You fill out your performance review with everything you have got. You document your wins, quantify your impact, and walk into the conversation feeling prepared. Your manager agrees that your work has been exceptional. And then nothing changes. The promotion does not come. The raise is smaller than you expected. The explanation involves budget constraints or timing or some vague promise about next year.
This is not a coincidence. It is not bad luck either. In this solo episode of the Lunch with Leaders podcast, Adaeze Iloeje-Udeogalanya shares the hard truth she learned after spending years doing exactly what she had been told to do, only to keep hitting the same wall. The performance review, as most women in STEM understand it, is solving the wrong problem entirely.
Listen to this episode now: The Real Reason Your Performance Review Is Not Getting You Promoted
The Performance Review Trap
For years, Adaeze looked forward to performance reviews. She saw them as her moment to shine, to present everything she had delivered and make the case for what she deserved. And for a while, that approach worked reasonably well. She consistently received the highest ratings available. Small raises followed.
Then she started pushing for something bigger. A substantial promotion. A real raise that reflected her actual contribution. And suddenly the story changed. There was no budget. It was not in the plan. They would revisit it next year.
Next year arrived and the same thing happened. The reason finally became clear: the budget conversation had already happened months before the performance review ever took place. By the time she sat down to make her case, the decisions were already made. She had been preparing for the wrong conversation at the wrong time.
Understanding this changes everything.
Promotion Decisions Happen Long Before You Know About Them
Here is what most organisations will never tell you directly. The conversation about who deserves the next role, who should be groomed for leadership, and whose name belongs on the shortlist does not happen during performance review season. It happens in informal moments, months and sometimes years earlier.
Think about how roles actually get created. A senior leader notices that their team is stretched. They mention it to a peer on a golf course, at a networking event, or in a hallway conversation. That conversation repeats itself over several months. Eventually, a budget line gets approved for a new position. By the time the job posting appears publicly, the informal shortlist has already been forming behind the scenes.
Your name either appears on that informal shortlist or it does not. And the determining factor is not the quality of your most recent performance review. It is the story that already exists about you in the minds of the people having those conversations.
As Adaeze puts it clearly in this episode, the decision about your future is being made right now somewhere in a conversation you are not a part of.
Hear Adaeze break this down in her own words: Listen to the full episode here
The Myth of Meritocracy
Many women in STEM carry a deeply ingrained belief that hard work and strong results will eventually be rewarded. Put your head down, deliver exceptional work, and your manager will notice. When an opportunity opens up, your track record will speak for itself.
This belief is understandable. In the early years of a career, it even holds some truth. Strong performance does get noticed at junior levels. However, by the time you reach mid-career and beyond, the rules shift significantly. Advancement becomes highly subjective. Relationships and visibility begin to matter far more than technical output alone.
Research supports this directly. People advocate for people they know and trust. Trust does not build during a performance review. It builds in informal moments, in relationships that exist outside formal reporting lines, in conversations where someone thinks of your name before anyone has to prompt them.
Two professionals with identical performance records regularly produce completely different career outcomes. The difference almost always traces back to one thing: one of them spent time building their personal brand and strategic relationships, while the other kept their head down and waited to be noticed.
This connects directly to what Adaeze explored in The 10% Rule: Why Hard Work Alone Won’t Get You Promoted, where the data shows that actual productivity accounts for only 10% of career success at senior levels. The remaining 90% comes from visibility, relationships, and personal brand. Working harder on the 10% while neglecting the 90% will always produce the same frustrating result.
Where the Real Decisions Get Made
Promotions at mid-career and senior levels rarely follow a clean, formal process. Most organisations have a hierarchy on paper. In practice, that hierarchy rarely dictates who actually advances.
Adaeze shares an example from her own career. She discovered that a sustainability project she would have loved to join had already been staffed before she knew it existed. By the time the announcement came, there was no room. The opportunity had been allocated in conversations she was not part of, to people whose names were already circulating in the right rooms.
This pattern repeats constantly across industries and organisations. The people who get tapped for stretch assignments, high-visibility projects, and leadership roles are not necessarily the strongest performers. They are the people whose names come up naturally when the right conversations happen.
For women in STEM working in male-dominated environments, this dynamic carries an additional layer of difficulty. Informal networks often form around activities and social contexts that systematically exclude women. Fishing trips, golf games, and after-hours socialising happen in spaces where many women are simply not present. If the decisions about careers are being made in those spaces, then staying out of them has a real professional cost.
Stop Preparing for the Performance Review and Start Doing This Instead
The practical shift this episode calls for is not subtle. It requires genuinely reordering your priorities and reorienting where you invest your professional energy.
Adaeze’s recommendation is direct: lead with your personal brand, your visibility, and your relationships. Let your work support those three things rather than treating your work as the primary vehicle for advancement.
Your personal brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. Right now, someone somewhere has a story about who you are and what you are capable of. The question is whether you shaped that story deliberately or left it entirely to chance.
Building visibility means showing up consistently in the spaces where the right people can see your thinking, your leadership, and your potential. Not once a year during review season, but throughout the year in moments that accumulate into a clear picture of who you are and what you bring.
Building relationships means investing time in the people who have the influence and the access to advocate for you when it matters. Mentors advise you. Sponsors advocate for you. Both matter, but the latter is what actually moves careers forward at senior levels.
This is exactly what The 3 Pillars of Career Advancement: Visibility, Sponsorship, Positioning addresses in depth. Visibility, sponsorship, and positioning are the three levers that determine who gets shortlisted and who gets overlooked, regardless of how strong their technical record is.
Ready to shift your approach? Start with this episode: Listen to Adaeze’s full solo reflection here
How to Get Your Name on the Right Shortlist
Getting your name into informal promotion conversations requires deliberate, consistent action. None of this happens by accident, and none of it requires you to become someone you are not. It requires strategy.
Show up where decisions get made
Identify the spaces where senior leaders in your organisation gather informally. Volunteer for cross-functional projects. Attend industry events. Join internal working groups that put you in proximity to people above your current level.
Build a specific point of view
The people who get advocated for are known for something. Not just for delivering excellent work, but for thinking a particular way about a particular set of problems. Become the person your organisation associates with a specific area of expertise or a distinctive perspective.
Make your impact visible before review season
Share project outcomes with senior stakeholders when milestones happen, not months later during an annual review. Send brief, well-framed updates that connect your contributions to outcomes the organisation cares about.
Invest in relationships strategically
Identify two or three senior leaders whose work intersects with yours and build genuine relationships with them over time. The goal is not transactional networking. It is building the kind of familiarity and trust that makes your name surface naturally when opportunities arise.
Stop waiting for perfect timing
The right time to build your visibility and relationships is now, not after the next project wraps, not after you feel more established, and definitely not at the performance review.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the performance review not lead to promotion?
Budget and promotion decisions happen during planning cycles that occur months before performance reviews take place. By the time you sit down for your review, the decisions are already made. The review confirms the story that already existed about you. It does not create a new one.
Is advancement really based on relationships rather than performance?
At junior levels, strong performance produces advancement reasonably reliably. At mid-career and senior levels, advancement becomes highly subjective. Research consistently shows that people advocate for people they know and trust, and that trust builds through relationships, not through performance review scores.
What if I am in a male-dominated environment where informal networks exclude me?
This is a real structural challenge that requires deliberate strategy. Seek out the internal spaces you can access, including cross-functional projects, internal communities, and leadership development programmes. Build external networks through industry associations and communities like African Women in STEM. And find sponsors, not just mentors, who can advocate for you in the rooms you cannot yet enter.
How do I build visibility without it feeling like self-promotion?
Reframe the goal. You are not promoting yourself. You are ensuring that decision-makers have an accurate picture of your contribution and your potential. Share project outcomes in the context of business impact. Contribute perspectives in meetings where senior leaders are present. Seek out opportunities to lead or present work to cross-functional audiences. These are leadership behaviours, not self-promotion.
What is the Leadership Edge Diagnostic?
A free, five-minute assessment developed by Adaeze that measures your current standing across authority, influence, visibility, relationships, and resilience. It identifies the specific dimension creating the biggest gap between how you are being seen and how you want to be seen. Access it at link.africanwomeninstem.com/leadership.
Conclusion
The performance review is not the moment your career advances or stalls. That moment happens much earlier, in informal conversations between people who already have a story about you. Your job is not to wait for the review and then make the case. Your job is to build the story deliberately, consistently, and strategically, long before anyone formally asks.
Stop spending the majority of your professional energy on the 10% that delivers your technical output and start investing seriously in the 90% that actually determines who gets chosen. Build your visibility and your relationships. Also, build a personal brand that means something specific to the people who make decisions about your career.
The leaders who keep getting chosen are not more talented than you. They simply figured this out earlier. Now you have too.
Listen to the full episode: The Real Reason Your Performance Review Is Not Getting You Promoted
Take the Leadership Edge Diagnostic:.africanwomeninstem.com/leadership
