Here’s a counterintuitive observation about career positioning at senior level: the more successful you’ve been inside a large organisation, the harder it often is to position yourself outside one.
Not because you lack substance. Because seniority inside a large corporate tends to make your value harder to articulate cleanly and easier to obscure behind title, brand, and tenure.
When you’re early in your career, positioning is relatively simple. You have a specific skill. You do a specific job. The market can understand, fairly quickly, what you bring.
As you move into senior and Director roles, something shifts. Your value becomes more diffuse. You’re no longer doing one thing, you’re orchestrating many things. Your expertise is now partly about context, judgement, stakeholder management, and pattern recognition. It’s harder to point to and harder to explain.
And inside the organisation, that’s fine. People know what you do. Your reputation is established. Your value is legible to the people who matter.
Outside the organisation? It’s almost completely invisible.
THE POSITIONING TRAP
The natural response, when someone asks a senior professional what they do, is to reach for title and industry. “I’m a Commercial Director in MedTech.” “I’m a Senior Finance Leader in professional services.”
That’s a description, not a positioning. And it sounds like every other senior professional in the same category.
The market, left with that description, has no way to understand why you specifically. So it defaults to standard filters: sector experience, years of tenure, brands worked for. Which is fine if you’re applying for a direct equivalent of your last role in the same sector. Less useful if you want to do something different, expand into a new market, or build any kind of external authority.
WHAT POSITIONING ACTUALLY REQUIRES
The senior professionals I see repositioning most effectively do something that goes against the grain of how they’ve been trained to operate: they get specific about a problem.
Not “I have broad commercial leadership experience.” But: “I help organisations build commercial infrastructure in regulated markets where the product is technically complex and the sales cycle is long.” Or: “I specialise in turning around underperforming commercial teams in the first 18 months of a new leadership tenure.”
Specific. Valuable. Legible to someone who’s never met you.
That level of specificity requires two things most senior professionals resist: choosing (which means leaving other things out) and committing (which means saying something concrete rather than something everyone can agree with).
Both of those are uncomfortable. But they’re the price of positioning.
The alternative: staying broad, staying comprehensive, not leaving anything out, is the positioning of someone the market will struggle to remember, refer, or choose.
I’m exploring how senior professionals can develop this kind of clarity as part of my work in the career intelligence space. If this is a challenge you’re facing (or have faced) I’d genuinely like to hear how you’ve thought about it. Reply here or message me on LinkedIn.
— David