😯 The career advice you probably didn’t get — especially for women

TL;DR

😯 The career advice you probably didn’t get — especially for women

🎭 HR’s disproportionate impact on employees’ careers — for better or for worse

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The career advice you probably didn’t get — especially for women

Sadly, this happens a lot. HR leaders in start-ups get replaced halfway through their progression. And no, it’s not always fair. But it is almost predictable in a scaling journey.

When it happens, the advice HR leaders receive is familiar: “Be more assertive. Be more visible. Build your confidence.”

Not wrong…just incomplete.

It reminded me of a TED Talk I heard years ago by Susan Colantuono: we’re missing 33% of the advice required to reach the executive level — especially for women.

The unspoken assumption that derails careers 

In her talk, Susan shared what executives list when asked what they look for in high-potential future executives:

And then they stopped ⛔.

When Susan asked why they didn’t mention business acumen, the reply was:

A given!?! 😑 A baseline so obvious they didn’t even think to say it out loud.

But when Susan asked 150 women in the room whether they had ever been told explicitly that business acumen is the door-opener to senior leadership, only 3 (⁉️) raised their hands.

HR leaders know personal greatness (33%). We excel at people greatness (33%). But what is systematically underdeveloped (for women and for HR) is: Business acumen.

The part no one tells us is required because they assume we should already know 🤷🏻.

We need to prepare for the inflection point in our careers

As HR leaders, we’re often the ones helping the business redefine roles as it scales. But we rarely pause to check how our own role is evolving…or whether we've kept pace with the shift.

When a start-up raises funding to scale, the business strategy changes🎯. 

Investors now expect repeatability, predictability and a clear pathway to profitability. So the HR role expands from “supporting the team” to designing the operating system that shapes every hire, every manager, every organisational decision — all to enable business growth.

This is where many early-stage HR leaders hit a ceiling. Not because they lack capability, but because the role has changed beneath their feet. And suddenly we’re told we need to “be more strategic”.

The most unhelpful sentence in career development

Your founder probably can’t articulate what “be more strategic” means either.

From my experience, here’s what they actually need from their HR exec:

Ask yourself:

If the answer is no, you will struggle to own your seat at the table — even if you’re invited to it.

Now that you can name it, you can close the 33% gap

HR leaders get replaced when the organisation outgrows the version of the role they originally stepped into. 

Once we understand this, the question shifts from: “Why is this happening to me?” to “What would change if I build the very capability no one told me I needed?”

Closing that 33% gap is how we protect our own trajectory, shape the organisation’s future and unlock the potential of every future leader watching how we lead.

HR’s disproportionate impact on employees’ careers - for better or for worse

For this section, let’s apply something businesses do constantly: scenario modelling.

But instead of forecasting revenue or market conditions, let’s model a scenario based on Susan Colantuono’s research: that we may be missing the 33% of leadership capability required at the executive level, especially for women.

Hypothetical scenario:

It’s not a comfortable thought — but stay with me.

We build for the 66%, not the 100%

If we, as HR leaders, were never explicitly taught the missing 33% (business acumen), then the talent development strategy we build naturally emphasises the capabilities we do understand deeply:

1️⃣ Personal greatness (33%)
2️⃣ People greatness (33%)

And that leads to a predictable pattern in our HR work:

But when the last missing 33% (business acumen) isn’t understood, it won’t be: ❌ assessed, ❌ taught, ❌ rewarded, ❌ measured or ❌ embedded.

And then, as leaders move toward executive roles, they hit a ceiling — not because they lack ability, but because our HR strategy never equipped them for executive responsibilities.

When HR leaders have a blind spot, our HR strategy inherits it

If HR isn’t commercially fluent, the organisation won’t produce commercially fluent leaders. Our blind spot becomes the organisation’s blind spot, we unintentionally scale the very gap we hope to close. 

And when start-ups began scaling:

This is the moment founders start saying: “We need to hire new execs.”

Because…the leadership bench we’ve built isn’t ready.

The implications are uncomfortable, but ultimately significant AND positive

If this scenario is true, then my message is not “HR has failed”. The message is: we now know what to fix.

1️⃣ Personally for HR leaders: Strengthening our business acumen increases our readiness for executive leadership. It deepens our influence, sharpen our impact and enables us to own the seat we’ve earned.

2️⃣ Organisationally for talent development: It elevate the impact impact we can have. We stop developing people in 66% of the equation and hoping the rest appears by luck. We build HR strategy that prepare people (especially women) for the executive roles the business requires.

And that, to me, is genuinely good news for how this scenario plays out.

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help: