Get Unstuck and Move Up in 2025

6 ways to escape being stuck

and

Jan 07, 2025

Ethan & Jason here—let’s kickoff the year strong. Welcome to this week’s *free article* of Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.

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Top Tips to Get Unstuck and Move Up in 2025

Watch on YouTube.

Takeaways

Six ways to escape being stuck:
1. Find out why you are stuck—get feedback.
2. Hard work is not enough—you must do effective, valuable work.
3. Take steps to get noticed—advocate for yourself and others and help your manager be aware (avoid the common trap of working hard and hoping to be noticed).
4. Understand the promotion process.
5. Building relationships help.
Directly address being stuck:
1. Ask your manager: “Manager, my career is naturally important to me, but I do not seem to be progressing here. To stay, I need to break through that blockage. Can you tell me specifically what I need to do?”
2. Ask your skip: “Skip, I know to move up I need your support. What do you need to see, specifically, to feel good advocating for me?”
What common negative assessments & labels really mean:
1. “Fred is steady and reliable…” — Fred can do what he is doing but we are unsure if he has the ambition, intelligence, and innovation to do more. Reliable is good, but you must be seen as more than that.
2. “Sarah lacks executive presence…” — Sarah does not have influence and is not impressing me.
3. “Rajiv doesn’t think big…” — Rajiv is not a thought-leader. Your current work is fine, but you are not imagining more.
4. “Maria is hard to work with…” — As the manager, I want to promote people I like, people who bring me solutions not problems, who step up and don’t complain…and Maria is not that person (she does not bring energy, she takes it away).
Share small frequent wins, not just the big accomplishments. Talk about your work in an ongoing way (leverage recency bias). If you are a manager, talk about what your team does. If you are an IC, talk about what you and your peers did. In the end, the common thread is you.
Managers help people who help them—offer to help your manager, examples of ways to help:
1. Take on a new (unattractive) project that nobody else wants.
2. Lead a hiring or cost reduction charge (in a low growth environment lead something that is efficiency, automation, AI, or savings driven).
3. Draft a key document or annual report.

If you want the presentation PDF slides, click here.

Additional Resources

Ensuring a Great Performance Review (if you want a one hour video on-demand Career Talk on this topic, see here).
Make the case for your promotion: Promotion document framework
"Attitude matters" - Amazon VP
What Your Manager Won't Tell You: The Art of Managing Up with Wes Kao (Cofounder of Maven & altMBA)
Manage Up to Executives: A guide for Senior Managers
Up Your Game to Influence Senior Leaders with Ethan Evans & Sue Bethanis
Executive Presence: How to get "it"
Relentless Self-Improvement: 4 ways to be exceptional
Traits of top performers: 3 ways to be High Agency
The Magic Loop: A framework for rapid career growth (if you want a one hour video on-demand course of The Magic Loop, see here).

Watch Ethan live executive coach a VP of Product Management

On January 9 (Thursday), Ethan will live executive coach a VP of Product Management on executive / C-suite career growth diving into 3 areas:

Finding the Right "Pool" to Swim In
Choosing the Right "Mountain" to Climb
Deciding "Which Room to Paint First"

Our Level Up newsletter paid subscribers are invited to attend live to watch how Ethan executive coaches, to learn alongside the VP of Product, and will get a private video recording link.

Ethan stopped accepting new coaching clients. The way this VP of Product got this session was all newsletter paid subscribers are invited to apply for free live executive coaching with Ethan (zero cost). It is one of benefits of being a newsletter paid subscriber and we will do more. Many paid subscribers say this benefit alone is worth the annual subscription of $170/yr.

RSVP and apply for free exec coaching

Stuck at Senior Manager - How to Break Through to Executive course

This is the last week to enroll in our next live online course cohort (starts January 11).

If you are interested, we recommend you enroll now because there is 7.5 hours of on-demand video lectures you must complete before we start the first live session.

We are proud of the many success stories from our 1,000+ alumni:

"Hope all is well with you and your family Jason! Happy to share that due to executing some of the tactics shared in the program (taking action for one), I have been successful in getting myself promoted."

- Promoted to Director

“I give so much credit to the Level Up: Breaking through to the Executive course and getting a front seat to Ethan's coaching and wisdom. Thank you for working to build this community that has given me to confidence to reach even in the current market environment! It is my dream role and I'm so grateful for the opportunity.”

- Promoted to Director

“When I took the ‘stuck at sr. manager’ course, Ethan mentioned that he knows that everyone wants to get promoted and wants it now but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal (paraphrasing, of course) since he knows us high performers are going to get there. Oddly, that comment didn’t make me lazier (“I guess i’ll get there anyway, so why try so hard”) but it grounded me a bit to take a breather and realize that it is not as urgent as I think it is and take the challenge (wanting a next level title) in stride!”

- Promoted to Director

“I am excited to share that I got promoted to Director and I sincerely thank and appreciate your help on this. I was not able to break through the barrier to Director level, partly due to constant changes happening in the company at leadership and strategies. I continued to apply my learnings from the community to influence the cross functional teams. Leadership was seeing the adaptability that I exhibited in continuing to add business value in new role and I was starting to get positive feedback from the VP on my flexibility. If I have to just pick one thing across all of Ethan’s teachings that helped me the most, it is being PROACTIVE. I am very grateful for your help and I really appreciate the learnings I have got as part of your community and your course on Stuck at Senior Manager. It really helped me to achieve this big milestone in my career. I thank you and Jason deeply as this promotion was very close to my heart."

- Promoted to Director

“What was key was that I actively participated in the live course AND followed through with some participants afterwards to talk shop and build relationships. One of those relationships just happened to be able to help when I needed it. Simply adding connections wouldn’t have been successful as they would have had no context about me, and not enough trust to put me in touch with important people in THEIR network.”

- Landed FAANG Role

In the past weeks, leaders from Google, ServiceNow, Amazon, Airbnb, DoorDash, Expedia, Meta, Etsy, Adobe, Spotify, Wayfair, VMware, Oracle, Zendesk, Coinbase, Merck, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and more have enrolled.

Explore the course page to see if it’s a fit for you.