"Ready" is a feeling in your boss's head. Here's how to put it there.
The usual advice goes like this: prepare first. Pick up the skills the next role demands, complete the training, patch the holes in your track record, and only when you can truthfully say you measure up, step forward and ask. Earn the move, then request it. Most of us were brought up on that approach, and it has the merit of being an honest path.
Yet "ready" isn't really a property of you. It's an image forming in your manager's mind, and the title tends to land with whoever already appears in that image, whether or not they hold the stronger credentials.
Item 1. Readiness gets judged by resemblance, not by a checklist
When a leadership group talks about who could move up, almost nobody opens a competency matrix. They picture the person in the seat. Can they imagine her leading the town hall, fielding the furious client's call, presenting to the board? If the answer is yes, she's ready. If not, she needs "a bit more seasoning," and that phrase describes the leaders' imagination far more than her actual record. In McKinsey and LeanIn's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, women in leadership were found to be mistaken for junior staff at twice the rate of their male peers. When people in a Cincinnati boardroom or a Blue Ash office take you for a junior employee, they find it hard to imagine you running a senior function.
Two. Identical criteria get interpreted in divergent ways depending on who is applying them.
Tara Mohr's survey, published in Harvard Business Review, showed that women often pass on jobs they feel underqualified for, largely because they treat the posted requirements as hard rules. Many men read that very same set of requirements as a wish list to grow into. So a woman waits until she satisfies every line, while a man who meets six of ten applies, gets pictured in the role, and wins it. At the very moment she decided she wasn't ready, she was in fact the more qualified candidate.
Three. The gap in ambition is not really what it seems to be.
That same McKinsey and LeanIn research found 80% of women want a promotion compared with 86% of men, and that the difference vanishes when women receive equal support. Women aren't less driven. Women are simply offered fewer opportunities to demonstrate the next level of work before the title arrives, and visibility in that work is what builds the image of a leader.
Where the conventional guidance remains applicable
Capability still carries real weight in Cincinnati boardrooms, from Covington to Blue Ash. Moving into a role you can't yet handle is a glass cliff wrapped in a congratulatory announcement. Russell Reynolds found women CEOs average 5.2 years in the post versus 8.1 years for men. That's a small sample, but a telling one, and part of the explanation is that women are sometimes set up to fail. So prepare. Just don't wait to be noticed until the preparation is complete.
A different approach
Establish your presence in the mental picture before any opening appears. Chair the meeting that your manager normally leads whenever she is out of the office. Brief her superior every quarter on work that truly carries weight for the business. Then make the picture unmistakable by saying: "I'm aiming for the VP role when it becomes available." What would you need to see between now and then?" The answer becomes your actual checklist, and it's usually shorter than the one you invented for yourself. Deliver one visible piece of that goal each month, in front of the people who will be deciding when the successor is named.
Around Cincinnati, from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble and Kroger to the leadership teams at Cincinnati Children's and the University of Cincinnati, the same dynamic plays out. When Greater Cincinnati's leaders discuss the next vice president, do they see you clearly or only as a possibility?