Companies will tell you that career advancement is driven by performance. To some extent, that's true.
But ask employees how advancement actually works in any given company and the answers get murky fast. You need visibility. You need an advocate. You need to speak up more. You should stay long enough to build relationships. You probably need to leave to get promoted.
Some of the advice contradicts itself. Most of it is vague. Almost none of it appears in the employee handbook.
That doesn't mean the system is random. Much of how careers actually move operates through interpretation, not documentation. Organizations rarely publish a guide explaining what actually builds confidence in someone's readiness. But employees know those patterns exist because they watch them happen. Who gets trusted with the stretch assignments? Who gets described as "not quite ready?" Who gets pulled into the room before they have the title?
The people who navigate this most effectively aren't working from a secret playbook. They've just learned to read the system they're operating in.
What Gets Lost in Translation
The gap between what organizations say and what they mean isn't a flaw in the system so much as a feature of how organizations actually function. Workplaces run on judgment, relationship, and pattern recognition as much as they run on criteria and process. The formal language describes the scaffolding. The informal language describes the building.
Most employees figure this out eventually. (And eventually is doing a lot of work here.)
In a recent Forté Signals article, I wrote about how job descriptions function less like requirements and more like clues about what an organization is trying to solve. The same dynamic runs deeper than hiring.
"Executive presence" often means leaders feel confident in your judgment when the situation is ambiguous. "Visibility" is less about self-promotion and more about making your thinking legible to people making decisions about you. "Leadership potential" is usually a prediction about how someone will operate under pressure, not a reward for past performance.
These aren't secrets. But they aren't written down anywhere either. They circulate in conversations between managers, in how stretch assignments get allocated, in the shorthand between people who have worked together long enough to trust each other's read.
Employees newer to an organization, or simply newer to its unwritten rules, are not less capable. They just haven't lived inside the culture long enough to understand how it actually works.
Where ERGs Come In
This is one of the less-discussed functions ERGs serve.
Most of what employees actually need to know about how advancement works doesn't travel through formal channels. It moves through relationships and observation and the kind of candid conversation that happens between people who already trust each other. Which means the employees who most need it are often the ones least likely to encounter it naturally.
ERGs can change that. Not by publishing the unofficial rulebook, but by creating space for the questions employees are uncomfortable asking publicly. Who has succeeded here and how. Who's no longer here and why. What that vague feedback actually meant and what a useful response might look like.
These aren't political conversations. They're interpretive ones. And when they happen regularly, the system doesn't become less ambiguous. But it becomes more navigable.
That's a meaningful difference.
Try This
Consider building one or more of these into an ERG event or mentoring conversation:
- A "what they actually meant" debrief format, where members share real feedback they've received and the group works together to interpret what it was pointing at and what a useful response might look like.
- A conversation with a manager or sponsor about the informal markers of readiness in your organization: not the job description criteria, but the things that actually move decisions.
- A discussion about the difference between being supported and being sponsored, and how to recognize who is capable of playing which roles.
- A session on how to make your thinking visible to decision-makers in ways that feel natural rather than performative.
Employees rarely need to be told to work harder. But they often need better information about what the work is actually being evaluated against. And that's where ERGs can make a difference that formal systems rarely do.
