At a top 5 global technology company where I coach, promotion rates for a large cohort of upper managers are expected to plummet to just 2%. Across industries, companies spent $37 billion on generative AI in 2025—up from $11.5 billion in 2024—creating pressure to implement AI investments while simultaneously ‘thinning out’ middle management. And while every traditional path to growth—promotions, new roles, lateral moves—has essentially closed, you’re still feeling pressure to “grow.”
Here’s the bottom line: the next 12 months will separate managers who stagnate from those who emerge stronger. Those who treat this as a gap year for their career will be the ones leadership remembers when budgets loosen. For many of you, 2026 is bound to be a year that stretches your creative adaptation abilities, and yes, requires a little patience and self-compassion.
If you’re an executive already feeling stuck in your current role while the job market has gone quiet, you’re facing a critical question: how do you pursue personal growth when you can’t move internally or externally. As the executive coach of 30-40 executives at a given moment, I’m observing this angst as underlying tension in practically every client. I see the ambition, the uncertainty and the desire for more clarity on how to respond to what many feel is an existential threat.
This underlying tension raises three important questions you need to consider in the current environment:
&How can you reframe personal growth as independent of immediate promotions and increases in compensation?
&How can you pursue personal growth strategies in a way that serves your desire for job protection and career advancement?
&How can you avoid the conflation trap of personal growth and career advancement?
Framing Personal Growth
Reframing personal growth in itself can be the first step in achieving it. In a market where people are changing jobs less frequently and companies are reducing middle management layers, there’s an even greater need to think about how you frame your personal growth, how you can achieve it, and how it can connect to specific career advancement goals.
Personal growth is a process that has two specific purposes: to enhance your ability to create value for an organization and to experience more personal fulfillment. This can be achieved by expanding and strengthening your capabilities, growing your knowledge base, and better aligning who you are with what you do, or a combination of these three.
Here’s the key: you typically must develop competencies for the bigger role before you get promoted to it.. Think of the current business environment as a traffic jam on your commute to work: if you’re like most, you often spend your time listening to audio books and articles to grow your knowledge. In a job market traffic jam, you can do the same.
Let’s start with enhancing your capabilities. When you think about your organization’s business goals and objectives, and the role you’re interested in eventually assuming, what are the most important competencies and knowledge areas; how do you personally align?
Here are some examples of skills you could focus on in your development:
&How effective are you at building support for new initiatives across functional areas?
-What about supporting your team with advising and coaching?
&Given your functional area, what new technology is coming that you’ll need to understand and use?
&How do you feel about workplace confrontation; are you able to harness it to advance your organization?
&What about your own self-awareness: what are your strengths and when can they work for and against your leadership effectiveness?
Create a Development Plan
Once you understand your priority growth opportunities, the next step is to develop a precise and realistic plan. Your plan will need to consider the most impactful changes you need to make to better qualify for an eventual promotion that offers more responsibility and higher compensation.
While it may be tempting to believe that personal growth comes from a promotion that enables the growth of new abilities, the converse is generally truer: expanding your capabilities leads to a promotion and related higher compensation. If you’re going to be stuck in the same role for a while, look around the organization for projects that offer opportunities to build the competencies in your Development Plan. Speak with your boss, peers and other senior leaders to learn what needs might align with your Development Plan.
Here are two real cases from my coaching.
John is a senior Director at a large technology company. When his promotion stalled, he decided to work with his team on strengthening their collective understanding of generative AI and how the technology might change how they meet their goals and objectives. By doing so, my client began to add a new competency to his repertoire and gain tangible experience and results for future roles requiring AI technology qualifications and experience. Perhaps most importantly, John felt more empowered and in control of his destiny.
Marie is a Vice President in a European based media company stuck in an insights and analytic role. She struggled with her inability to rise to the next level and with how technology is changing how media is used. Instead of spending her time looking for new roles, she’s decided to focus on strengthening her leadership effectiveness and pick 1-2 projects to begun executing that will make her feel more up to date on the technical aspects of media. Since she developed her plan, her self-confidence has risen and she’s less worried about her next promotion: with more qualifications, she knows it’s just a matter of time.
Avoid the Growth-Advancement Conflation Trap
But this is where many managers stumble in a low-turnover, AI-charged economy: they forget that that abilities generally precede career advancement.
And this conflation – between career advancement and personal growth—can act as a barrier to long term career development. Too often, the goal of career advancement relates more to preserving or elevating social status, leading to an unhelpful focus on short-term promotions and compensation.
On the one hand, personal growth—the process of making competency gains—can reduce the risk of job loss, make you more marketable, and even increase the odds of a promotion and a bigger bonus. On the other hand, too often the focus is on getting a promotion and earning more money and not on strengthening areas that could lead to these outcomes.
When you’re worried about a lack of advancement and feeling frustrated, consider developing your growth plan first, informed by the role you desire, and start executing on immediately.
Growth Also Means Finding Personal Satisfaction and Fulfillment
When is there ever time (or even a desire because it can feel dangerous) to step back and make space to reflect on your level of satisfaction with your work. While you keep your eye out for the next opportunity to rise up in hierarchy and earn more income, you may also want to take the time to consider what changes you need to feel more in balance. That’s right, what are the aspects of work that motivate and demotivate you, that put you in a more balanced life where you thrive.
In the Science of Leadership, Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore suggest three categories of factors that motivate people in general:
Joy.
You really enjoy it e.g. prototyping applications. This aligns well with the concept of Flow described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Finding Flow.
Meaning.
You find meaning in it, generally feeling positive about connecting with something larger than yourself, e.g. the environment.
Rewards.
You value the resultant rewards e.g. money, prestige, power.
Thinking about your work, what motivates you the most? Which aspects of your work bring you joy – how could you do more of these? Which projects do you find meaning in or could you find meaning in? What about the rewards of your work: do you feel they are sufficient? What could you change to get the rewards you want? Given your assessment, how would you change the work you do and the projects you work on? How does this affect what your team is working on?
Here’s an exercise to try: using a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest possible, in each of the three motivation buckets, how would you rate your motivation in your current role? What can you learn from these ratings?
If you’re looking to pursue personal growth by better understanding what motivates and fulfills you, consider also conducting a Timeline of Life exercise. This is an exercise I conduct with most of my clients as part of the onboarding process. Here’s how it works:
Draw a horizontal line using a large piece of paper in landscape format.
Above the line indicate positive incidents and below the line negative incidents.
Indicate a mark on the horizontal line every five years, perhaps starting with middle or high school and ending in the present.
On the piece of paper write the most important incidences during the years marked on the line e.g. in high school, in college, at work, at home.
Viewing these incidents, consider what you learned and how can it move you forward with a goal of better aligning what motivates and fulfills you with what you do for work. By taking time to reflect using this or other exercises, you may see an opportunity to redirect your career path.
Acting Now
Personal growth is a goal most of us can rally around. What is meant by personal growth, however, can vary. When you think about personal growth, ask yourself “what does personal growth mean to me?”
When the job market slows and available opportunities for career advancement diminish, it’s a wonderful opportunity to use your creative adaptive skills, to keep growth and building for more success in your career.
This week, identify one capability gap and one project in your organization that could help you close it. Then schedule a conversation with your manager to discuss how you might contribute.