"Ready" is a feeling in your boss's head. Here's how to put it there.

The conventional advice is to get ready before you ask. Pick up the skills the next position calls for, enroll in the course, fill the holes in your résumé, and once you can truthfully claim you're qualified, step forward. Earn it, then request it. Most of us were taught this way, and there's real integrity in that kind of effort.

Yet "ready" isn't something measurable inside you. It's an image forming in your leader's mind, and the promotion tends to land with whoever already appears in that image, whether or not they meet the bar on paper.

Three. Readiness is decided by resemblance, not by a checklist

When a leadership group in a company from Sacramento to San Diego talks about who might move up, almost no one reaches for a competency matrix. They picture the person doing the job. Is she easy to picture running the all-hands in Orange County, calming an angry client, or standing in front of the board? If so, she's ready. If not, she needs "more seasoning," and that phrase describes the leaders' imagination rather than her track record. According to McKinsey and LeanIn's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, women in leadership are twice as likely to be taken for a junior employee. When people in a meeting assume you're junior, they struggle to imagine you occupying a senior chair.

Four. Identical criteria produce different verdicts depending on who reads them.

Tara Mohr's survey, published in Harvard Business Review, found women often pass on roles they feel underqualified for largely because they treat the posted requirements as hard rules. Men tend to read the identical list as a set of aspirations. So the woman waits until she satisfies every line, while the man with six of ten requirements applies, gets imagined in the role, and wins it. By the time she concluded she wasn't prepared, she had already become the stronger applicant.

Five. The gap in ambition is not quite the story it seems to tell.

That same McKinsey and LeanIn report found 80% of women want a promotion compared with 86% of men, and that the difference vanishes when support is equal. Women aren't less driven. Women are simply offered fewer chances to be watched handling the next level's work before the title arrives, and visibility is what shapes that mental image.

Where the familiar advice still works

Competence remains important. A promotion into a job you can't yet do is a glass cliff with a friendlier announcement. Russell Reynolds found women CEOs average 5.2 years in the role versus 8.1 for men, a small sample but a telling one, and part of that pattern reflects women being set up poorly. Prepare thoroughly. Just don't wait to become visible until you've finished preparing.

A better alternative

Establish your presence in the picture well before a position becomes available. Lead the meeting your manager usually runs when she's away. Give your manager a quarterly update on a project that moves the business forward. Then state the goal plainly in your own words: "I want the VP role when it opens, and I'd like your help getting there." What would you need to see between now and then?" The answer is your real checklist, and it's usually shorter than the one you invented for yourself. Each month, deliver one clearly seen result from it before the same decision-makers who will be weighing in when the name is raised, whether that room is in Sacramento, San Diego, or the East Bay.

When leaders discuss the next VP, is your name a clear picture or just a maybe?