Susan Colantuono, 2013

“Business, strategic and financial acumen is the missing 33 percent.”

Leadership adviser Susan Colantuono used this phrase in her 2013 TEDxBeaconStreet talk about why capable women can stall below senior leadership. She argued that common advice emphasizes confidence and relationships while failing to explain that advancement also depends on demonstrating business, strategic, and financial impact. The quote makes an implicit promotion criterion visible. Reliable performance and interpersonal skill matter, but decision makers also look for evidence that a person understands how the organization makes money, competes, allocates resources, and manages risk. Its practical value lies in making a familiar management habit visible enough to question. The distinction matters because organizations often preserve the visible result while forgetting the less visible habits and relationships that produced it.

Managers can explain these expectations early, provide access to financial information, and assign work with measurable commercial scope. Sponsorship should connect talent to decisions where strategic judgment can be practiced and observed. A small test can reveal more than a broad declaration when the baseline and decision rule are clear. Reviewing the mechanism prevents a favorable outcome from being mistaken for proof that every assumption was correct.

The framework must not become another shifting standard applied unevenly. Organizations should audit whether comparable evidence is credited differently by gender or race and whether some employees receive opportunities while others are told to prove readiness without access. The organization should also ask who benefits, who carries uncertainty, and who can appeal. People responsible for execution should help define the measure because they see consequences a dashboard may flatten or miss.

Opaque advancement continues to waste talent and reinforce informal networks. Colantuono’s point remains useful because it turns vague advice to “be more strategic” into capabilities that can be taught, assigned, and evaluated. Choose one role below the executive level and publish the business, strategic, and financial outcomes required for advancement. Give each candidate a sponsor and an assignment that can produce that evidence within a fair review period. Learning compounds when those answers remain available after the project, leader, or market moment has changed. The next team can reuse the insight while still testing whether its customers, risks, and operating environment are different. The review should include one person who was skeptical at the beginning and one person who experienced the change directly. Their observations can expose hidden support, transferred work, or a benefit that the summary metric misses. If the evidence remains mixed, the responsible response is to narrow the claim, adjust the design, and continue learning rather than converting uncertainty into a polished success story. The responsible leader should preserve dissent and explain how new evidence affected the choice.