Sonal Bahl spent eighteen years in corporate HR, at GE and PricewaterhouseCoopers, before she ever thought about starting her own business. Then the roles she wanted stopped calling back. She started a YouTube channel out of pure necessity, and within a few videos, people started reaching out. That accident became Supercharge, a career advisory firm she now runs from Belgium for clients across every habitable continent.
Along the way, she reviewed 250,000 resumes and sat in on more than 5,000 interviews. That is where career positioning stopped being a theory for her and became a pattern she could name on sight, and it is the subject of episode 81 of the Productivi-Tree podcast.
The pattern is this: high performers wait until something breaks before they ask for help. And when they finally do ask, they ask the wrong question. “What else can I do?” “What more should I be doing?” More doing is exactly what got them stuck. Sonal calls the fix a shift from doing to being: recognizing the level you already operate at and showing up as that person, instead of proving it again from scratch every quarter.
The Candy, Vitamin, Painkiller test for your own career positioning
Sonal borrows a framework from venture capital and applies it to people instead of products. A Candy is fun to have around: entertaining, forgettable, easy to lose without noticing. A Vitamin is the reliable, capable colleague who does good work and gets thanked for it. A Painkiller solves a problem that is expensive, visible, and urgent enough that the company will bend rules to keep that person around.
Most competent professionals, Sonal included, for years, sit in the Vitamin box. They are good at what they do. Nobody is worried about losing them because nobody has tied their work to a cost the company is afraid to pay.
“HR is suddenly creating exceptions. He went from expat to localized, and they say, let them keep their benefits, because we can’t afford to lose these people.”
Sonal Bahl, on what changes once you’re seen as a Painkiller
Painkillers get retention packages and relocation exceptions. Vitamins get a nice performance review and no leverage in the next negotiation. The shift starts with naming the specific, expensive problem you already solve, then making sure the people above you know you’re the one solving it. That is career positioning. It has nothing to do with the volume of output.
Career positioning is not a LinkedIn content calendar
Ask most professionals how to get visible, and they will say the same thing: post more on LinkedIn. Sonal pushes back on that hard. “I am not a huge fan of going out on LinkedIn and starting to create posts,” she said on the podcast. It gives a small hit of dopamine, a couple of likes, and then it is over. That is not leverage. That is a treadmill.
Two things work instead. First, a comment strategy: when you see a post you genuinely like, write about why you liked it, add your own point of view, and, if it is appropriate, a respectful counterpoint. Sonal has built real client relationships from a single comment, because a comment written by a human brain reads differently than one written by an AI tool asked to say something nice.
Second, an optimized profile, built around what she calls the Fab Four: headline, About section, recommendations, and the skills section, which is the part of your profile the platform’s search algorithm actually reads. None of it is about output volume. It is about making sure the words on your profile could not have been written by anyone else in your role.
What actually blocks the move from mid to senior management
Sonal’s clients earning $120K to $350K who are trying to break into $400K-plus roles run into two separate traps. The first is a mindset trap: complainers versus what Sonal calls “obtainers.” Blaming a broken hiring process or a distracted boss keeps you exactly where you are. The professionals who move describe the same market from a different perspective: there is still a seat, and they can still help fill it.
The second trap is structural, and it shows up specifically in people who became indispensable. If your skill set is the only reason a function still runs, moving you creates a real cost for the business, so nobody proposes it. The specialist reputation that once protected your job now caps your ceiling. The fix Sonal recommends is deliberate: build advocates and ambassadors who talk about your work in rooms you are not in, so your influence is no longer tied to your physical presence at your desk.
Uncover Your Productivity Score Before It Costs You
Does career positioning even work the same way across cultures
Sonal has lived and worked in India, Uruguay, Chile, France, and now Belgium, so this question came up naturally. Her answer surprised even the host: positioning is closer to universal than most people expect. “People are people,” she said. “Whether we are living in Uruguay, Chile, Bahrain, or Barcelona, human beings are human beings.” The instinct to want to provide, to be seen as competent, and to look forward to Monday rather than dread it, does not change much by geography. What changes is only the local etiquette around how loudly you say it.
Reading orange flags before you take the offer
When someone is actively job hunting, walking away from a flawed offer can feel like a luxury they cannot afford. Sonal does not pretend otherwise. Bills are real. Kids need college funds. Parents get older. Her advice: take the role that pays the bills, but take it with your eyes open, on a defined timeline, and pay attention to what she calls orange flags rather than red ones, because in the moment you cannot always tell which color you are looking at.
Her list from direct client experience: a hiring manager who never apologizes for wasted time, an interviewer who will not turn on their camera, a process built entirely around third-party contracts with no direct company contact, and an offer that moves unusually fast with no clear reason why. None of these guarantee a bad outcome on their own. Together, they are worth a longer look before you sign.
What to do when you are working sixty hours and still invisible
This is the question Sonal hears most often, and her answer starts with a hard stop: do less of what is not working. “Tell your fragile ego that if something is not working, it doesn’t mean you keep doing more of it,” she said. “That’s literally the definition of insanity.”
The second move is a direct conversation with your manager, planned rather than triggered by frustration. Sonal’s script: name the role you want, name the timeline, and ask what you can start working on today to close the gap. Ask for advice, not for a decision. People who feel consulted tend to become advocates. People who feel ambushed tend to say no, because saying no to a direct ask is easier for most managers than the uncomfortable conversation that follows a yes.
This is where the Ownership vector of the 4 Productivity Vectors methodology earns its place. Accountability is not just delivering the work. It includes making sure the right people know you delivered it, and asking directly for what comes next. Organizations that track engagement at scale, including Gallup’s ongoing workplace research, keep landing on the same point: employees who understand how their work connects to what leadership actually cares about report far higher engagement than those who do not.
The most dangerous assumption high achievers still make
Sonal names two assumptions that quietly cap careers. The first: “I followed the job description, so I did my job.” Job descriptions describe a floor, not a ceiling, and nobody gets promoted for meeting the floor. The second: “hard work speaks for itself.” It rarely does, on its own. Results need a narrator, and if you never take that role, someone else will assign you one you did not choose.
Sonal holds an MBA from INSEAD, and the research coming out of business schools like it keeps circling back to the same finding: visibility and network reach predict career mobility about as strongly as raw performance does. INSEAD Knowledge covers this territory regularly, under the umbrella of what researchers call sponsorship and advocacy, distinct from simple mentorship.
If any of this sounds familiar, run a real diagnostic instead of guessing. Santi’s high performer diagnostic is built for exactly this pattern: people who are clearly good at the work yet still stuck.
Ready to fix your own positioning?
Sonal’s closing line from the episode is the whole argument in one sentence: “Either the ladder is broken, or the ladder was on the wrong wall the whole time.” Careers are not linear anymore. Breaks happen. Layoffs happen. What stays constant is whether the people who decide your next move actually know what problem you solve.
Start with the free productivity quiz to see where your own habits are helping or working against you, then explore the full Productivity Hub for the tools to act on what you find. If your bottleneck is process rather than positioning, the stakeholder mapping template is a fast way to see who actually needs to know what you deliver.
Being good at your job was never going to be enough on its own. Being known for the right problem is what moves you.