11 Nov Should I Go for the VP Promotion or Leave Corporate?

A Director I was coaching had spent several months preparing for exactly this moment. Then the senior VP left the company, my client was invited to put themselves forward, and other candidates were already in the running. I remember that call very well, because the first thing my client told me was that they were no longer sure they wanted it.

That is how this dilemma often arrives. A senior colleague leaves and the role opens up, a headhunter messages you on LinkedIn about a VP job at another company, or your manager invites you to a first conversation about stepping up to VP. A plan becomes a real possibility, and a decision you thought you had made starts to move again.

Fourteen years in investment banking before I faced my own version of this question taught me how loud a title can be. In this article I look at what really changes when a Director becomes a VP, how the other paths compare, and then at the two things that decide it: the identity question and the numbers.

Does a VP vacancy or a headhunter’s call tell you whether to go for it?

An opportunity starts the question and almost never answers it. In my work with Directors and VPs, that moment is usually what brings someone to coaching, and most of our sessions are then about the internal questions it has stirred up.

Notice that a move to another company is often a promotion too. A bigger role elsewhere brings what a VP title brings at home: a different kind of responsibility, leaving the comfort of what you have mastered, and creative answers you have not needed before. That happens wherever you sit.

And not every question starts with an opportunity at work. The birth of a child or parents who are getting older can make you look at your career far more strategically than any performance review does.

What changes when a Director becomes a VP?

A VP role is a different identity, and it takes time to grow into. The scope widens from your own function to the business as a whole, and so does the responsibility: more people, more of their work, and decisions whose consequences reach well beyond your team. The questions change too. Fewer of them have a right answer, and more of them ask for strategic judgement and creativity rather than expertise.

Directors already lead through other people, so the shift is less about delegating and more about how you think. A Director is usually valued for owning a defined area and running it superbly. A VP is valued for setting direction across areas, holding the bigger picture when the information is incomplete, and being the person others look to when the answer is unclear.

That is why clients in their first months as a VP often tell me some version of the same thing: what exactly is my value now? At this level the value is less visible. It shows up in the direction you set and the decisions you make, rather than in output anyone can point to, and it can feel almost like being an imposter until the new identity settles. It is the same pattern behind why high-performing Directors stop getting promoted.

The shift can be learnt. One Director in tech I worked with was promoted to VP within six months, with CHF 75,000 more in total compensation, and stopped working weekends. The promotion came once they had started to think and act like a VP, which is the part no offer letter can do for you.

Why does a VP promotion feel like a loss as well as a win?

Every step up includes an ending. More money, more status, perhaps an equity stake and a seat where the bigger decisions are made are all real. To enjoy them, you have to let go of the Director identity that served you so well: the expert in your own area, the one with the clearest view of the detail. That letting go deserves its proper name, which is grief.

The author and consultant William Bridges, who spent his career studying transitions, described them in three phases, now known as the Bridges Transition Model: an ending, an uncertain in-between he called the neutral zone, and only then a new beginning. People who try to skip the ending tend to carry the old role into the new one.

You will recognise that VP. They are still deep in the detail of the function they came from, defending its interests in the leadership meeting and waiting for a brief they are now meant to write. Learning to step up without burning out starts with noticing that pull.

My client from the opening was standing right at that ending. The vacancy stirred up questions about what the role would mean: more responsibility, more creativity, and the confidence to trust that they could rise to all of it at once. In that session we worked at a deeper level, with the body as well as the head, on what this new success and being a VP would mean in practice, now that it was truly available. After that session my client felt completely ready. We prepared for the interviews together, and quickly, because the other candidates were not waiting. They got the role.

I still think of that call. They were ready, and they had wanted it for months, yet the moment the opportunity arrived it shook the identity underneath. I see the same moment again and again: we freeze just before the big dream, as if something in us senses how much will change the moment we step up.

How do the five paths compare?

The honest answer depends on where you would go, because each path changes something different: your team, your income, your days. Besides the promotion inside your company, there are four other paths: a bigger role at another company, your own consultancy or business, staying and reshaping the role you have, and a severance package or a lower role.

With a new employer, look at the responsibility, the team you would inherit and the company’s mission as closely as the package. I have seen clients take a VP title elsewhere and find, later, that the new company’s values were different from what they expected. That gap slowly drained the pleasure and the sense of achievement out of a role they had worked hard to win. It happens more often than people expect: in McKinsey’s research on leadership transitions, between 27 and 46 percent of executive transitions were regarded as failures or disappointments two years in, and 68 percent of those that struggled foundered on politics, culture and people.

Building your own consultancy or business uses muscles corporate life rarely lets you grow: selling, pricing your own time and living with an uneven income. It is a different muscle, one that can be trained and that takes time.

Staying deserves the same attention as going up or going out. Reshaping the role you already have, by choice, can be as ambitious as the promotion, and clients who do it tend to walk into the next big conversation already knowing what they want from the next chapter.

Sometimes the conversation is less welcome: a severance package, or a role at a lower level inside the company. If job cuts started your question, read what to do when job cuts hit the headlines first. The same questions apply, and the table below puts the five paths side by side.

Path	What changes	What you let go of	Numbers to check
Step up to VP in your company	Wider responsibility, strategic judgement, setting direction across functions	Being the expert in your own area	Package, equity, the hours it will take
A bigger role at another company	A new team, new politics, a values check	Your reputation and network inside	New package against unvested equity and pension left behind
Your own consultancy or business	Selling, pricing, an uneven income	The salary and the title	Months of runway, savings, the family’s fixed costs
Stay and reshape the role you have	Redesigning the job by choice	The idea that only up or out counts	What you would trade for evenings and weekends back
Severance or a lower role	Deciding on someone else’s timetable	The role you expected to have	The package against the months to your next income

How do you decide between the VP promotion and leaving?

The first of the two deciding things is identity. You find out which new role you can grow into, and how fast, by testing it rather than by trying to think your way to the right answer. Going up and leaving both mean letting go of an old identity and giving birth to a new one. The choice that works is the one you can step into with some pleasure and a sense of meaning.

So the useful questions are personal. How much of the VP do you already embody: do you think about the whole business rather than your own area, take a position when the information is incomplete, and feel at ease being responsible for work you will never see up close? And how much of the Director you have been still lives in your habits, your calendar and your body? Those answers predict more than the size of the package.

Herminia Ibarra, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, studied 39 people who changed careers and concluded in her book Working Identity that doing comes first and knowing second. In practice, that means rehearsing the new role before you hold it.

You might lead an initiative that crosses functions, put forward a view on the strategy for the area above yours, hold a strategy conversation without the safety of detail, or, if leaving is on your mind, take one small paid project outside work. A few weeks of that tells you more than months of thinking alone, because the decision has to feel right in your body as well as make sense in your head. If you have been turning the question over for a long time, why we put off career decisions may help.

Which numbers should you check before choosing VP or leaving?

The second deciding thing is the numbers. Check what each path costs and pays, month by month, so the decision rests on facts as well as feelings. Sometimes leaving for another opportunity is very good for you financially. Sometimes unvested equity or the pension makes staying two more years the wiser move.

I always ask clients to run a practical cost-benefit analysis for each path: income, savings, pension, investments, and what the family’s fixed costs need. I call it mapping the numbers, and it does not replace a financial adviser.

Often the numbers alone rule one path in or out. When they do not, the identity question above decides it, which is why the two belong in the same conversation.

What I learned leaving investment banking without a plan

I spent fourteen years in investment banking across four countries. In the middle of one of the largest mandates I had worked on, I realised I had stopped caring about the work, and I had been running the question of what came next in the background for years.

So I left the way people leave when they have waited too long: suddenly, and without a plan. Leaving was right for me. Doing it without a plan cost me, and a bigger title would not have answered the question I was really asking.

That is why I now help Directors and VPs decide while the question is still a question, with their head, their body and their numbers. Underneath it sits the question of whether you want the next ten years to look like this.

Should you go for the VP promotion or leave corporate?

Neither the VP title nor a headhunter’s call will make this decision for you. What makes it is how far you already embody the identity the next role needs, and whether the numbers work for the path you choose.

If you pictured yourself at seventy, looking back at this year, which version of you would you want to have chosen?

Warmly,
Danguole

Danguole Litvinskaite is an ICF PCC executive coach and former investment banker who helps corporate Directors and VPs facing a big career decision choose whether to stay and reshape their role, step up to the promotion, or step out of corporate life, and then take the first concrete steps to make it happen.

Questions people ask about the VP promotion or leaving corporate

Is it a mistake to turn down a VP promotion?

Turning down a VP role is a mistake only when it happens by default. Staying by choice is one of three equal paths: stay, step up or step out. What matters is that you chose it, with your numbers mapped and the decision tested, rather than drifting into it out of fear or fatigue.

Can I go for the promotion and plan an exit at the same time?

Yes, and many senior leaders do exactly that. Going for the next role while building a way out in parallel keeps your options open. It works as long as you are honest about which path you are mainly working towards and how much energy each one can have.

How long does it take to grow into a VP role?

Longer than ninety days for most people. McKinsey’s research on leadership transitions found that 72 percent of internal hires and 92 percent of external hires take far more than ninety days to reach full productivity in a new leadership role. The identity shift usually takes longer than the title change.

Should I take a severance package or a lower role?

Ask the same two questions you would ask about any move: which identity can you grow into, and what do the numbers say month by month? A package buys you time and a lower role buys you stability. Map both before the deadline the company sets for you.