Making the right career moves can accelerate an executive’s influence, leadership growth, and long-term success.
Team WeQual | September 25, 2025
Making the right career moves can accelerate an executive’s influence, leadership growth, and long-term success.
Team WeQual | September 25, 2025
Careers don’t always unfold in a straight line. For most leaders, progression looks more like a series of inflection points, moments when a decision, sometimes small, shapes progress toward influence, visibility, and ultimately, executive-level responsibility.
Yet, too often, leaders describe their journey as though it “just happened”. A sponsor appeared. A role opened. A mentor offered advice at the right time. While serendipity plays a role, the truth is that those who make it to the C-suite don’t rely on chance. They treat their careers as a series of strategic decisions; each one made with intention and long-term vision.
In this article, we explore what those decisions look like, why they matter most at the mid-career stage, and how inclusive leadership practice has become the critical differentiator between executives who plateau and those who progress.
In business, leaders are trained to make strategic decisions every day: where to allocate capital, how to respond to competitors, which risks to mitigate. But when it comes to their own careers, even the most capable leaders can fall into a pattern of short-term thinking, accepting the next logical promotion, waiting for that ‘tap on the shoulder’, or assuming their performance will speak for itself.
The reality is that careers are shaped not only by what you deliver but also by the intentional decisions you make about your visibility, network, and leadership behavior.
Executives who thrive in the C-suite consistently demonstrate four patterns of decision-making, aligned to WeQual’s Inclusive Leadership Benchmark:
These are not one-time decisions. They are a disciplined habit, practiced repeatedly until they shape not only an individual career but also the culture of the organization around them.
he most decisive stage of an executive’s career is not the top, it’s the middle.
This is the stage often referred to as the “leaky middle”. It’s where managers aka the “Rising Leaders” are competent, even high performing, but struggle to convert performance into progression. Too many leave, frustrated at a lack of recognition or opportunity. Others stagnate, continuing to deliver within their function but never quite breaking into leadership roles.
The leaders who do break through make a different set of decisions:
These decisions layer together to shape long-term outcomes. Each decision builds on the last, shaping a leader’s story over time, not just as a functional expert, but as someone capable of operating at the enterprise level.
Organizations that recognize and enable these choices see positive returns. For instance, a global organization partnered with WeQual through the Rising Leaders program. The results were impressive and saw 88% of participants report higher levels of confidence in their leadership skills. In addition, 35% of participants were promoted into new or expanded roles due to sponsorship and greater visibility of opportunities.
This wasn’t just about skills; it was about creating the conditions which empower managers to drive better career decisions.
Across all these stages, the differentiator is not technical expertise—it’s inclusive leadership.
Executives who succeed over the long term recognize that leadership is not just about them delivering results themselves, but rather about creating the conditions where others can deliver more. That requires:
Inclusive leadership is not “soft” leadership. It is a commercial imperative. Organizations with homogeneous leadership pipelines face a 66% performance penalty. The executives who decide to lead inclusively don’t just advance their own careers, they protect and strengthen the competitiveness of their businesses.
It’s tempting to frame this entirely as an individual responsibility: make better career decisions, and you’ll get to the top. But the reality is more complex.
Organizations shape the environment in which decisions are made. Leaders can only choose visibility if opportunities exist. They can only build networks if the culture supports sponsorship.
This is why organizations must take pipeline health seriously. Weak succession planning at the executive level is not just a talent problem, it is a business risk. Building deliberate, inclusive pipelines is about more than fairness; it is about ensuring the enterprise has leaders capable of navigating complexity, disruption, and transformation.
The best companies recognize this dual responsibility: individuals must make intentional decisions, and organizations must design systems that reward them.
In the end, an executive career is a sequence of decisions, each one building on the last. Few leaders can point to a single moment that defined their path. Instead, they can trace a pattern: the decision to take on the uncomfortable role, to seek sponsorship, to build inclusive teams, to measure success in broader terms.
By the time a leader reaches the C-suite, those decisions become visible not only in their own trajectory but in the culture, they leave behind. The best executives are remembered less for the role they held and more for the decisions they made about people, systems, and legacy.