Career
The Most Under-Discussed Predictor of Career Success
- by Holly Burton
Have you ever taken a job where the odds of success were so low that international betting markets priced in 70% chance that a supermarket lettuce would outlast your tenure in the role?
(& even worse – ever taken the job and then watched the lettuce win?)
Yep, you, me, Liz Truss and countless other women have all done this at some point in our careers! Ok, maybe not exactly the whole getting-publicly-humiliated-by-a-lettuce thing, but we’ve all experienced the thing the lettuce represents: The Glass Cliff
The Glass Cliff
The glass cliff is an under-publicized but incredibly harmful challenge women face when working to advance their careers.
You’ve probably heard of the glass ceiling – the phenomenon where women’s careers top out at a certain level, and no matter what they try, they can’t seem to advance into more senior roles. The glass cliff is its sneaky wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing cousin.
The glass cliff describes the scenario where women only have access to senior leadership roles in times of crisis, where conditions are unfavourable and there’s a high risk of failure.
When women get elevated into these Glass Cliff senior roles, they are effectively set up for failure. When they (predictably) struggle to take the lemons the role has handed them and turn them into highly profitable lemonade, they are made into scapegoats and quickly let go. The short nature of their tenure, lack of positive results, and often public nature of their failure function as a poison-pill for their resumes, preventing them from taking on top leadership roles of the same stature in the future.
Here are some famous examples of women done in by The Glass Cliff:
- Kim Campbell was Canada’s first (and only!) female Prime Minister. She was elevated to the role in 1993 when her predecessor, Brian Mulroney, resigned due to exceptionally low governmental and personal approval ratings (12%!), just over four months before a mandatory federal election. Prime Minister Campbell lost the election in a landslide, dropping her party from 156 seats to only 2 in the legislature.
- Marissa Mayer was the CEO of Yahoo from 2012-2017. She was appointed to the role well after Yahoo had lost its cultural relevancy and its market share to Google. She got the job amidst a leadership crisis where 14% of employees were laid off and two successive CEOs were let go in under four months. Tasked with captaining a sinking ship, her time as CEO was not successful. She was ranked the least likeable CEO in tech in December 2015 and sold the once most popular home page on the internet to Verizon for pennies on the dollar in 2017.
- Kamala Harris was the eventual 2024 Democratic nominee for the US Presidential election. She was given the spot only after a disastrous debate performance by her predecessor, incumbent President Joe Biden, where he appeared to be struggling with age-releated memory challenges. She ran a shortened campaign, was not afforded the opportunity to compete in a primary contest, and had to answer for her senior role in his administration as they covered for his declining mental acuity. She lost the election.
The glass cliff traditionally applies to women moving into very senior roles – CEOs, Prime Ministers, etc – but it can actually happen at any level of seniority within an organization.
Women are often only given the next role up when conditions are terrible – think leading at times of a merger, helming difficult re-organizations, handling a team with toxic culture, managing falling departmental revenues, or improving the prospects of failing products.
They’re also often under-resourced – picture being given a stretch assignment with a tiny budget, an impossibly short time line, no senior leadership support, and/or staff that do not have the skills for the work.
Faced with nearly-impossible assignments and inadequate resources, it’s no wonder women put in these Glass Cliff roles fail. How could it go any other way? It’s pretty easy to see the disaster coming – the glass cliff is actually quite obvious once you learn how to spot it.
So why does this keep happening to so many smart women?
Why The Glass Cliff Happens
The glass cliff phenomenon happens for lots of reasons, but there is one big workplace gender dynamic underlying the whole thing:
Women are less likely to be given promotions.
Stats vary depending on role and level, but a 2021 study by researchers at Yale put women’s chances of promotion at 14% less likely than men at one large company.
This happens for a number of reasons, including the fact that women are held to higher performance and skill standards in promotion decisions, and the fact that men are more likely to be judged as qualified for a promotion based on subjective assessments of their potential (vs objective assessments of their actual achievements).
The fact that women are less likely to be given promotions drives the Glass Cliff phenomenon in several key ways:
First of all, men tend to avoid obvious Glass Cliff roles.
Because men have less difficulty getting the ‘yes’ when they go up for a new senior role, they can access far more opportunities for advancement. If they have lots of opportunities to move into senior roles, why would they take an opportunity where they have a high chance of failing? Since promotion opportunities aren’t scarce, they can be pickier.
Put simply: They don’t take on roles where they’re not set up for success because they don’t have to. If they pass up this opportunity, they know that they’ll have the opportunity to interview for (and get!) another senior role in the future.
Secondly, women feel pressure to accept Glass Cliff roles.
Women being less likely to be offered promotional opportunities (and facing a higher bar for hiring when they do get them), means that they have to seriously consider every promotion they are offered.
Unlike men, if they turn this job offer down, statistics say that the next one is not necessarily right around the corner. It’s harder to be choosey when you have less options to choose from.
Given the choice between no promotion or a sub-optimal promotion, most women choose to take the Glass Cliff job being offered.
Third, with men out of the competition for Glass Cliff roles, women have a higher chance of actually getting offered the promotion.
Given the 14% advantage male candidates have in being awarded a promotion, you know what really improves women’s chances of getting a promotion? Fewer male candidates throwing their hat into the ring!
Men’s reluctance to take on Glass Cliff roles means that women are actually more competitive in the interview process for these roles. In some ways, as a woman, your best chances for getting promotion is actually to apply to one of these terrible Glass Cliff roles.
And this goes even further. Some research has even suggested that skills women typically excel in – think soft skills like communication and encouraging others – are viewed as more essential in crisis situations. So women’s stereotypical skill set might, in a rare instance, actually be viewed as a competitive advantage (not a downside) in hiring for these roles.
So the upshot of all of this is that women end up in Glass Cliff roles because:
All of which is driven by gender dynamics where women are considered less ready for promotions of all kinds.
And of course, if we mostly promote women to Glass Cliff roles that have a ton of risk baked in, then their inevitable higher rates of failure reinforces that original sexist notion that women aren’t ready for the big jobs in the first place.
*sigh*
I think I need a cry break.
How Women Throw Themselves off the Glass Cliff
Look, what I’d love to tell you at this point in the article is that women are too smart to fall into this Glass Cliff-shaped catch-22. But they actually – for highly relatable reasons! – often contribute to their own Glass Cliff-ment.
So let’s talk about how we contribute to the colossal mess that is the Glass Cliff. And just so it's clear how common and difficult these Glass Cliff challenges are to avoid, I'll throw in some examples of times I fell into these traps from my own career to illustrate.
#1 - We Take The Sh*tty Job & Try To Make It Work
Because women (correctly) perceive that they are unlikely to be given many good promotion opportunities, they take the Glass Cliff job and try to make it work.
This is a totally understandable choice, but the results are often disastrous for their careers.
My first experience with this Glass Cliff trap happened while I was still a student. I accepted a summer job with a major mining company halfway across the country. When I got there they assigned me an impossible task (designing an entire new area of the mine from scratch in under 4 months using my zero years of underground mine design experience). But luckily for me, I also had useless resources (an experienced but exceptionally creepy old guy who spent hours each day sexually harassing me and my fellow 20 year old colleague). Surprising absolutely no one, I was not successful in finishing my project and the company opted not to make me a full-time employment offer.
What was surprising was what one of my male colleagues did. Like me, he had been given a job he wasn’t that interested in where he didn’t have much hope for success. Unlike me, he didn’t stick it out all summer. He quit three weeks into the job, telling our manager that he wasn’t interested in spending his time working on a dead-end project.
To say that I was shocked was an understatement. The idea that he could just quit was unfathomable to me. He was a student! The least important person at the company! And he basically told our boss to keep the job and left. The audacity of it blew my mind.
But you know what? By the end of the summer, we had the exact same employment prospects (aka: no job) and he hadn’t spent four months failing every day while being harassed by a creep.
All of this to say: Sometimes not accepting the Glass Cliff job is the biggest win available.
#2 - We Stay Too Long in a Job Gone Wrong
Once it becomes clear that we’ve gotten sucked into a Glass Cliff job, a lot of us stick around far too long. Afraid of a short tenure on our resume and reluctant to admit defeat early, we muster up all of our grit and determination and…run ourselves ragged fighting a losing battle for the next 3 years.
The problem here is that your working hours are a finite resource.
You’ve got about 40 years of work experience between the beginning of your career and your retirement. And every job you take helps you build skills that move you closer to (or further from!) the person you want to be when you grow up.
So while it can be tempting to stay in a Glass Cliff job that’s not working out as a strategy to manage the optics of a short tenure on your resume, the longer you stay, the more you’re sabotaging your future. Glass Cliffs jobs don’t help you develop the skills and results you need to get the next job you want – and not only that, they actually develop skills and stories that make your resume look worse suited for your dream jobs.
Think about it this way: If you put an address in your GPS and start driving in the wrong direction, what does the Australian-voiced robot lady who lives in your phone’s Google Maps do? She tells you to pull a U-turn at the first opportunity! She doesn’t let you drive 2 hours down the road and THEN turn around. That would be a ridiculous waste of gas and time, and it would take you even longer to get where you were originally going.
So it’s simple: If you find yourself headed down the wrong road, turn the car around! Start hunting for a new job ASAP so you can escape the Glass Cliff and get back to doing what you love.
Need to Get Your Career Away From The Glass Cliff?
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#3 - We Under-Advocate For Resources We Need to Be Successful
The third way women help contribute to their own Glass Cliff-ing is by accepting too little when they accept a difficult job.
Let’s imagine a scenario where you decide to take the job you’re being offered. You read this whole article and decide that what I’m talking about isn’t going to happen to you:
“The job I’m being offered isn’t as bad as all that. It’s only a liiitttllle bit of a Glass Cliff. It’s still possible to make it a success. It’s not like I’m not being asked to become the CEO of Twitter after Elon Musk took over, reinstated all the hate speech, and lost 50% of its advertisers! I can make this job work, Holly!”
Cool. So you accept, sign on the dotted line, and show up for the first day of your job, excited to turn things around and rack up some wins.
A few weeks go by and you realize that the job totally is possible, but:
Ugh. Just because a job is possible in theory, doesn’t always mean it’s possible in practice.
So how did you end up here?
One of the biggest misconceptions with Glass Cliff jobs is that they have to have a nefarious element, like a work enemy trying to get your career to stall, or a board looking for a scapegoat if things go sideways. But you can get Glass Cliffed by a lack of resources alone.
The biggest mistake women make in these scenarios is thinking that the job offer is ‘take it or leave it’, ie: that you have to say yes to the job as-is with no negotiation, no modifications, and no input from you before you sign up to do it.
These days lots of women are getting better at negotiating their compensation, but we often still struggle to negotiate our resources and success criteria when we take on new roles. And that comes back to bite us in the end when we can’t produce superhuman results on a zero dollar budget.
I experienced a version of this when I was offered my first management job. My boss had been going to bat with our VP to give her senior staff more exposure to leadership, and after months and months of effort, she finally got him to agree to move me into a management role.
The only catch? My new management job was a 3-month temporary position that I would have to share with my male colleague.
I almost fell off my chair.
While I appreciated the offer and all of her effort, it was…less than I was expecting. We were (surprise, surprise!) going through a revenue downturn at the time, so success meant improving the profitability of the team. And company policy meant that if I wanted to turn the role into a permanent position, I would have to sustain that financial success for a year. But since I only had three months to do the job before handing the reins over to my colleague, I knew I’d be stuck doing all the messy set-up work while he got to preside over the improved revenues – all with no prospect of turning it into a permanent posting.
It was a classic Glass Cliff role. The financial improvements they wanted were possible, but the timeline and total lack of credit for me made it a non-starter. It was a trap you could see coming a mile away.
How to Beat The Glass Cliff
So what’s an intrepid woman to do, faced with the dreaded Glass Cliff role?
Take a page from men’s books. One of the things I admire about men at work is their ability to speak up and say no to things that don’t work for them – including Glass Cliff roles.
Does their ability to do this come from a massive dose of privilege not all of us have access to? Absolutely. But I also think that one of the things that makes patriarchy so effective at silencing women and making them play smaller is the lifetime of intermittent reinforcement we all get to not push back, to not be self-motivated, and to not expect more. What I see over and over again in my coaching practice is that we’re so used to the invisible electric fence of patriarchy that we abide by its rules, even when the fence is nowhere to be found.
In short: sometimes we play small when we don’t have to. We under-judge our poker hand and play like we’ll never be invited back to the table. In a bid to minimize risk and ensure we get access to senior roles, we accept the cards we’re given with a smile and do our best. And we all know where that leads.
Instead of our well-worn I’ll-take-what-I-can-get approach, I want us to adopt a new way of showing up at work:
Only play games you can win.
Offered a difficult job with terrible chances of success? Turn it down and interview until you find a better role. Realizing your project is facing new headwinds after a merger changed leadership’s priorities? Get it off your plate ASAP and align your work with something that does matter. Asked to manage vaguely-defined continuous improvement projects off the side of your desk with no budget and no team? Negotiate your butt off to get clear success metrics, budget, and some dedicated people resources.
Friends, I truly believe only playing games you can win is one of the most under-discussed predictors of career success.
A few years ago there was an idea running around the internet that talked about how women can generate career success using their “natural talent” for grit and persistence. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about that framing – don’t even start me on that “natural talent for persistence” thing – but it’s also such obvious patriarchal propaganda. According to this model, to be successful women need endless striving and hard work, even in the face of very little pay off (literally, a book valorizing the career benefits of grit describes it as continuing on despite “a lack of visible progress for years, or even decades”). But you know what else makes women successful and doesn’t require a decade of suffering? Playing an easier game!
I don’t need to know anything about your grit, determination, or how hard you try, to predict with a high degree of accuracy that you’ll probably do pretty well if you’re put in charge of your company’s main profit centre that has been running on autopilot for 25 years, and you’ll probably do much worse if you try build out an entirely new multi-billion dollar product line the company is only somewhat interested in that has no proven market.
It’s easier to win games where the deck is stacked in your favour.
Men have been using this fact – and a hefty dose of privilege – to avoid the Glass Cliff for years. So it’s time to throw out the Grit and Determination for Ladies Career Plan™ and replace it with something that has way better odds of success (and way less exhaustion).
From now on, we’re going to only play games we can win, where the deck is stacked in our favour.
How to Actually Win The Game
As you can no doubt tell by now, a big part of not falling off the Glass Cliff is seeing it coming – and staying away! So our first couple of steps are all based around avoiding Glass Cliff roles.
#1 - Spot the Glass Cliff
When you’re given a new job offer, evaluate your chances for success in it as systematically as you can.
Is the company or department going through significant upheaval or crisis? Big challenges or changes up the Glass Cliff risk factor.
What happened to the last person in this role and how long was their tenure? Short tenures and involuntary departures are worrying signs that the role is difficult, the resources are missing, or executive support is poorly aligned or absent.
How important is this department, project, or position to the major drivers of success for the company? Or, put another way, how many paragraphs will be written about your work in the annual shareholder report? If the role focuses on something important, that increases the chances you’ll have the resources and support you need, and it also means better future results to show off on your resume.
Will you have adequate financial and people resources to do the job? Check in on whether this role is well resourced, or else you’ll spend the next several years fighting for scraps and burning the midnight oil.
Will you have the unequivocal support of leadership in this role? It’s crucial that your initiatives in this role are not just supported by senior leadership, but enthusiastically supported. This is doubly true if the scope of your work involves any amount of change management or turnaround. Will the execs back you if things get tough as you take on this role, or will you be left to sink or swim?
Are the success metrics and timelines for the role reasonable and achievable? In the spirit of we only play games we can win, it’s important to examine the rules of the game to see if a win is actually possible. If you look forward into the future, what percentage chance do you give yourself of being successful hitting the KPIs and timelines as they’re currently defined with the resources you’re being offered? I want that number to be above 80% – and if not, you’ve got some negotiation to do (or some interviewing to do!). Your ideal situation is a role with metrics that are easy to hit and timelines that let you and your team work at a reasonable pace – not one where you will have to run yourself into the ground for a 30% chance of success.
How will taking this role affect your resume if it’s a success? What if it’s a failure? What skills and results will this role put on your resume if you manage to do the things being asked of you in the role? And how will those skills and results help you get the next role you want? It’s crucial that you spend the next 2-5 years moving your resume in the direction you want to go, not on a pointless detour. It’s also important to think about whether the skills and results this role helps you develop the most important ones for you to tick off the list on your way to the next job. Is this the best role for you to take in preparation for that next role you want? If not, consider whether you could find a role that would give you more bang for your buck.
#2 - Get Away From The Glass Cliff!
This step is easy: If you spot a Glass Cliff role, don’t take it! And if you’re in one now, plan your exit ASAP, whether that means leaving your job, pushing your dead-in-the-water project off your plate, or advocating for your glass cliff job to be eliminated so you can take on higher-priority projects that are better resourced and central to the company’s success.
Now, sometimes this step feels easier said than done. If getting away from the Glass Cliff role in front of you feels risky, now’s your time to get introspective.
Identify the risks you see from leaving or turning down the role. Are you concerned you’ll burn bridges? Leave work unfinished? Lose your only chance at a role at this level?
Once you’ve figured out the risks in the way, you can come up with a plan to mitigate them that doesn’t involve taking on the Glass Cliff role. (Psst: If you need some help with this part, a Career Strategy session with a coach might be a helpful assist!).
Part of what drives women towards the Glass Cliff is fear that there is no better option out there for us to advance our career than this terrible role. So everything from this point forward is about finding better options so we have good alternatives to the Glass Cliff role of our nightmares.
#3 - Generate Some Better Options
One of the reasons men feel more secure in turning down Glass Cliff roles and only playing games they can win is that they feel like they will have access to better roles in the future. So we’re going to have to make the same situation true for you!
If you feel the looming presence of the Glass Cliff as you plan your next career move, your job is to interview, interview, interview, until you can’t interview anymore!
The best remedy to the temptation to take a yuck job offer is a better one waiting in the wings – so it’s up to you to go find one!
Quite often my executive coaching clients are understandably nervous to take this approach. The thinking goes like this: If their current company that knows their track record of success is only willing to offer them this unimpressive role, will they really be able to find a better job at another company? What if they’re not qualified for the “good” roles? What if the “good” roles are just wishful thinking and don’t really exist?
I get it. It’s scary to put yourself out there and interview – and it takes a boatload of time. Imagine if you put in all that effort only to get disappointing results? It feels easier to just resign yourself to the idea that this is the best thing out there.
But obviously, I hate this plan. Even though it’s easier, it’s pretty costly. If you’re right about this – if there are, in fact, zero better jobs out there in the entire world – then your career is kind of cooked, right? You’ll either never move up, or you’ll take a Glass Cliff job and fail and then spend the rest of your life plotting revenge on an entire category of produce with Liz Truss.
Maybe that’s your future – vengefully studying lettuce eradication. But I think you should run some tests before you consign yourself to this very bleak fate.
The deal I make with my coaching clients is that when they have a belief like this – ie: one that says it’s impossible for them to get what they want – they have to prove to me it’s true before we start planning their life around it. We have to at least test the theory that their career is destined for ruin before we resign ourselves to failure.
So if you think you’ll never find a better job than this, great! Go interview for 30 jobs at this level. If you’re right and they all suck, I’ll let you told ya so me to death. But if you’re wrong and one of those 30 jobs is actually good…well then you have a brand new non-Glass Cliff job that you love! No matter what, you win. You either get your dream jobs or endless gloating rights over me. Yum yum!
So get out there and interview for a better senior role!
(and PS: in 10 years of me issuing this challenge to clients, not a single one of them has ever won gloating rights – they all just find the great jobs they were previously convinced don’t exist, and usually in way less than 30 interviews. Just sayin’!)
#4 - Make Your Own Better Option
Struggling to find a job that comes with the visibility, support, and resources you’d need to generate major career-building wins for your resume? Build your own!
Your next career-defining role doesn’t have to be somebody else’s idea. Take a look at the challenges your company is currently up against. What kinds of projects could you propose that would solve the problems that keep the C-suite and board up at night? Make a business case and get to convincing folks that your idea is the world-beating solution they need to greenlight ASAP!
Other peoples’ lack of ability to envision you in a senior role doesn’t have to be your blocker. If you come to the table with executive-level vision and create your own role, they might just say yes! You don’t have to wait to be tapped on the shoulder.
#5 - Negotiate Your Way to Better
We’ve been talking about the idea that it's easier to win games where the deck is stacked in your favour. That means that anytime you take on a new role – Glass Cliff or otherwise! – you need to do the work upfront to stack the deck.
Before you say yes to a new job, negotiate anything and everything you need to so you can ensure you have a very high chance of success:
If you get the things you want, great! Now you can go hit it out of the park in your new role.
And if you don’t get the things you want…well, you can consider whether this is effectively a Glass Cliff role if you don’t have the resources and conditions you need to be successful.
I want to encourage you to negotiate as hard as you can up front. That way you don't have to work hard later when you're playing the game.
Even if it feels like asking for a lot, it’s better and more respectful of the relationship to get the agreement for what you need now than to hold off and ask later.
And, even more importantly, you want to avoid a situation where you don’t ask and then struggle to complete an important company objective just because you were nervous to ask. If giving you an extra 10k means that you can dedicate yourself fully to a project that makes the company millions of dollars, that’s a great deal. Don’t endanger your success – and the company’s success! – over fear of asking for something that costs peanuts in comparison to the impact of the project.
When you approach your negotiation, you should aim to be abundantly resourced, not just barely able to get by.
As much as you possibly can, advocate for what you need so that the most likely outcome of this project is that you’re successful, even if lots of things go wrong or turn out differently than you expected. Don’t propose a budget, timeline, or KPI that only works if everything goes perfectly. Ask for what you actually need. They want you to be successful – so be honest about what that will take.
In Conclusion: Never Agree to Compete with Lettuce
Alright, time to wrap up this bazillion-word article.
The Glass Cliff is a real phenomenon that has damaging effects on women’s long-term career prospects. Getting pulled into a role with little chance of success makes it hard to build into exciting challenging roles in the future – plus it’s exhausting and terrible!
Even though there are lots of perfectly understandable gendered reasons women end up being put into Glass Cliff roles – men noping out, women being held to higher hiring standards, fewer senior roles being offered to women – the good news is there’s also a lot of Glass Cliff-ings that happen (at least in part) to how women interact with these job offers.
To make sure you don’t end up the subject of national ridicule that features a 24/7 livestream of a head of iceberg in a blonde wig, do your best to only play games you can win – and negotiate up front to stack the deck in your favour.
And remember, if you’re ever asked to take over for a historically unpopular politician who has been ousted by his own party (or the workplace equivalent), the only acceptable answer is ”Absolutely not. Do you think I just fell out of a coconut tree?”
Never Compete with Lettuce Again!
Book a call with Holly and get the leadership coaching you need to avoid the Glass Cliff and create a thriving, produce-free career!
