When Your Career Hits a Plateau, What is Next?

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career plateau what's nextAre you in a place in your career where everything appears to be working and yet something no longer feels quite right? You are still delivering, meeting expectations, and seen as successful. But underneath the surface, is there a quieter, nagging sense that the role you are in was built for a version of you that no longer quite exists?

The challenge is that, at senior levels, acting on that instinct is rarely straightforward. Along with the emotional considerations of how much the work is part of your identity, the financial rewards of deferred compensation, unvested equity, or a bonus, makes leaving feel economically irrational. Add the real question of whether the next place will offer the same flexibility, hard-won political capital, or connections with colleagues, and staying starts to look less like a choice and more like the only sensible option.

But there is a difference between a deliberate decision to stay and a slow drift into stasis. Recognizing which one is happening is the key to shaping your next chapter with intention.

What Is Your Relationship With Your Work?

Before asking whether you should make a change, it is worth asking something more fundamental: what is your relationship with your work?

Organizational psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski’s research is the most prolific on this topic and suggests that most professionals relate to their work in one of three ways, regardless of role or seniority:

  • As a job: the focus is on the financial reward and what it enables outside of work.
  • As a career: the focus is on advancement, achievement, and status.
  • As a calling: the work feels tied to identity and purpose, something you would do even without external rewards.

The important insight is that these orientations are not fixed, they shift. A role that once felt like a calling can slide into becoming a career, and then, over time, a job. The external circumstances may remain unchanged with the same title and responsibilities, but your internal relationship to the work evolves. Recognizing which of those dynamics is at play is what allows you to move from drift back into intention.

A calling perhaps cannot be applied to everything, but a career that allows some elements of calling along with autonomy can often lead to job crafting, a term that captures the active changes employees make to their own job and task design. This can bring about numerous positive outcomes, including engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving.

Where Are You Right Now?

Once you have a sense that something has shifted, it is worth getting more specific.

Herminia Ibarra’s book “Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader” offers a self-assessment that remains relevant today. By taking the ten-question long quiz, you can quickly assess if you are still experiencing growth, if you are ready to make a change, or even if you are already in transition in your career.

The Outsight Problem

At the heart of Ibarra’s work is a shift in how we think about change: clarity about what comes next rarely comes from thinking alone. It comes from action.

You do not think your way into a new chapter. You act your way into it and in doing so, begin to see yourself differently.

For senior professionals, there is a structural challenge. The longer you have been in one place, the more fixed both your reputation and your internal narrative can become. Others have a clear idea of who you are and what you are capable of and over time, that can begin to shape your own sense of what is possible.

Outsight requires deliberate disruption of that pattern:

  • A board role in an adjacent sector
  • A speaking opportunity in an unfamiliar room
  • A mentoring relationship that goes both ways
  • A project outside your formal scope

While strategic networking can be another part of the picture, these are best understood as experiments, ways of stepping outside your current context to see what else might fit.

This is also where the current wave of AI disruption becomes relevant. The professionals navigating it best are not those defending their existing expertise most aggressively. They are the ones who got curious early and who used the moment to explore adjacent capabilities and reposition before it became necessary.

A Note on the Financial Aspect of Staying

While it is important to consider the emotional calculus of whether it makes sense, from a fulfillment and meaning perspective, to stay or leave a role, it is equally important to directly assess the financial impact.

The “golden handcuffs” of deferred compensation, unvested equity, and year-end bonuses can create a powerful incentive to stay. But there is no way to make a fair assessment without running the actual numbers. Look at the net, not the headline figure. Consider the real timeline. Then weigh that against what you may be trading in terms of energy, momentum, and optionality.

Sometimes the math supports staying. But there is no way to know without a rigorous evaluation.

This is not a critique of how compensation is structured. It is simply the reality of incentive design. Managing a career well requires understanding those incentives clearly and deciding consciously whether they are worth the trade-offs.

Starting Before You Are Ready

Waiting until you know exactly what you want is one of the most reliable ways to ensure you stay exactly where you are.

The leaders who navigate transitions well tend to begin earlier than they think they need to. They start conversations, explore adjacent work, and build visibility outside their immediate context before they are formally “in the market.” Not because they are being overly strategic, but because they took the initial discomfort seriously.

These are not questions that tend to resolve neatly in the everyday pace of work. They require space to step back from delivery and look more clearly at what is shifting underneath it.

For those who are navigating this kind of inflection point, Evolved People Coaching, the executive coaching arm of The Glasshammer, offers a space to work through these questions in a more structured way. Coaching creates the opportunity to step back from day-to-day demands, clarify what is shifting in your relationship to work, and test assumptions about what comes next.

If you are ready to explore what a more intentional next chapter could look like, BOOK HERE for a complimentary exploratory conversation.

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Julia Hoggett: CEO, London Stock Exchange

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Julia Hoggett“My entire career has been motivated by answering exam questions that I’m passionate about,” says Julia Hoggett. “I’ve had the privilege of being able to answer them in each of the seats that I’ve been in, and I’ve learned to trust that those questions and opportunities will manifest over time.”

When the Glass Hammer first spoke with Hoggett in 2012 when she was the Head of Covered Bonds and FIG Flow Financing at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, she was already thinking about her career in exactly these terms. Now, as chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, Julia Hoggett sits at the center of UK capital markets, having also held senior roles across banking, regulation and market oversight. She frames her path as a succession of problems worth solving, each transition driven by curiosity and the conviction that the next challenge would reveal itself when the time was right.

Following the Exam Questions

Hoggett trained as a sociologist specializing in sub-Saharan East Africa and originally entered the City to answer what she calls her first big exam question: “How does Malawi operate in the global economy?” She expected to stay in finance for two years and then return to postgraduate research. Instead, the pursuit of one question led to another, and after seven years advising clients on multi-billion dollar bond issues, DEPFA offered her the opportunity to run a bank funding program – the exam question there was that she had talked the talk for those 7 years, could she walk the walk?

Thereafter, Bank of America Merrill Lynch offered Hoggett the opportunity to advise on bank liquidity structures after the GFC, and she thought: “That’s a good exam question.” From there she held senior roles at the Financial Conduct Authority, including designing the supervision of investment-bank conduct in the aftermath of major market scandals, and steering oversight of the UK securities markets through Brexit and MiFID II.

Then came a moment in the summer of 2020 that changed everything. Apple’s market capitalization exceeded the entire FTSE 100 for the first time. Hoggett, then Director of Market Oversight, sat down that evening and wrote out everything she thought she could influence from a policy perspective. The next afternoon, the phone rang.

“It was a headhunter and the first words out of her mouth were, Julia, why haven’t you applied for the LSE job?” she recalls. “And I knew the next exam question.”

Today Hoggett is working on two exam questions simultaneously: “It’s not just how we create the best possible environment in the UK for great companies to start, grow, scale, and stay here,” she explains. “But also, how we reshape our capital markets over the next decade to make the best use of tokenization and digitization.”

The Risk of a Plan

Hoggett’s philosophy of following fascination over something like five-year plans is something she absorbed without quite knowing it until the day she heard her mother articulate it in a speech when she was Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. When a female lawyer in the audience asked her mother how she had planned her way there, her answer was: ‘do what you’re doing to the utter best of your ability, trust that opportunities will come from that and don’t close yourself off to those opportunities however different they are from the path you’re on’.

“I almost started laughing,” Hoggett recalls. “I’d been asked a version of the same question the week before and given almost word for word the same answer. But my mother and I had never talked about it.”

When her mother graduated, there were six women and 94 men in her law cohort, one female judge, no female Law Lords, and the Supreme Court didn’t yet exist. Had she aimed at a visible target, she would have aimed too low.

“The risk of setting a plan is that what you think you’re capable of at the time is not what time proves you’re capable of,” Hoggett says.

Start With Where You Want to End Up

If Hoggett resists personal micro styled career planning, she is unambiguous about strategic direction. Her mantra is simply start with where you want to end up and work backwards.

“Don’t start with where you are and work forwards,” she says, “because the minute you do, you’ll be constrained by the first obstacle you hit. If you start with your vision and work backwards, you won’t constrain your ambition, and you’ll maximize the chance that you get there.”

Running an institution that has existed for over 300 years changes your relationship with time horizons. “Your job is not to be a day trader,” she says. “It’s to be there as this immutable piece of capability that others build their technology, their legal frameworks and their ambition to.”

Setbacks Are Data

Having navigated the Asian crisis, the Russian crisis, the global financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, the conduct crisis, Brexit, COVID and Ukraine, Hoggett treats each challenge as data whilst not underestimating the deeply human impact of so many of those crises.

“I assume I’m going to have one of those learning moments every day,” she says. “And usually you do.”

Her approach is twofold: brutal honesty about where things actually stand, combined with absolute confidence that with the right people in the room you can find a way through.

“Think of it like pushing off from the blocks as a sprinter. You need those blocks to be completely anchored into the ground, you need that solid foundation to push off from.
But you also have to create the space and the culture for that honesty to feel safe, rewarded and listened to.”

The Cloak of Post-It Notes

One of the most distinctive pieces of advice Hoggett shares came not from a mentor or a sponsor but from her ex-wife, a counselling psychologist.

Early in her banking career, Hoggett would write a to-do list on a Post-It note, scratch off items through the day, and then throw it in the bin when she left. Her ex-wife listened, then said: “Metaphorically, you’re throwing away all of your achievements at the end of every day.”

Hoggett started keeping a record instead, “thinking of each thing I struck off as one of life’s little victories, an accumulation of skills that I hadn’t necessarily had before I learned how to do it by doing that job. And then I started to think of it as a cloak made up of these metaphorical post-it notes. It was armor to take into the next thing that I did.”

The mental shift matters for navigating imposter syndrome, which she does not dismiss but reframes. “I think a certain amount of imposter syndrome is incredibly valuable. I get to do things in a day that most people don’t get to do. I’d never want to not recognize that that’s what they are.”

Mentors, Sponsors and Being Three-Up

Hoggett distinguishes between mentorship and sponsorship and emphasizes gathering the former from an unusually wide field.

“I don’t think of a mentor as having to have a particular shape,” she says. “Every day I am watching and observing all the people I work with whether they are male, female, more senior to me, more junior to me. I’m constantly observing how they do things and going, I like the way they did that, I would like to try and do it that way too.”

On sponsorship, she reflects on a colleague who moved teams and then approached her about a role elsewhere in the bank.

“She was three-to-‘more-than-one’ up on me. She knew me as an observer of the work I did. She knew the role she was sponsoring me into better than I did. And she knew the degree to which she was prepared to put her reputation on the line to sponsor me into that role.”

For Hoggett, the realization was when a sponsor approaches you, to recognise that they are operating with significantly more information than you are and to trust their willingness to place a step in your career in their hands.

Purpose Is Not a Buzzword

When asked about her why, Hoggett returns to where she started: an African development sociologist trying to understand how capital moves in the world.

“The capital markets are not there to make investment banks deal fees and league table position,” she says. “They are there as a convener, to bring together those who have capital, those who need capital, in service of an objective. Investment banks making deal fees is a byproduct of the purpose. It is not the object.”

That sense of fundamental purpose, Hoggett argues, is what allows strategy to flow and what allows thousands of people who may never be in the same room as a leader to feel connected to the work they do.

She has made repetition into a deliberate tool of culture, using phrases like 300-year-old fintech and convener of capital over and over again until they belong to everyone.

“The joke is it’s become Julia Bingo,” she says. “But there’s a pride in the fact that we all have that language, because that’s our shared articulation of our purpose. It’s not mine, it’s ours.”

It is, in the end, the same logic she applies to everything: not ownership, but direction. Not a plan, but a question worth answering, held lightly enough to let it evolve.

“I know that I am trying to do the thing I am doing right now to the utter best of my ability,” she says, “and I love it. What the next exam question is, and therefore what I do next, I don’t know yet and I don’t need to. I’ve learned to trust that the next exam question will manifest at some point, usually at the right moment.”

By Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching

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Why Women Need to Learn AI — Not Fear It

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why women need to learn ai

By Jessica Darmoni

“Imagine you start a new job and your boss gives you a Mac, but you are used to a PC,” said Michelle Ann Gitliz, Founder & CEO of Change Agents Technologies, Inc. a SaaS company that leverages its proprietary AI and automation platforms to transform how businesses manage compliance. “It’s a condition of your job to work with it and at first it feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable but eventually you adapt because it is part of the workplace. AI will likely follow a similar path. Many future jobs will require workers to collaborate with AI systems whether they feel ready or not.”

Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept reserved for tech companies and science fiction movies. It is rapidly becoming part of everyday life, shaping how we work, communicate, create, and make decisions. Yet for many women, AI can still feel intimidating, overly technical, or disconnected from reality. The truth is that understanding AI is not just about career advancement; it is about empowerment, safety, and maintaining agency in a world increasingly driven by technology.

Leveraging AI for Efficiency and Modernization

“Engaging with the technology allows people to understand both it’s strengths and it’s pitfalls,” says Gitlitz. “One of the most important things to understand is that AI is a tool and like every major technological shift before it, the people who benefit the most will be those who learn how to use it wisely. “

Nancy Li is a Los-Angeles based consultant helping firms leverage AI and Machine learning to scale and scope their organizations.

“Many organizations genuinely want to improve efficiency and modernize legacy systems,” she says. “The reality is that implementation is difficult. Most businesses are still trying to figure out how AI can truly augment workflows.”

She estimates that we are still several years away from full-scale adoption across industries and that AI must solve real-world problems.

In the meantime, there is an important opportunity for women to learn, experiment, and position themselves ahead of the curve instead of being left behind by it.

A Successful Use Case

According to Li, there is one major area where AI has already demonstrated measurable success: programming and coding. AI systems can now assist with software engineering, data analysis, automation, and workflow optimization. However even in those fields, humans are still essential. Someone has to guide the system, verify the output, and determine whether the result is useful, ethical, and accurate.

Li believes the future workforce may evolve into teams of “quality control managers” overseeing AI-powered systems and digital agents. That future raises a fascinating question: what does work look like when technology can perform many of the repetitive tasks people once did for a living?

The answer may depend less on technical expertise and more on judgment, creativity, discretion, and taste. AI can generate endless amounts of information, but it cannot fully replace human intuition or emotional intelligence. Knowing what you want, understanding your goals, and evaluating whether an AI-generated solution actually makes sense will become critical skills.

Understanding AI as a Matter of Safety

Women do not need to become engineers to participate in the AI economy. However, they do need enough familiarity to ask informed questions, challenge assumptions, and protect themselves.

Gitliz reminds people not to click “agree” on terms of service without reading them, or hand over personal information without considering the consequences.

“Your data is valuable. Your birthday, browsing habits, preferences, and online behavior can all be used to build detailed profiles for advertising and targeting.,” she says. “What matters is knowing the options exist, understanding the terms of use, and recognizing the impact these tools can have on your life.”

Women especially should understand how their data is collected, stored, and used. Learning the basics of AI and digital systems helps people recognize risks, identify manipulation, and make informed decisions online. You cannot safeguard yourself from technology if you do not understand how it works.

Cathy Yoon, General Counsel at Harmonic, emphasizes that the human element is still essential when leveraging AI systems. She believes that AI is good to fill in workflow gaps but that humans still need to verify outputs.

“Verification is essential because AI systems can still produce inaccurate, biased, or misleading information,” she said. “Learning how to question outputs and confirm facts will become just as important as learning how to generate them.”

Meritocracy Matters

There is also a larger cultural shift happening around merit and opportunity. Increasingly, employers and industries care less about where someone went to school and more about what they can actually do. In some emerging industries, especially digital assets and technology, AI literacy will become the new college degree and a baseline expectation rather than a specialized skill.

“This creates a unique opportunity for women from diverse backgrounds. AI has the potential to level certain playing fields because access to knowledge is more open than ever before,” says Li.

People can learn independently, build portfolios, launch businesses, automate workflows, and develop expertise outside traditional institutions.

The goal when women approach AI should be informed participation. The women who thrive in the AI era will not necessarily be the most technical. They will be the ones who stay curious, ask questions, protect their data, verify information, and learn how to use technology to supplement their strengths rather than replace them.

AI is coming whether we embrace it or not. The safest and most empowering choice is to understand it well enough to shape how it shapes us.

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Powering the Future: Jamila Piracci, Founder of Roos Innovations

Jamila Piracci

By Jessica Darmoni

“Historically, much of the derivatives business has been passed down through oral tradition,” says Jamila Piracci. “People learned through mentorship or by being in the right place at the right time. While this helped some people, we need to make sure as an industry that we formalize an information sharing process and purposefully strategize succession.”

The Glass Hammer was first introduced to Jamila Piracci when she was the Vice President of Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives at the National Futures Association (NFA) where she led a team in designing one of the most significant regulatory frameworks in modern derivatives markets.

Following the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, Piracci was hired by NFA to establish its swaps regulatory program. The effort required coordinating within the well established futures industry self regulatory body to create processes, recruit staff, and develop oversight mechanisms for swaps market participants. By the time she left NFA to relocate to Texas with her family, the swaps program had approximately 120 professionals, including examiners, risk specialists, auditors, and quantitative experts.

The experience gave Piracci a front-row seat to one of the largest regulatory transformations in derivatives history. Her experience with swaps oversight at NFA, combined with her past roles at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and ISDA, provided a particularly valuable perspective as the markets evolved. She has a unique ability to help firms understand not only the technical requirements but the spirit of U.S. regulatory frameworks. For emerging leaders entering the futures industry, understanding both the structure of these markets and the policy forces shaping them can be daunting without a formal information sharing process.

Building the Future Workforce

Piracci is working to fix that with work grounded in education. As part of her involvement with the Futures Industry Association (FIA), she contributes to industry development initiatives designed to cultivate expertise across derivatives professionals.

Piracci serves on the FIA Board and is a member of the board’s Membership and Market Structure Advisory Committees. She also instructs a virtual “Swaps 101” course through the organization’s training programs. The course introduces newcomers to the fundamentals of swaps markets—an essential area of modern derivatives trading.

“FIA’s educational initiatives aim to build expertise from the ground up, ensuring a steady pipeline of knowledgeable professionals in the industry,” she explained.

Her own entry into the swaps world reflected a different dynamic. Early in her career, she was handed the 1999 ISDA Credit Derivatives Definitions booklet and told that if she wanted to understand the field, she should read it from start to finish.

“I learned a lot from that experience,” she recalls. “But I also had mentors along the way. That was partly because of where I worked. However, I started wondering what happens to talented people who don’t have access to those same networks?”

Programs like FIA’s educational initiatives aim to answer that challenge by making industry knowledge accessible to anyone interested in learning about derivatives markets.

Democratizing Knowledge

Piracci believes that education and transparency are essential for the long-term sustainability of financial markets.

The concept resonates with broader developments in financial technology, particularly in digital assets. One of the central ideas in that space is democratizing access to financial opportunities and reducing barriers to participation. Piracci sees similarities with education.

“Information should always be democratized,” she says. “The more people understand how these markets work, the more people can participate responsibly.”

By creating structured learning opportunities, the industry can attract new talent and reduce a reliance on informal knowledge transfers. She credits this mindset to her time at NFA, which has become a foundation for her later career values.

“I was responsible not just for recruiting the staff but I also had to ensure they were trained. We built a training program partly based on my experience and partly on NFA’s existing new staff training program,” she said. “I am most proud that the staff became beneficiaries and later leaders of the training structure that we built together methodically over time.”

A Passion for Public Interest

Longevity is a theme that runs through Piracci’s current work too. Today, at Roos Innovations she works with federal regulators, commodity and energy market participants as well as trade associations to help firms build responsibly and endure transitions. Her work also extends to financial services firms seeking registration with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). These engagements often involve creating healthy dialogue and, in some cases, building the pillars necessary for firms to function as regulated entities.

“Many companies today want to become U.S. regulated market participants, ” she says. “This includes commodities firms, as well as digital asset firms and prediction market companies, some of which come from overseas and want insight into how to work with U.S. regulators.”

She also believes that financial markets ultimately serve a broader purpose.

“Transparent, well-regulated markets protect participants but also ensure broader economic growth, which is essential for long-term societal health,” she said.

That philosophy extends into her public service roles. For the past two years, Jamila has served on the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, where she was appointed by former CFTC Commissioner Summer Mersinger. The advisory committees provide recommendations and insights to the Commission, helping regulators understand market developments and stakeholder perspectives.

Jamila’s commitment to the public interest also includes extensive work with industry organizations such as Life:Powered, a nonprofit dedicated to improving America’s energy literacy, and the Committee of Chief Risk Officers. Through research and written analysis, she contributes insights on how policy decisions affect consumers and energy markets as well as how they impact risk management choices that have become increasingly more complex.

Skills for the Next Generation

Looking ahead, Jamila believes the most important skill for emerging leaders will be adaptability.

“The ability to learn new things matters more than simply amassing new facts,” she says. “The real skill is learning how to learn differently.”

In a world defined by technological innovation, regulatory change, and evolving market structures, professionals must be able to pivot quickly.

She describes this not merely as managing change but managing volatility.

“This requires a recognition that change is constant and must be embraced rather than resisted,” she says.

A Mission to Share Knowledge

Throughout her career, Jamila has worked at institutions central to the derivatives ecosystem, including regulatory bodies and an industry association. Those experiences gave her insights into how markets function at both policy and transactional levels.

Rather than keeping that knowledge within a small circle, she sees sharing it as a responsibility.
Whether advising firms, supporting industry groups, or sharing knowledge with other professionals, Piracci’s work reflects a commitment to adaptability, education and a talent pipeline that will guide the markets of tomorrow.

In closing, she is reminded of the quote by American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler, “the illiterate of the future will be those who can’t learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

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