👋 You’re reading a free Saturday issue of UX Mentor Diaries by Marina Krutchinsky. ex-VP @ JPMorgan. Every Wednesday I coach designers and leaders 1:1 on getting faster to the next level, overcoming layoffs, prepping for interviews & promotion. What comes up in these sessions becomes this newsletter (fully anonymized, of course) Free Saturday issues give you the “what” - what’s actually holding you back (and usually it’s not what you think). Paid Wednesday issues give you the “how to fix it” part - the exact moves to copy, the templates I use in sessions, and how long it takes to see the change.
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A Wharton professor named Matthew Bidwell once dug through 6 years of hiring and promotion records at a big financial firm.
He was chasing an answer to a simple question: when a senior role opens in the company who will be a better performer, is it a person promoted from inside, or the person hired from outside?
Outside hires scored worse across the board: on performance reviews for their first 2 years, on “more likely to get fired”(in fact, 61% more likely). Needless to say, they take longer to find their footing in a new place. And yet…
When outsiders are hired, they get paid around 18% MORE than the inside person already doing the same job. AND when they start, they usually get at a higher title as well.
Just think about it - the outsider performs worse, gets fired more, and still shows up with more money and a bigger title than the person who was already there and already good at it.
Doesn’t make much sense, doesn’t it?
And that’s a pattern that was measured across years of real data.
Once you understand why it happens, you’ll see why your own internal promotion has been stuck longer than it should have been.
Let me you about one of my clients - a Staff designer, 12 years in, last 5 at this latest company. He was already - by any honest read - doing the job of a Director.
He set design direction across 3 product teams, was the person execs would pull into the room when the risky design compromise needed to made and someone had to make a call. Other designers come to him before they’d come to their own manager. He wasn’t asking to be “handed a level”, he’s grown into it at least 2 years prior, but nobody cared to admit it or file the official paperwork.
So one day, he sat down with his manager and said that he wanted to make the case for Director.
What he heard back, surprised him: “You’re our strongest and best maker on the team. We’re just not sure you’re ready to be a leader yet.”
Another year has passed. This time he heard “you’re getting there, just keep doing what you’re doing with more consistency…”
A month later a new Director got hired from the outside. Into the scope he already run and with the salary in the director bracket, of course.
So the outsider got the title AND the pay, while my client got “not yet.”
At that point, he decided that he was “bad at politics” and that he should have “self-promoted” more.
What he didn’t realized, there were some psychological factors at play, and none of it was about his talent or leadership qualities.
Your company has a “file” on you. And i don’t mean a real file, I mean a mental one.
It got written in the minds of people a long time ago, when you just started and it says something like “our brilliant maker”
That file was accurate the day it was created. And it stayed as is since.
When you start doing Director things (like owning outcomes, pushing back on a VP, setting direction that isn’t yours to set on paper) you are literally contradicting that file.
And according to science: groups come down harder on their own members who break the expected pattern of behavior than they do on total strangers who do the exact same thing.
Psychologists even have a name for it, and I bet you heard it: the black sheep effect.
In the original study people rated an off-pattern member of their own group more harshly than an identical person from a rival group.
No, it’s NOT about careers, but it explains the resistance associated with internal promotions.
When a person acts above their “filed identity”, their own org reads it as overstepping.
Like, “he’s gotten political” or “she’s not the humble maker we know”.
The outside Director has no file to violate yet, so triggers none of those feelings..
Let’s a wait a second here.
For about a decade the answer would be “yes”, obviously. In April 2022 people who switched were getting median raises around 16 percent while the loyal ones got… scraps.
But that market is gone. By early 2026 the “switching premium” fell to about 1.9 points over people who stayed put. In other words, a record low.
For a variety of reasons we are not going into here, companies stopped poaching, so they stopped overpaying to poach.
Leaving still resets your level, but it no longer hands you a fat raise when you leave and start anew.
So don’t storm off just yet.
The smart move in this market is to try to run the internal rewrite first, and only leave when the title is genuinely real, because the outside world won’t cover your comp the way it did 3 years ago.
To test the internal waters, ask your manager this one question,“If a Director role opened tomorrow, what would make you hesitate to put my name in?”
Then, please stop talking and let them answer. Don’t explain why you’re asking and don’t defend your work. Just collect the answer. You’ll know more about your next promotion from that one answer than from your last 3 reviews combined.
Wednesday’s paid issue goes inside a real coaching session with a lead designer (fully anonymized, of course) already doing Director- level work, but is still seen as the maker instead of the leader.
You’ll see the exact plan we built to close that gap (and you can copy it word-for-word if it’s relevant to you career challenge) —
how to turn her new boss into her sponsor,
the 1 sentence that makes people call you a leader in the rooms you’re not in,
how to translate design into the risk-and-cost language executives actually hear.
It’ll be in your inbox on Wednesday, July 29th.
Talk soon!
I work with a small number of super seniors designers, managers and directors who are ready to be positioned as the “obvious choice”.
This is for you if:
You’ve been passed over for roles you were qualified for
You’re a director at a startup struggling to be taken seriously at larger companies
You know you’re ready for the next level but can’t make your work “visible” no matter how hard you try
I’ve helped designers go from “not ready yet” to promoted, hired, and finally seen as the senior leader they already were.
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