The Evaluation Gap

There is a particular frustration that many senior ethnic-cultural professionals recognise. Strong performance reviews. Consistent delivery. A reputation, within their immediate context, as someone who leads well. And yet, the step into broader executive responsibility does not come, or comes more slowly than the track record would suggest it should.

Part of what explains this is a gap that rarely gets named directly: the criteria by which mid-level managers assess leadership presence and the criteria by which C-suite executives assess it are not the same.

Two different lenses

At director and senior manager level, leadership presence is largely evaluated through execution. How clearly do you communicate? How confidently do you present? How effectively do you manage your team and deliver against your objectives? These are legitimate measures of performance at that level, and meeting them well builds a strong local reputation.

C-suite leaders are reading something different. They are less focused on how well you execute within a defined scope and more interested in how you think beyond it. The questions they are asking, (often without articulating them), tend to centre on strategic framing, organisational awareness, and the kind of judgement that becomes visible only in ambiguous or high-stakes situations.

A leader who handles a client loss competently impresses their director. A leader who extracts a systemic lesson from that loss and introduces it into the organisation’s broader thinking gets noticed at a different level. The distinction is not about capability. It is about the altitude at which you are operating.

What C-suite leaders are actually observing

Three things tend to differentiate leaders who get noticed at executive level from those who remain well-regarded but locally contained.

The first is how problems are framed. Leaders who surface root causes rather than symptoms, (who resist the pull towards immediate resolution and instead name the structural dynamic underneath), demonstrate a quality of thinking that is directly relevant to executive decision-making. It signals that they can operate at the level of complexity the role requires.

The second is the reach and nature of their networks. Internal team leadership is expected. What C-suite leaders look for in addition is evidence of horizontal influence, relationships across the organisation and beyond it, external visibility, the kind of network that brings perspectives and intelligence that the organisation would not otherwise have access to.

The third is how setbacks are handled. Not whether they occur, (they always do), but whether the leader treats them as isolated incidents to be managed or as sources of organisational learning to be shared. The willingness to be transparent about failure, and to extract value from it in a way that benefits others, is a strong signal of executive maturity.

The information gap

What makes this dynamic particularly consequential is that most professionals navigating it receive no explicit guidance on it. Feedback at director level tends to address execution. It rarely addresses the second-order signals that determine whether someone is seen as executive-ready.

The professionals who bridge this gap most effectively tend to have access to senior leaders who have made the transition themselves. People who can name the informal criteria, share how they are read in practice, and offer perspective on how to demonstrate strategic thinking without abandoning the delivery excellence that got them there.

That kind of guidance is not widely available. And its absence disproportionately affects ethnic-cultural professionals, who are less likely to have informal access to the senior networks where these conversations happen naturally.

A deliberate shift

Closing the evaluation gap does not require becoming a different kind of leader. It requires understanding precisely how your leadership is being read, (and at what level), and making deliberate choices about how you show up in the contexts that carry the most weight.

That means being as intentional about the questions you ask as the answers you give. It means building relationships outside your immediate sphere before you need them. And it means developing a clear enough sense of your own strategic perspective that you can articulate it consistently, in the rooms where it will be evaluated.

The gap is real. But it is also navigable, once you know it is there.