(And What You’re Probably Getting Wrong)

A candid look at how promotions really work in consumer products, from someone who’s been on both sides of the table.

By Gerry Lubanszky | Founder, GoTo Market Solutions Ltd. | Executive Director, Consumer Products Institute of Canada Inc.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

You think you’re being evaluated on your output. You’re not. You’re being evaluated on something much harder to define and almost nobody tells you what it is. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for decades. I’ve watched brilliant people get passed over and average people get promoted. The difference was never IQ, never hustle, never the quality of a PowerPoint deck. It was something else entirely. And I’m going to tell you exactly what it is.

I’ve sat in enough boardrooms, talent reviews, and succession planning sessions to know exactly how promotion decisions get made. And I can tell you with confidence: effort is not the currency. Neither is tenure. Neither is being liked. Here’s the truth: leading in consumer products is not glamorous. Quarterly cycles don’t stop. Retail partners don’t slow down. Margin pressure is relentless. Innovation pipelines don’t pause because your team is tired. Senior leaders in this industry are managing risk every single day: across the P&L, across the supply chain, across their retail relationships, and across a competitive set that never sleeps.

Decision-making at that level is pattern recognition at speed. The leaders I know and respect don’t have time to parse through ten slides of context before getting to a recommendation. They need people around them who reduce their cognitive load. Not add to it. If you make your boss’s job harder just by showing up, that’s a problem, even if your work is technically excellent.

Organizations don’t promote effort. They promote reduced risk.

When a senior leader decides who moves up, they’re asking one question, often silently, sometimes unconsciously, but always: “Can I safely bet on this person at the next level?” That’s the whole equation. Everything else is supporting evidence for or against that answer.

Most high-potential Gen Z professionals I encounter have been trained to execute. They’re smart, fast, and technically capable. But school taught them tasks. Corporate onboarding taught them compliance. Neither taught them how power, trust, and promotion decisions actually work inside real organizations.

That’s not a talent problem. It’s a system-literacy problem. And it’s fixable if you’re willing to stop waiting for the system to notice you and start learning how to operate inside it.

WHAT SENIOR LEADERS ARE ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR

Let me be clear: nobody in a senior leadership role is looking for the hardest worker in the room. They already have those. What they’re looking for is someone they can trust with more.

Here is what that actually means in consumer products:

1. Business Acumen. Do you understand how the business makes money? Can you connect your work to commercial outcomes? Can you speak the language of P&L, margin, velocity, and category growth, not just activity metrics? The candidate who walks in and says, “we increased distribution by 15 points, which drove a 4% velocity lift and added $2.1M in net revenue” is operating at a completely different altitude than the one who says, “I worked really hard on the launch.”

2. Emotional Intelligence Under Pressure. Can you stay useful when things get ambiguous, political, or commercially messy? Senior leaders get promoted because they remain calm and clear when others don’t. Panic, blame, and escalation are expensive. Composure and clarity are assets. Show me you have them.

3. Executive Communication. Can you give a decision-ready update in two minutes? Can you frame a trade-off, make a recommendation, and own a position without a novel-length email or a 40-slide deck? This is genuinely rare at every level of the organization. The people who can do it get noticed immediately.

4. Stakeholder Range. Do you know who decides, who influences, and who blocks? Do you manage relationships across the organization and not just upward to your direct manager? In consumer products, almost nothing gets done in isolation. Category managers, supply chain, finance, the customer’s buying team all matter. Show me you can navigate that landscape.

5. Reduced Risk. This is the subtext of every promotion decision. Will this person protect the business? Will they exercise judgment? Will they create problems I’ll have to clean up or will they prevent problems before I even know they exist? Be the latter. Always.

WHAT ACTUALLY CONCERNS US ABOUT YOUNGER TALENT

I’m going to be direct here, because that’s more useful than being diplomatic.

When senior leaders look at high-potential Gen Z candidates, here is what gives us pause:

• Candidates who lead with “I” — their role, their hours, their effort — without ever connecting the work to a business outcome. Nobody is promoting your effort. They’re promoting your impact.

• Candidates who confuse being busy with being impactful. Full calendars are not proof of value. Results are.

• Candidates who expect to be recognized rather than building the conditions for recognition. Recognition is a lagging indicator. Reputation is a leading one. Build the reputation.

• Candidates who think feedback from a mentor is the same as sponsorship from a decision-maker. It is not. A mentor tells you what to do differently. A sponsor advocates for you when the decision is being made, even when you’re not in the room.

• Candidates who negotiate compensation before they’ve negotiated scope, visibility, and decision rights. If you’re not getting the right experience, no salary increase will fix your trajectory.

The truth: if the people in the room when your name comes up can’t repeat your story without you there, you don’t have a promotion case. You have a job.

HOW PROMOTION DECISIONS ACTUALLY GET MADE

Let me pull back the curtain on the process because most of you have never seen it from this side.

Promotions are decided in rooms you’re not in. That’s the logistics of it. Talent reviews, succession planning sessions, calibration meetings are closed conversations among senior leaders who are collectively managing risk across a portfolio of people.

The decision-maker is not just evaluating your performance. They’re evaluating your risk profile. They’re asking: Has this person already operated at the next level? Can they absorb ambiguity without escalating everything upward? Are they trusted by the people they’ll need to influence once they get there?

Sponsors beat mentors. Mentors give you advice. Sponsors advocate when the decision is being made.

Timing matters more than most people realize. Organizations promote when their confidence is high and their perceived risk is low. Not when someone “deserves” it. Deserve is a feeling. Confidence is a business decision.

And one more thing: the signal that gets you promoted is not your most recent win. It’s the pattern your last twelve months created. One exceptional quarter doesn’t build a promotion case. A consistent, visible pattern of operating above your level does.

HOW TO STAND OUT IN INTERVIEWS

This is where theory meets practice. Here’s what separates the candidates who get the role from the ones who were “really strong but not quite right.”

1. Lead with outcomes, not activities. Don’t tell them what you did. Tell them what changed because you did it, and do so in commercial language. Revenue lifted. Margin protected. Customer retained. Sell-through improved. Risk identified before it became a problem. That’s the language of investment. Speak it.

2. Show you understand the business, not just your function. Candidates who can connect their role to the P&L, the category strategy, and the retailer relationship signal immediately that they’re thinking at the next level. That’s what gets you shortlisted. That’s what gets you hired.

3. Demonstrate stakeholder range. Talk about how you aligned, influenced, or navigated, not just what you delivered. Show them you can work across functions, not just within your lane. Consumer products is a team sport. Prove you know how to play it.

4. Make a recommendation, not just a summary. When they ask about a challenge you faced, don’t stop at the description. Tell them what you would do and why. Own a position. That’s executive communication. It’s rare. It’s memorable. Do it!

5. Ask questions that signal systems thinking. “How does the organization decide who’s ready for the next level?” “What does strong performance look like at this level versus the one above it?” Those questions signal ambition with intelligence. They show you’re not just looking for a job; you’re thinking about how to win inside the system. That’s exactly the kind of thinking senior leaders want to see more of.

THE CORPORATE OPERATING SYSTEM

The system isn’t unfair. It’s just not transparent.

Most organizations are not trying to hold you back. They’re trying to reduce risk on every investment they make, and that includes you. The market for senior talent in consumer products is competitive, and the bar for trust is high. Your job is to make yourself the lowest-risk, highest-credibility option in the room.

Stop waiting to be noticed. Start managing the signals. Build the proof portfolio, the track record of operating above your level before anyone asks you to. Find a sponsor, not just a mentor. And walk into every interview and every 1:1 with your manager ready to speak the language of business outcomes, not just job descriptions.

That’s how the operating system works.

Now you know it.

Gerry Lubanszky is the founder of GoTo Market Solutions and Executive Director of the Consumer Products Institute of Canada (consumerproductsinstitute.ca). He has spent 35+ years inside Canada’s consumer products industry as a senior executive, go-to-market strategist, and executive educator, coach, mentor and author of the upcoming book, The Corporate Operating System.