, it should be described that way. Until it describes something you can observe, it's hard to know what you're supposed to develop. Your manager may also use these phrases because they haven't found the words for what they see yet, so asking for specifics can help them as much as it helps you.

Culture can complicate the picture

Some of these behaviors may carry different meanings depending on where you learned to work.

If you were taught that listening carefully before you speak is a sign of respect, a colleague from another workplace culture may read your silence very differently. If humility has always been part of professionalism for you, talking about your accomplishments may feel uncomfortable, even a little wrong. And if you work in English as an additional language, you may know exactly what you think and still want a few more seconds to organize how you say it.

Workplace English for multicultural leaders covers more than vocabulary. It includes knowing when to jump in, how directly to disagree, and how much credit to claim. This is where cultural communication training for professionals can be useful, as long as it treats these as choices rather than rules.

None of this means you need to erase those parts of yourself or copy someone else's version of leadership. It helps to understand how your behavior is interpreted, decide what's worth adapting, and be more intentional about how people experience your leadership. That's your call to make, and managers and organizations share responsibility for noticing when they're misreading a different style as a lack of potential.

Your development strategy may need to change

If you're aiming for a more senior role, here's a question I'd sit with: what do people need to see from me now that they didn't need to see at my last level?

You may already have all the technical credibility you need. What's next could be showing your judgment more clearly, influencing a wider group, talking about your impact, or getting more comfortable making a call when there's no perfect answer. That's a different kind of development from getting better at your current job, and it deserves its own plan.

Over the next few posts, I'll share some of the feedback I hear most often from professionals moving into senior roles, including what it can mean to be more strategic, build executive presence, and gain visibility. If you're making that transition yourself, subscribe so you don't miss the rest of the series.

And if you're already getting feedback like this and aren't sure what to do with it, this is the kind of work I do with clients at The Leadership Voice Studio. As an English communication coach for immigrant professionals, I start with the situations you're actually navigating, then help you make sense of the feedback and build what it points to. That might be business English coaching for tech professionals, English public speaking coaching for meetings where you're expected to take a position, or leadership communication for non-native speakers ready for a bigger role.

Many people come to me looking for English for tech professionals in the U.S. and find they need something broader. Accent-friendly English fluency coaching, as I see it, means working on clarity and range without asking you to sound like anyone else.

Learn more about working with me or book a Needs Assessment call.

Joyce Talag, MCC, is a leadership and executive communication coach and founder of The Leadership Voice Studio in The Loop, Chicago. She works primarily with multicultural and multilingual professionals navigating greater visibility, influence, and leadership responsibility in U.S. workplaces.