Why talkers rise faster —and what leaders overlook

Everyone claims to promote based on performance. But if you’ve worked in a startup, you’ve seen the pattern: the person who dominates meetings, presents well, and "seems strategic" ends up climbing faster than the one who quietly solves problems, builds repeatable processes, or unblocks the team. This isn't just annoying—it’s a signal failure. In execution-heavy environments, the reward system is tilted toward those who perform communication, not those who fix systems. And that’s not just bad optics. It’s how fragile orgs scale the wrong operators into influence.

Founders think they’re rewarding impact. They’re rewarding presence.

Let’s get tactical. Startups, especially in Series A through C, are execution-constrained. Speed, survival, and clarity matter more than optics. But they rarely have clear performance scaffolding—so in its absence, airtime fills the void.

Here’s what typically happens:

1. No Clear Metrics for Cross-Functional Work: Ops, marketing, product, and GTM roles often collaborate across undefined boundaries. Who owns what? What counts as success? Without clarity, leaders default to surface signals—how articulate someone is in sprint reviews or all-hands.
2. Promotion Criteria = “Strategic Visibility”: In theory, this means “you influence across functions.” In practice, it means “you look comfortable speaking about other people’s work.”
3. Founders Outsource Judgment: When the team grows past 20, many founders stop directly witnessing execution. They rely on manager input and what they see in meetings. Loud voices crowd the signal.
4. Middle Managers Don’t Want to Risk Their Own Credibility: So they recommend the polished candidate who can present a roadmap, not the one who quietly rebuilt the delivery system that actually got things shipped.

The result? The people promoted are often those who signal confidence in complexity—not those who reduce it.

"High visibility" is the phrase you’ll hear. It sounds smart. But it often hides a broken loop: teams start confusing verbosity with vision.

Here’s the pattern:

• The talker synthesizes other people's work.
• Leadership applauds them for "systems thinking."
• The builder—who owns delivery, carries the late nights, clears blockers—is told to “be more strategic.”

And here’s the kicker: the talker is often promoted before the system they describe has proven stable. So they get rewarded on the illusion of leverage. Not repeat value delivery. It’s execution theater dressed up as thought leadership. This dynamic isn’t just unfair—it’s dangerous. Because it builds an org where performance becomes abstract. If you can narrate the chaos, you get ahead—even if you’re not fixing any of it.

You’ll start to feel it when:

• All-hands become recap sessions, not alignment levers.
• Retros reward storytelling, not structural resolution.
• Promotion panels weigh “stakeholder management” higher than repeat system output.
• Quiet performers check out. You know the type: the one who fixed the onboarding mess, rebuilt finance ops, cleaned up the GTM flow—but who gets told they’re not "strategic enough."

Eventually, your systems decay. Because the people who know how to maintain them start leaving. And the people who narrate the system? They inherit teams they’ve never had to unblock.

This isn’t a charisma problem. It’s a systems problem. You don’t fix it with presentation training. You fix it by changing what you measure, what you reward, and how you surface value. Here’s the framework we use with founder-led teams past Series A:

1. Redesign What Counts as “Strategic”

Define strategy not as airtime, but as leverage:

• Narration ≠ Strategy. Ask: What system did they design or repair that outlasted them?
• Impact is Time-Extended. Did it reduce future load? Clarify future choices?
• Dependency Mapping. Who relied on their work to perform better? Did their output create second-order value?

2. Anchor Promotion to “Repeat Value Per Function”

Drop the vague “leadership potential” scores. Instead, look at this:

• Within-function repeat delivery: Do they consistently solve real problems in their domain?
• Cross-function unblock rate: How often do other teams reference them as enablers?
• System redesign log: What systems or rituals did they improve? Is that still working 3 months later?

3. Make Visibility Observable, Not Performative

Redesign feedback loops:

• Replace “executive presence” with “clarity under ambiguity.”
• Replace “cross-functional influence” with “measurable unblock effect.”
• Replace “strong communicator” with “alignment replicator”—someone who gets others to act consistently even when they’re not in the room.

You’ll start surfacing a different kind of performer—the one who builds long-term systems, not just short-term perception.

Let’s be honest. Founders get overwhelmed. At 20+ people, you stop being able to observe output directly. So you use proxies:

• Who keeps showing up in Slack threads?
• Who speaks clearly in stand-ups?
• Who has a narrative ready in retros?

These proxies are noisy. And noise compounds when you stop validating it against throughput. So you end up with a crop of “rising stars” who are smart, articulate—and systemically dislocated from delivery.

Worse: this dynamic teaches your best builders that output doesn’t matter. Airtime does. That’s how you lose the team.

In companies that fixed this early, three changes stand out:

1. Promotion Memos Require Output Maps
Don’t just ask for a list of “contributions.” Require maps that show: what systems were changed, who was affected, and what the repeat value is.

2. Meeting Contributions Are Weighted Less Than Out-of-Meeting Pull
One founder I worked with made it a rule: if someone was only ever cited during meetings—but not during system discussions, debriefs, or when people ask for help—they weren’t considered for promotion.

3. Managers Are Trained to Surface Builders, Not Echo Talkers
Middle managers were taught to flag team members who unblocked others, not just “owned narratives.”

It takes time. But the trust dividend is massive. Your quiet performers stay. Your team starts rewarding repeat clarity, not polished chaos.

If your team promotes talkers over builders, it’s not a communication issue. It’s a system design issue. You’re operating with broken visibility metrics, poorly scoped leverage definitions, and a reward loop that favors signal over substance. And here’s the hard truth: those talkers you promoted? Some of them are good. But many are a liability waiting to compound. Because if you scale narrative without structure, you inherit fragility.

So here’s what to watch instead:

• Don’t just track team output. Track repeat value per system per operator.
• Don’t ask who presents well. Ask who creates long-term leverage for others.
• And when someone asks, “Why didn’t she get promoted?”—you should be able to point to a system, not a speech.

Because in high-pressure teams, performance isn’t what you say. It’s what survives you.