September 9, 2025

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short in Breaking Through a Career Plateau

By: Michael Lee

You’ve worked hard. You’ve achieved significant milestones. You’re a seasoned professional, respected in your field, and you know you have more to offer. Yet, lately, something feels…stuck. The upward trajectory has flattened. Promotions are slower, challenges feel less stimulating, and the path to senior leadership seems less clear than ever.

Welcome to the mid-career plateau–a common, yet frustrating reality for many ambitious professionals. You are not alone, as most people face these same challenges at some point in their careers. What separates certain highly motivated individuals from the pack and positions them for future success is how they manage this plateau.

The Illusion of “Doing More of the Same”

When faced with a career plateau, many individuals instinctively try to double down on what got them here–working harder, taking on more responsibilities, maybe even earning another certification in their specific domain. While commendable, these traditional approaches often fall short for one fundamental reason: what got you to the mid-career stage isn’t what will get you through it.

Here’s why these common strategies rarely lead to breakthroughs:

“Just Work Harder” Isn’t Strategic: Throwing more hours at your current role might earn you recognition, but it won’t necessarily position you for strategic leadership. Senior roles demand foresight, influence, and the ability to drive change across an organization, not just increased output.
Generic Training Misses the Mark: Off-the-shelf leadership programs often lack the depth, personalization, and sustained application needed to transform a mid-career manager into a rising leader. Development at this stage must move away from broad strokes and be replaced with personalized feedback and precision-point transformation.
Untapped Sponsorship Potential: While informal mentorship can be valuable, it often depends on chance encounters and provides advice without offering a structured, holistic framework for identifying specific gaps, building new competencies, and navigating complex organizational politics. Rising leaders who are successful have advocates (or “sponsors”) in rooms where career opportunities are being discussed.
Superficial Networking: Simply collecting business cards or LinkedIn connections won’t cut it. Authentic senior leadership requires building a strategic network of peers and mentors who can offer genuine insights, open doors, and champion your growth. This requires intentionality and a shared commitment to mutual advancement.
Focusing Only on Technical Skills/Ignoring Soft Skills: At a certain point, technical expertise becomes table stakes. Senior leaders are distinguished by their strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, ability to lead diverse teams, influence without authority, and navigate ambiguity. Traditional approaches often neglect these critical yet powerful “soft” skills.

The Missing Piece: A Transformative, Advanced Solution

Breaking through the mid-career plateau requires a paradigm shift in your approach to professional development. To effectively overcome this challenge, investing in a structured leadership development program can be a valuable and transformative next step. Leadership development programs can offer guidance and hands-on learning opportunities that empower you with tools to reach new heights. As you prepare to take leaps in your career, you need more than just knowledge; you need catalytic experiences that provide:

Opportunity for Self-Reflection: You need to understand your strengths and blind spots, and how they influence your leadership style, especially under pressure. A rigorous understanding of your leadership style, strengths, and blind spots should be explicitly tailored to your aspirations.
Personalized Guidance: Utilizing a C-suite executive coach who can act as a strategic partner will help you navigate complex career decisions and understand what it takes to operate and perform at the highest levels.
Safe Space for Learning and Testing Skills: As leadership responsibilities grow, so does the pressure. Practicing senior leadership skills in safe, simulated real-world scenarios is crucial for understanding how to utilize your strengths and manage weaknesses under pressure.
A Curated Peer Network: Relying solely on a few colleagues or a mentor for feedback, organizational navigation, and understanding unwritten rules is insufficient. You need to establish a personal “Board of Directors” to achieve a comprehensive understanding of your personal brand, successfully guide your career within the organization, and access new opportunities. This should be a hand-selected cohort of high-potential, diverse leaders who challenge, support, and inspire you.
Playbook for Executive Leadership: Do you ask the right questions to the right people? Do you know the difference between expectations and what truly sets you apart? Are you perceived as having an executive presence? A playbook for achieving executive leadership is crucial.

This is precisely where the best leadership development programs stand apart. Unlike traditional, fragmented approaches, they are specifically engineered for accomplished mid-career professionals looking to make the leap. But before investing in any program of this type, one should make sure that it is structured, results-oriented, delivers clear steps and measurable outcomes, and is explicitly designed to accelerate the climb to senior leadership.

These requirements provide the criteria that we used to create MLT’s Career Advancement Program (CAP) and Foundations for Advancement (FFA). We designed these programs to be strategic investments in personal transformation which go beyond traditional training courses.

FFA is a six week virtual program that is designed to lay the foundation for understanding the personal challenges that keep many mid-career professionals from advancing their career and ultimately get the most value out of the full CAP program. Following the critical groundwork done in FFA, many of our Fellows will continue on to CAP, a 9-month program that completes the journey of self-discovery, and provides impact that follows all participants throughout their careers.

If you’re ready to stop pushing against a ceiling and start ascending to your full leadership potential, contact FFA@mlt.org if you’d like to learn more about Foundations for Advancement, or CAP@mlt.org to learn more about our Career Advancement Program. You can also visit the Career Advancement center at https://mlt.org/career-advancement-program/ to get more details. Either way, we look forward to helping you figure out the next steps that are right for you.