The call came out of nowhere.
My boss was on the line. And she told me there was going to be a new VP. His name was Brett. He was coming in from another property. And for now, I would be his only direct report.
I had one question.
“Was the job posted?”
No, she said. They don’t really have to post VP positions.
I let her know I wasn’t satisfied with that. There were qualified people, including me, who hadn’t even been given the chance to apply. But I also knew I wasn’t going to change the outcome of that conversation. So I told her I’d do the right thing. I’d support the transition. I’d take the high road.
Then she told me something else.
I had one hour before the announcement went out to the entire organization.
I got off the phone, called my three core leaders into my office — two directors and a senior manager — and closed the door. These were people who knew exactly who Brett was. They’d worked with him as an internal customer. They knew how he operated: going around people, calling vendors directly, bypassing the protocols we’d built. They had opinions.
And I looked at them and said: “we’re going to do the right thing here.”
“We’re going to walk into that room, make this announcement, and support it like it’s a good idea. Whatever we actually think about it stays in this office.”
They agreed. We brought the whole team together, made the announcement, answered questions, and moved on.
That’s what taking the high road looks like from the inside.
It’s not graceful. It’s a choice you make with gritted teeth.
If this is resonating with you, save this — you may want to come back to it later.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about that moment and about the phone call that preceded it.
The job was never going to be posted. Not because of an oversight. Not because the process broke down. But because at that level, the process doesn’t work the way most people assume it does.
Roles at the VP level and above are rarely filled through formal searches. They’re filled through relationships. A leader identifies a gap, thinks about who they trust, and makes a call. The posting, if it happens at all, is a formality. The decision has usually already been made.
That doesn’t make it fair. But fairness isn’t how those decisions get made.
What drives them is trust. Familiarity. Existing relationships with the people who have the authority to create the role in the first place.
Brett had that. He had positioned himself. whether intentionally or not, so that when the need arose, he was already the answer in someone’s mind. I wasn’t in that conversation. And by the time I found out a VP role existed, the outcome was already decided.
At the time, I was leading my team through a reorganization, implementing new systems, absorbing responsibilities from two people who had been let go. From a performance standpoint, I was doing exactly what a strong leader does in a difficult period.
But I wasn’t operating at the level where those decisions were being shaped.
I was visible inside my team. I wasn’t visible to the people who were deciding what came next.
That’s the gap most high performers don’t see until it’s too late.
It’s not a performance gap. It’s a positioning gap. And the difference matters enormously, because you can fix a performance gap by working harder. You can’t fix a positioning gap the same way.
If I were navigating that situation today, I wouldn’t wait for an opportunity to be posted to signal that something was available. I would treat visibility as part of the job — tracking my impact consistently, communicating it to the right people, and paying attention to where influence actually sat in the organization.
Not self-promotion. Strategic presence.
Because here’s what the phone call taught me:
By the time you hear about the opportunity, the conversation has already been happening without you.
Most high performers don’t have a performance problem.
They have a visibility and positioning gap.
Confidence was never the lever.
Visibility and evidence are.
