Act Your Next Level
A field guide to the observable behaviors that decide your level.
Most people think that the adjective “senior” is earned as a function of time and raw output.
I have been here five years. I am one of the most productive people on the team.
Yes, those things matter. But something else matters even more: observable behavior.
It is what people see you doing in real time, in your meetings, and in the messy middle of an incident, in the documents you write. And it’s in the things you do when nobody told you to do them.
When your actions don’t match the description of “senior,” you will remain at your current level, no matter how smart you are or how hard you work.
Today, I am going to hand you a clear lens on the behavior others are watching
In “The 7 Behaviors That Separate Juniors From Seniors,” I laid out seven concrete things that people at the next level do where others can see them. They will:
Arrive with options and a clear recommendation
Broadcast progress and blockers before anyone asks about status
Make the people around them better
Connect their work to business outcomes
Making progress while the requirements are still ambiguous
Creating their own scope
Knowing when “good enough” is genuinely good enough
Two of these behaviors are worth seeing in action.
Take arriving with options. A junior walks into the manager’s office and says, ‘The client is unhappy. What should I do?” A senior walks in armed with three options that will address the client’s real concerns, and the recommendation that they would make if it were their call. It is the same problem in both cases. But the second person did the thinking first, and they came in to get a decision made.
A junior on my team once handled a tough client issue exactly that way. They were promoted the next quarter.
Or take broadcasting progress. Most people report progress when their manager asks for it. The ones who get noticed will send it before they’re asked: what they have shipped so far, and the risk they have just spotted, with the fix already in motion. Every update provided in that manner is one less thing your manager has to chase. And good managers tend to promote the people who make their own jobs lighter.
Now read the full piece with a highlighter and ask yourself the same question for each of the seven behaviors: Do my peers and managers see me doing this? If so, where?
You will mostly find that you already do these things, but you have simply never made them visible to the people who rate you.
This is what I would underline harder in 2026. As more work goes remote and more output gets assisted by AI, the people who advance will be the ones who over-index on visible leadership behavior.
Put another way, quietly doing great work in the corner no longer gets noticed the way it used to.
Full breakdown (paid) → “The 7 Behaviors That Separate Juniors From Seniors”
If this hit a nerve, here are three more from the archive. The full versions are paid, but the core of each one is right here.
Senior on paper, but still capped? The sharpest idea in the sequel article is communicating at the right altitude. I once gave two people the same feedback: “Work on your communication.” The first person started talking more in meetings and writing longer emails with bigger words. The second one went quiet for two weeks, then came back opening his notes to leadership with a plain-language summary of what mattered and why, saving the technical depth for the people who needed it.
One of those people is at the same level today. The other was promoted within a year.
Adjust what you say to who is in the room with you. That single shift constitutes most of what reads as senior. Full piece (paid): “7 More Behaviors That Separate Juniors From Seniors”
Worried you come across as junior without meaning to? These tells live in your temperament, and the most expensive one is visible irritation. I sat through a planning meeting once where a strong mid-level engineer sat the whole hour with his arms crossed, and at one point muttered “This is ridiculous!” loud enough for the front row to hear.
He was probably right, but that did not matter. He had been slated for the next level, but within a year, he had stalled. He likely never connected that meeting to the years that followed.
The fix costs nothing. When you feel a sigh coming, treat it as a signal that you have something worth saying, and turn it into a question that moves the room. For example, “Can we pause and name what we are deciding here?” This way, the same instinct that would have leaked out as contempt becomes the thing that gets the meeting unstuck. Full piece (paid): “4 Behaviors That Make You Look Junior”
Indispensable in a crisis, but stuck at your level? The habit that traps the most people is being the go-to firefighter. Being first to every emergency feels heroic and earns you the kind of praise that feels like job security. But it also locks you in reactive mode, and the strategic, high-visibility work will pass to people who are not buried in incidents.
Worse, if you are the only one who can fix the thing, you will have quietly made yourself the bottleneck, and the team will never level up around you.
The people who break out of this mode are those who build the systems and the teammates who can extinguish fires without them. That looks like leadership to the people above you. Full piece (paid): “Code Isn’t Enough: 7 ‘Smart’ Habits Stalling Your Tech Career”
If you do nothing else this week, do this one thing. Pick one of the seven behaviors and determine where your manager will clearly see you doing it in the next seven days. Then engineer that moment on purpose.
That is how the “senior” label will begin to catch up to your behavior.
Top Tier
If you want to know exactly which behaviors you are already showing and which ones remain invisible, that is what Top Tier is built for. Top Tier lets you meet regularly with someone one to two levels above you, the kind of person who can see where you stand and hand you the exact moves to close the gap. See if Top Tier is right for you.
I Coached an Ex-Microsoft Manager for His Netflix Interview
After 19 years at Microsoft, John expected his track record to speak for itself. It didn’t. A year into his search for an engineering manager role at Netflix, the interviews keep ending the same way.
His experience is all there, but the stories aren’t showing it. I coach John live on exactly what’s getting in the way.