What distinguishes the high potential, high-performing, promotable rock stars from everybody else?

One thing I discovered in my interviews with executives about this topic is that the rock stars actively seek to find out how the promotion and talent management processes work in their company. Specifically, they look to uncover how the company identifies who they want to invest in and who they feel has the potential to go to the next level. Then they reverse engineer their career development and perception management efforts accordingly. And those conversations begin to foster alignment and trust.

Consider the impact of that action. Now they're competing for the best development the company has to offer and future leadership roles with their colleagues who maybe don't know how the process works, who are quietly waiting to be recognized based on what they're doing intuitively, and whose actions may not be best aligned with what needs to be done for them to be perceived in the best...

I know you're all interested in the promotion process as I've heard from you. I want to walk you through it. I'm Christina DelliSanti-Miller of Full Potential Realized.com and I help women to build careers they love by driving their own development.

So let me tell you a little bit about my background. I worked for 20 years in corporate in Fortune 100 companies, responsible for Talent Management or Diversity & Inclusion or Leadership Development and Succession Planning.

I spent a lot of time with executives behind closed doors talking about their people challenges and helping them to build leadership teams that were high-performing and balanced. And sometimes we got to the balanced part, but sometimes we're “still working on that”…

 And so I was thinking about what we could we be doing - I mean I thought about this all the time - what could we be doing to support more women and people of color to push through to senior leadership levels.

 I...