Issue #20: Performance Will Get You Paid. But It Won’t Get You Promoted.
A consultant sat across from me once and told me one of my people would never be a leader.
No qualifiers. No “here’s what she’d need to develop.” Just a clean verdict, delivered with the kind of confidence that only comes from someone who’s never had to live with the consequences of being wrong about a person.
All of it — the verdict, the certainty, the zero room for growth — based on a 30-minute interview and a test score.
I sat with it for maybe four seconds before my gut caught fire — because I knew this person. I’d watched her navigate situations that would break most people. Fight for herself and others. Figure out a way through, over, under and around to help the company and her teammates.
Years later, she’s still at it. Still leading. Still proving that consultant wrong one quarter at a time. (I may have sent him a mental “told you so” every single quarter. And by may have, I mean definitely still do.)
Full confession: I dug in a little that day. More than I probably should have. When someone tells me a person “can’t” be a leader, something in me short-circuits. It’s my weakness and my superpower in equal measure. But I’ve spent a lot of time since thinking about why that consultant got it so spectacularly wrong.
He was measuring performance. Just a very specific type of performance.
And while performance is real, necessary, and completely non-negotiable — it is, at absolute best, 10% of the career equation.
That number isn’t mine. It’s the research.
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Let Me (Re)Introduce Myself.
Most people have never heard of Harvey Coleman. Which is a shame, because in 1996 the former IBM executive and organizational consultant published a framework that should be handed out at every onboarding, stuck to every office wall, and taught in every business school that claims to prepare people for the real world.
He called it PIE.
P — Performance. What you do. Your results, your output, your craft. The thing most of us were taught is the whole game.
I — Image. How you’re perceived. How you show up in a room, in a crisis, on that Zoom where half the cameras are suspiciously off. Your reputation — not your resume.
E — Exposure. Who knows what you can do. The access you have to people who can open doors, create opportunities, and advocate for you when you’re not in the room.
Here’s what Coleman found studying career advancement over decades:
Performance: 10% Image: 30% Exposure: 60%
Go ahead and stare at that for a second. I’ll wait.
(P.S. — Is it literally 10/30/60 in every company? Of course not. But it’s close enough to reality to be useful — and different enough from what most people believe to be worth taking seriously.)
Now, before we proceed, let me be clear… You need to perform 100% of the time. Half-assing anything will absolutely get you nowhere. But your performance alone doesn’t count for as much as you may want or think it does when it comes to getting to the next level. At least not in most roles where subjectivity and natural human bias play a major role in the decision-making process.
So that thing most high performers pour 90% of their energy into? Worth 10%. And the thing too few of us are intentionally building — Exposure — is worth more than the other two combined. Which is a great thing to know, and also a little infuriating if you’ve spent the last decade with your head down, convinced the work would speak for itself. (He wrote with a gentle nod to his past self).
Coleman’s line:
“Performance will get you paid. Image and Exposure will get you promoted.”
I’d have that tattooed somewhere visible, but I’m told that’s frowned upon in board meetings. And I already have those tear drops and Tweety tattoo.
Now — here’s the important caveat, and I mean this. Earlier in your career, performance matters more. A lot more. You have to earn the right to be seen. You can’t skip straight to Exposure if nobody knows what you’re capable of yet.
I busted my butt for years building a foundation of results before any of the exposure moments I’m about to tell you about meant anything. Ask anyone who worked with me in my twenties. (Actually — don’t. I still work with a lot of them, and I was a bit much.)
But here’s what shifts as you rise: performance starts getting assumed. At a certain level, everyone in the room has delivered results. That’s the entry fee.
What separates the people who keep climbing from the ones who plateau is almost never more performance. It’s image and exposure — the parts of the equation that are trickier, and far more intentional, to build.
Here’s what I mean.
It’s 2008. I’m in a distribution role, out with a VP and a dealer principal at a launch for a new high-performance task chair. When the dealer principal started rolling his eyes at yet another chair launch, I jumped in.
I gave an impassioned pitch — half product utopia, half practical reality.
The dealer principal looked at me and said: “You sold me.”
And the VP noticed.
I’d like to tell you I had a plan. That I’d studied the room, mapped the stakeholders, and executed some carefully designed visibility strategy. That would make a much better story.
What actually happened is I was just… present. And lucky. Annoyingly, accidentally lucky.
But that VP put me on his radar — and with it came exposure.
First, a national television spot on CBS Morning News presenting that same chair. Then invitations to leadership development sessions. And two years later, a promotion into a critical new enterprise role.
One serendipitous conversation. Sixty percent of the equation activated without me even realizing it.
Here’s what still bothers me about that story: It was an accident. It shouldn’t have been.
And if you’re leading a team right now — or trying to reach the next level yourself — you have the power to make sure it isn’t an accident for your people… or for you.
🧠 Why PIE Works
Before we get into the research, let me be clear about something. This isn’t a framework that lets average performers off the hook. (Heaven knows that is not my style.) It explains something different: why exceptional performers sometimes get stuck — and why people who look like long shots on paper sometimes become the best leaders in the building.
The science backs it up.
Your work doesn’t travel on its own — it needs a carrier. Organizational psychologist Herminia Ibarra’s research at INSEAD found that employees with strong visibility to senior leaders advanced significantly faster than equally high-performing peers who lacked those relationships. The work is real. But someone still has to see it, repeat it, and advocate for it in the rooms you’re not in. That’s Exposure doing what Exposure does.
Your reputation forms in unscripted moments. Research on executive presence consistently shows that Image isn’t built in formal reviews — it’s built in the small, high-stakes situations nobody schedules. How you handle being wrong in a meeting. How you show up when a project is on fire. What you say when a difficult call lands in your lap. Those moments quietly shape how people see you long before any promotion conversation happens.
Context changes how performance gets judged. The consultant who assessed my team member missed something fundamental: he didn’t have the context, relationships, or accumulated exposure that develop over years in the right rooms. Performance doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People who lack access to key conversations and advocates will often look like lower performers on paper — even when they aren’t. Which means the PIE gap isn’t just a career problem. For leaders, it’s a fairness problem.
🍽️ Try a Bite This Week
Here’s the thing about frameworks: everyone loves them in theory and ignores them by Thursday. So let’s make this one stick. Try these out and let me know what you think:
🍴 Run the audit. Write down the last five times you had visibility with someone two levels above you. Were they planned or accidental? If you’re struggling to name five — that’s your answer right there. Now pick one Exposure move for this week: reach out to someone senior you haven’t spoken to in 90 days. Not a big ask. A relevant observation, a question, a quick FYI on something that touches their world. One intentional move. That’s it. Start there.
🍴Put someone on the map. Name one person on your team right now who is performing but invisible. Then find one specific meeting or conversation happening in the next two weeks where you could put them in the room. Not someday — next two weeks. Have them present the work. Make the introduction. Let someone important see what they’re made of. You don’t need a plan for this. You just need to do it once and watch what happens.
🍴Ask the one question most talent conversations skip. The next time you’re in a review, a calibration, or any conversation where someone’s potential is being assessed — ask this before the verdict lands: “What has this person actually been exposed to?” Not what they’ve done. What they’ve been given the chance to do. You’ll be surprised how often one question shifts the entire conversation.
💡 A Final Thought
That consultant wasn’t measuring the wrong thing. Performance matters. I’ll go to my grave arguing that.
He just wasn’t measuring enough of the right things.
And honestly? Neither was I, for a long time. I believed in hard work the way most of us do — completely, and sometimes at the expense of everything else on the PIE chart. I still do. But I’ve learned that working hard in a room where nobody can see you is a lot like giving the best speech of your life to an empty auditorium.
The work matters. It will always matter. But 10% of the game is still 10% of the game. Math doesn’t care how hard you worked.
That dealer principal saying “you sold me” in 2008 didn’t make me better at my job. I was already working on that. It made me visible. And visible was the thing that changed everything.
Build your PIE. And while you’re at it — help someone on your team build theirs. Because the best version of leadership isn’t just developing performance.
It’s making sure the right people — and potential — can finally be seen.
🌶️ Add Your Spice
Which part of PIE have you been neglecting most — and has it cost you or someone you know?
And for the leaders in the room: Is there someone on your team right now who’s crushing their P but invisible everywhere else? What’s one concrete thing you could do this week to change that?
Drop it below.
And if this hit home, share it with someone who’s working incredibly hard and wondering why it’s not adding up. They need to hear this.