The Read I'd Give a Mate
Most of what you've been told about getting ahead was written by someone who was never in the room when the decision was made.
Essay · 19 May 2026 · 6 min read
Five o'clock on a Thursday. Seven of us in a conference room at Google's Sydney office, a whiteboard of names and a calendar invite that said "calibration — senior ICs." The meeting ran ninety minutes. By the end, we'd talked through fifteen people, moved the goalposts on three promotions, and passed on two that had been running unopposed.
None of those fifteen people knew we were in that room.
I spent seven years in Google People Ops — Sydney first, then across APAC — and four more as Director of HR at Meta APAC. I've been in the room most people are navigating from outside. I've sat in the scorecard debates, watched a name get moved up or down a calibration list in ninety seconds, and run the exit interviews where half the truth stayed in the room with the person leaving.
I've also taken the early morning calls — the ones that come in at seven from someone who's been sitting with something longer than they'd admit.
Here's what I actually say.
Your manager is either advocating or they're not
The most reliable signal of whether you're going somewhere has nothing to do with your last performance rating. It's whether your manager is saying your name in rooms you'll never see.
In calibration sessions across both companies, the majority of the promotions that actually moved had a manager who walked in already building the case — who'd been planting the story before the room came together. The other third were stalled or passed, despite the person having a strong record. The machine runs on momentum, and momentum has to be created by someone. Usually that someone is your manager.
Most people have a sense of which situation they're in. They just don't ask.
Ask directly. Here's the exact question — send it by email if that makes it easier:
"I want to make sure I'm well-positioned for what's next. Can you tell me what you've said about my work or my trajectory to your peers or your own leadership in the last quarter? And if that conversation hasn't happened yet — what would it take for it to?"
Watch what comes back. Something specific — a promotion discussion, a project they flagged on your behalf, a room where your name came up — means someone is actively carrying your case. Vagueness, or a pivot from your positioning to your performance, is also information.
Most of what happens in that room isn't about you. Whether your manager shows up with the story half-told isn't fully in your control. What you can control is finding out which situation you're in, and doing it now rather than at the end of another quarter.
The feedback you're getting is managed communication
Exit interviews are one of the great organisational farces.
I ran hundreds of them. Most of what comes back is a managed version — the real reason stays in the room, shaped for the reference and for the relationships that will outlast the job. That's not a criticism. By the time someone is in the exit interview chair, they still need the reference, they're still connected to their team, and they've run out of energy for institutional honesty. The interview arrives at the worst possible moment for candour.
The same dynamic runs through ordinary feedback. Philosophers of knowledge call this epistemic cowardice — the preference for vague over honest because the social cost of honesty is simply too high inside an ongoing relationship. Most organisations run on it. Feedback gets softened, shaped for the next conversation you'll have to have with that person in the hallway. The result is that most people have very little accurate idea how they're actually perceived by the people who decide what happens to them.
Find someone with nothing to gain from managing your reaction. A peer who's moved on. A former manager at a company where you no longer work. Someone who will give you the unpackaged version, over coffee, outside any performance cycle. That one conversation is worth more than a year of structured reviews.
Culture documents describe the company as it wishes it was
Most people who write them believe every word. I don't say that cynically. But culture is what surfaces under pressure — not in the mission statement, in who carries the cost when something goes wrong and how directly that gets addressed.
Two diagnostics that actually work:
- Ask what happened the last time something went genuinely wrong. Who carried the cost? Was it addressed directly and quickly, or through a slow drift of reshuffling and silence? You're not looking for a company that never has hard moments. You're looking for one that knows how it handles them.
- Ask people who've been there more than two years what they wish they'd known before joining. Not what they love about working there — that question has too easy an answer. The gap between what they love and what they wish they'd known is where the actual culture lives.
Two conversations, thirty minutes each. More reliable than any amount of Glassdoor research.
The title is a lagging indicator
I made silk at thirty-eight. In HR, that meant reaching the level where what I was called roughly matched what I'd been doing for years. I spent a long time thinking the title was the thing worth chasing.
It isn't. And I've watched capable people grind for two years toward a Director or VP designation while the real scope of their work quietly contracted. They got the badge. Monday felt the same.
What actually shifts — what I've seen consistently change how people feel about their work, week to week — is the complexity of the problem they're handed, the quality of the people around them, and whether their judgment is treated as a real input or a bureaucratic checkpoint. Those compound over time. The title is a lagging indicator of them, at best.
In any role negotiation, push on what you'd own outright — what decisions are genuinely yours, without a sign-off chain — rather than on what you'd be called. If that question gets a vague answer, adjust your read of the offer accordingly.
When you know, you know
This is the call I get most. Usually at seven in the morning, from someone who's been sitting with it longer than they'd admit.
There's a moment — quiet, often — where the internal signal arrives. A decision gets made above you that you'd have called differently, and instead of feeling surprised, you feel confirmed. A peer gets promoted and instead of feeling competitive, you feel done. The signal is precise. It arrives well before the official reasoning does.
The reasoning follows later. The LinkedIn post about new opportunities, the exit survey citing limited growth. All real. Mostly post-hoc.
Staying long enough to finish what you're doing, to set yourself up properly on the way out, to let the next step actually come into view — that takes real discipline and it's worth it. But taking the signal seriously when it arrives, rather than spending eighteen months building the case for why it doesn't mean what it means, is also a skill.
Give yourself a month. Then write down what would need to be true for this role to be exactly what you need in six months. If you can't write the list — or writing it makes you feel tired — you've already written the other one. You just haven't looked at it yet.
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Back in that Sydney conference room, someone cleared the whiteboard. Fifteen names, gone. Most of those people got a message the following week from someone who'd been in the room, relaying a decision made without them.
The ones who landed well weren't necessarily the strongest performers. They were the ones whose managers had walked in with the story already half-told.
Which of these reads is sitting closest to a conversation you're currently treating as optional?
