Melody Wilding: If you are a senior manager, a director, an experienced IC, individual contributor, then listen up. Today I am talking to you, and I wanna get into how and why summer, right now, these next three months or so, are a crucial career advancement window for you to capitalize on. And I get it that that may sound completely backwards because isn’t summer the time when everyone is slowing down?

You’re going to be taking PTO, your kids are out of school, they have camps, they have a very irregular schedule, so things are anything but predictable. By the end of this episode, you are going to have a completely different perspective. You are going to be light years ahead of everyone else when it comes to proactively positioning yourself for the opportunities you want. Whether that is a formal promotion or we’re talking about something more along the lines of a scope expansion, the headcount you’ve been needing, a bigger budget, a seat in planning sessions.

Whatever it is, this is not going to be me telling you you need to grind harder. I’m not going to say outwork everyone, sacrifice your summer, be answering Slack from the beach. That’s not what we’re talking about. I am a summer lover. I’m a summer baby. I 100% get it if you crave, if you wait all year for that slower pace, the long evenings, the space that comes along with it.

If you have been counting down the days to that vacation you have You can have that and maximize this time period for your career growth in a way you never have before. So what I’m going to be describing today isn’t necessarily about volume and doing the most, but it requires a more sophisticated skill set.

One aspect of that is situational diagnosis, and by situational diagnosis, I mean that is the ability to look at a situation, or in this case, a season, that everyone else sees as, “Well, nothing’s happening here, I might as well coast,” and refuse the pull of the obvious or the surface level story, and instead decode accurately what is truly happening, especially on the relational, the emotional, the political realm.

Because let me tell you, plenty is happening there, especially when we are talking about things that actually make senior level advancement, which is often the softer, the more invisible, less tangible side of things. It’s the narrative, trust building around your readiness, your level of capability. And that goes hand in hand with a second skill set, which is foresight.

You are seasoned. You are mature enough to know that nothing I just mentioned happens overnight. Advancement always requires runway, and usually it requires much more runway than you would ever like or expect it to. Yet we keep our heads down. We just focus on the next project or the fire that is right in front of us.

We set aside all of this work we’re gonna talk about today, and I won’t lie, it is work. It does take effort, but we do that because it feels too hard or too vague, abstract, like I, I don’t know what to do or who I would talk to or where to begin. And so we tell ourselves, “Well, if it were going to happen, then it would just happen.”

We have this passive faith that good things find good people, which we consider ourselves, and I’m sure you are, but that lets us off the hook from doing the uncomfortable and deliberate part. And then we totally check out and we say, “You know what? I’ll just deal with this in the fall when things are back in full swing,” only to wake up in October and then be upset when we don’t have the opportunities, the pay, the cachet, the reputation that we want and we feel we deserve.

So if you want to be in next year’s plan, you have to be in the conversation while the clay is still wet, while it is still being formed. I’m gonna talk more about this later. If you wait until September, all the decisions are made, the money is allocated, the projects are assigned, and you are the one who is behind the eight ball.

We do not want that happening to you. This is a conversation I’m having with our highest level clients inside of Lead From Within, that is my advisory, mastermind program, and that is that everything you want is the result of positioning that happened months earlier. The conversations, visibility, relationships, the evidence of your impact, all of that has to be planted now.

So I’m saying all of this to drive home that you do not have to trade your summer for your ambition. You can have pool time and you can capitalize on the runway required to be in line for the next role you want. You can go ahead and take that treasured PTO and be the person who sets themselves up for the rest of the year and beyond.

So I wanna take you inside, give you some of the hidden reasons that the summer slowdown is actually the preseason. It is not the off-season for your future, especially at the mid and senior level. All right.

Number one reason why this is true, decision makers are suddenly within reach and they are more willing to talk.

Summer gives you so many organic, lower stakes, face time opportunities with the exact people who are shaping your opportunities and who may, in many cases, be nearly impossible for you to get access to, especially real time extended access to, the rest of the year. Just think about, let’s take the case of your skip level.

Think about what their calendar looks like in the spring or the fall. It is a war zone in there. They are back-to-back double booked. Every 30-minute slot is spoken for for weeks and weeks and weeks out. Getting a conversation with that person, it, it means you have to jump through hoops, you have to comp- compete with their board prep, the 30 other people who want the same 15 minutes as you do Now, though, if we look at that same calendar in June, July, August, many of their direct reports are rotating going out on PTO.

So chunks of their standing one-on-ones are freed up. The status meetings that usually eat up a lot of their week, they are paused or they are at least more thinned out because half of the attendees are at the beach. Client, partner activity, all of that slows down, so those external fires they have to put out, that settles a bit, too.

Recruiting, interviewing that be- they may be leaped- looped into, rather, that slows down as well. And so all of that, it’s adding up to this very rare white space that they have And it’s not just that they have more time, it’s also that they’re in a different mode of receptiveness. So those executives during this time, right, during the summer, they tend to be in a bit more reflective.

They’re a bit more zoomed out in terms of their head space, rather than just laser-focused on execution. So they are more willing than any other time to have longer conversations with you about what they are seeing across the org, where they think the back half of the year is heading, what they are thinking about for early on next year.

And I am not just talking about your direct leadership line here. I know I use that example of your skip level, but over the summer, you have so many chances to access other executives, other team leads, board members, top customers, and clients. And why is that? Well, we have all of these summer events happening, right?

All of that summer fun, whether it’s the company, uh, volunteer day, it’s a picnic, it’s an offsite. You have an all-hands with cocktail hour afterward. Now, listen, all of this is coming from an introvert myself. And hear me when I say these events are not just social niceties that you can just across the board skip.

They are exposure. They are visibility vehicles. The higher you go, the less your progress depends on just your direct boss, the more it depends on the web of people above you and beyond your function. There are many voices in the mix that determine if and when your name comes up for that stretch project, for example.

It is not just your manager, it is their peers. It’s the leader of the cross-functional team you’ll have to partner with. It’s the C-level who has to sign off on the final headcount. These people may not experience your work directly day to day. They experience the reputation of you and your work, many times secondhand, filtered through whatever impression they have happened to independently form of you along the way.

And if they have no impression of you, that’s not a good place to be. You are an unknown quantity. You are just a name on a slide who your boss is advocating for, which makes you much more easy to question, deprioritize, and pass over. So your boss can nominate you for opportunities, but more times than not, they cannot by themselves promote you into the collective consciousness of the other decision-makers and upper leadership.

That part you have to earn. You have to cultivate that through exposure. And what summer offers you is an unstructured version of this. Right? Going back to that volunteer day where you’re packing boxes next to the COO, and you end up talking about her kid’s soccer team. You are at that company picnic, and the head of product wanders over to your table because all the other tables are taken.

There’s the off-site dinner where after, you know, all the formal sessions end, people are hanging out over a glass of wine, and the conversation drifts to what people are really worried about and thinking about heading into the next year. These are the important moments where those inaccessible leaders, they stop being titles.

They start being people, and where you, by the same token, you stop being just a name or a title. You start being a person, too. Plus, decision-makers, they form their opinion on who is, quote, unquote, “executive material” precisely in the moments when your guard is down, not when you are performing at the front of the room, when you are posturing, when you are delivering that polished update that you have rehearsed, when you have slides to back you up.

They’re making assessments of you when you don’t realize they are making assessments. They are watching how you carry yourself when there is no agenda, whether you are gracious. Are you grasping when nothing is at stake? Can you hold a conversation about something other than your own area? Are you curious about them, the broader business, or are you just really constrained to your little narrow lane?

Do you make people around you feel comfortable? Do you bring out the best of them? Do you make them feel anxious? Do you have the kind of presence, ease, judgment that they want near them, that they literally want to sit beside? So please make the most of these casual, these off-script moments as you can. I am not saying, and you cannot and should not take advantage of every single one of them.

That is how you will spread yourself thin, and I know if you have a parent, if you are a parent, you have other responsibilities. It’s not possible for you to be everywhere all at once. But as you can, show up, be present, let people experience you as a different version of yourself, as just a human, not someone who is performing.

Reason number two summer is the ideal time for your mid and s- senior level advancement, you stepping in to cover for your colleagues is your audition for the next level. This actually happened to one of our Lead From Within clients recently. She’s a director at a large health system. I’ll call her Paulina.

Her boss went out for about three weeks on a vacation abroad on a safari, so they were totally off the grid, and in the meantime, Paulina was the one who was tapped as his stand-in for the very first time. She was the one who was going to represent him, the entire function in their ELT executive team meetings with his peers in situations that she normally would only hear about secondhand.

And I wanna be honest about how this started because it wasn’t pretty from the beginning. She didn’t step in with this confidence and bravado like, “I got this. I’m so excited.” And I think you may recognize yourself in that. That first week she was freaked out. She was stressed, and that old imposter voice surfaced.

It was very loud. The, “Am I good enough? Do I actually belong here? What if I say the wrong thing in front of these important people?” But to her credit, she did not cower. We coached her through it. By mid-second week, it was like something had flipped. That fear was replaced by a completely different attitude, and she literally said, “Now I feel more like, bring it on.

What’s next?” And in her words she said she got her leadership legs back. She was proving to herself, this gave her the opportunity to prove to herself in real time that she could hold her own in those higher level, more pressure-filled conversations. She could be articulate. She could add value without her boss having to be there for validation or backup And I, I wanna share that too, because a mini lesson within here is you cannot think your way out of imposter syndrome from the sidelines.

Paulina got out of her head precisely because she was forced to step into a bigger seat. And that opportunity for coverage during someone else’s PTO, it did more for her and her growth, her confidence, than years of just thinking about it, intellectualizing about it could. Now, when her boss came back several weeks later, they debriefed.

He told her something huge, which is that his C-suite colleagues had gone out of their way to express how much they appreciated the work Paulina had delivered while she was the one holding down the fort. She didn’t ask for that feedback. She didn’t campaign for it, but they had formed such a strong opinion that they had to share it.

They felt compelled to share it with her boss because it stood out so much. And that had a ripple effect of elevating her even once her leader was back. He was now asking her to run some of those strategy sessions. The C-suite was now explicitly seeking her out for her input and her involvement more.

And a few months later, she was actually offered a promotion in another division, which, plot twist, she turned down. I think that is the biggest testament of all, because Paulina was in such a position of leverage now that she didn’t need the only opportunity that came to her. And so what I want you to take from this story is that coverage is not a chore, it is not a burden you just have to survive and grit your teeth through.

When a colleague, your leader, is out this summer and the work is thrust onto you, this is actually a huge chance for you to prove what you are capable of. It puts you in front of a bigger audience, a wider circle. Your colleague is probably in meetings, they are on email threads, they are in front of stakeholders who you normally don’t get any time with.

And now those people can either get to know you for the first time, or they can see you outside of the typical box they have slotted you into, because they are watching you make different, broader judgment calls, handling escalations, speaking to different parts of the business and strategy.

Reason number three now is the time to capitalize on your career advancement during the summer.

This is when the rest of the year and the beginning of the next year falls into place, and pun intended there. The decisions that will dictate your next 12, 18 months, they are being drafted as we speak. I’m recording this in June, and already our clients, who are the ones who are the top brass, they have already started having conversations about, “What are we investing in next year?

Where do we cut? Who’s ready to take on more? What should the team structure look like?” And at first, those talks tend to be loose. They’re exploratory. And going back to my clay analogy from, from earlier, the clay is still soft, it’s wet, but it’s starting to get shaped, right? People put their fingers in it and their fingerprints on it.

And then that turns into a, another form. That turns into budgets, headcount requests, calibration documents, org charts, strategy docs. And by the time you reach Q4, it is set in, set in stone. Things have hardened. They are reviewed, approved, and they are locked in. And yet fall is when most people just start thinking about these things.

It’s when they snap out of the summer haze to attention and start making their case for growth, the project they want, the promotion they want. And every single year, they’re disappointed when they’re too late, right? And they’re turned down or turned away. So again, your leverage is now to influence those inputs.

Plus, you need to keep in mind that we are moving into the heart of reorg and layoff season. There are some estimates, this is a report from Challenger, Gray, and Christmas that came out end of 2025, that shows that at the end of the year, the back half of the year, is when job cuts jump up to 40%. But again, this is a lagging effect.

The choice of who should stay, who should go, who should be moved where, that is all made around what I mentioned earlier, budget- budgeting, fiscal year planning, strategy resets, even if they’re not announced till a little bit later. Which means the same window where you can shape your role up is there.

But if you stay passive, your role can get stripped away from you. It can get totally taken out without your input. And so that’s exactly why I want you to see this as an opportunity that it can be, not just a risk. Because in stable times, your role is very fixed. It is hard to change. But during a restructure, during this more malleable time, the lines are being erased.

They’re being redrawn, and scope, ownership, reporting relationships, suddenly everything’s up for grabs. It’s thrown in the air in a way they almost never were. People are open to new ideas and ways of rethinking things. And so if you see just a reorg as a threat, you put your head in the sand and think, “You know what?

I’ll just wait to see how things shake out until the fall You are at the mercy of waiting to learn your fate. But if you understand, going back to our point before about foresight and situational diagnosis, if you apply that, if you lean in, get ahead of what’s coming, and help shape the new structure instead of letting yourself just get slotted into it, you have a tremendous advantage.

And so that’s why we have so many clients inside of Lead From Within who actually come out ahead in reorgs. We have one who went from having her team stripped away from her to six months later being named to lead a center of excellence and build a new function under her, because she knew how, during all of that upheaval, to surf the politics, to grow and influence org-wide during that, that very sensitive time.

So I, I hope you have really enjoyed this insider take on summer, how to make it work in your favor. These are the things people realize too late, and they suffer for it, which is why I wanted to do this episode. And now that you are deeper into your career, all of this matters that much more. The higher you climb, the more your advancement runs on access, relationships, being top of mind.

And as we’ve talked about today, summer hands you all of those things more than almost at any other time of the year.

And speaking of which, this is exactly why I’m hosting a brand-new free class on July 15th. It’s called Top of Mind and Tap for More: Leverage Q3 and Q4 to Rise into the Role, Projects, and Pay that Match Your Caliber. Just head to melodywilding.com/training. We have very limited spots, so make sure you sign up for that now.

This is an advanced training. It is specifically for senior managers, directors, VPs, heads of… People who are looking for nuanced, non-ChatGPT-able guidance about how to build org-wide influence and advance to the next level. It’s going to be entirely taught by me. You will be in very good hands. Two-time bestselling author here, award-winning executive coach to C-suite leaders across Google, Amazon, Apple, top officials at NATO, the UN, you name it.

And we’re going to make sure that you are leaving with the information you need to capitalize on the latter half of this year. And during this free event, enrollment will open for Lead From Within. This is my premier advisory and mastermind program. This is the final time we will be open in 2026. The doors will likely not open again until mid-2027.

So if sophisticated executive-level readiness and success strategy is what you want and you need, Lead From Within is where you need to be for weekly coaching and support with me. And since 2022, we have had hundreds of top performers at organizations like Clorox, Cigna, Lululemon, along with the federal government, top hospital systems, major nonprofits.

They have used Lead From Within to graduate from that, that reliable high-performing contributor to enterprise-level executive. This is an in-depth advisory for those of you who are ready to engineer your next move to the role, the scope, the salary you deserve by mastering four skill sets. Number one, nailing your personal brand so decision-makers see you as the obvious next choice, not a candidate they have to be sold on.

Number two, mastering the politics so you can build sponsorship and navigate blockers without having to sell your soul in the process. Number three, growing your people so your function is an example for the entire organization, and you finally have bandwidth for strategic work And four, pitching your promotion.

With our strategies, we give you step-by-step and coach you every step of the way for landing that bigger title and bigger paycheck. No more waiting for the right time that never comes. Now, what is very special about this enrollment of Lead From Within, Lead From Within is normally a six-month program, but for this enrollment only, you are getting three additional months.

You will have nine months total in the program at no additional cost. So the investment then c- comes out to less than $725 per month, which by comparison, is a complete and total steal for the level of world-class coaching access, the career-changing results you can get. So remember, applications, the enrollment for Lead From Within, it all kicks off with my free advanced training July 15th, Top of Mind and Tap for More.

You need to be there if you want to apply and get a spot to talk with me first, because last time, those spots to talk with me one-on-one, they filled up within 24 hours. So remember, grab your spot for that free training. It’s melodywilding.com/training. The link is in the show notes as well. I will see you there, and I will see you over in the next episode.