From Corporate Strategist to Career Strategist: Breaking Through When You’re Not the “Core Business”

“Integrate your core skills as your advantage to break through your career limitations.”

Atip Muangsuwan
CEO Coach and Coach Supervisor

As an executive & leadership coach, I often work with brilliant professionals who feel stuck. They’re experts in their field, yet they’ve hit an invisible ceiling. The culprit? An organizational structure or culture that doesn’t see their function as “core” to the business.

Sound familiar?

Recently, I coached “Linda,” a highly accomplished VP of Marketing & Strategy. Linda is a master strategist. She expertly analyzes markets, understands customers, and builds campaigns that drive real growth. Yet, when a coveted Regional VP of Marketing position opened up, she felt constrained. Despite her interest, she felt limited by her company’s sales-driven culture, where marketing was seen as a support function, not a core driver of value.

Her initial session goal seemed simple: “I want to learn how to shape strategy more effectively.”

However, as her coach, my intuition told me that she had her “hidden” session goal. Later in the session, I found out that my intuition was correct!

The profound insight we uncovered from the session was this: It was time for Linda to stop just creating marketing strategies for her company and start applying that same strategic mindset to her own career.

If you, like Linda, are ready to architect your own breakthrough, here are the strategic principles we explored in our session.

The Foundation: The Three Awarenesses of an Effective Strategist

Great strategy, whether for business or your career, starts with deep awareness. We used a psychological model to frame this:

1. Awareness of Self: You must be crystal clear about your own strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and what you truly yearn for in your career. What is your unique value proposition?
2. Awareness of Others: Strategy is not executed in a vacuum. You must understand the psychology of your key stakeholders—their goals, pressures, and what they perceive as valuable. For Linda, this meant deeply understanding the Sales team and senior leadership.
3. Awareness of Context: This is about reading the room—and the market. Understand the company culture, the competitive landscape, and the unspoken rules of advancement within your organization.

This triad forms the bedrock of all strategic thinking. As the ancient strategist Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.”

In a corporate context, “Heaven and Earth” represent the context—the market conditions and organizational terrain you must navigate.

Your 5-Step Actionable Strategy Framework

Awareness alone isn’t enough. You need a process. I shared with Linda my own process of becoming an effective strategist:

1. Anticipate the Future: Don’t just wait for opportunities; foresee them. Where is the company headed? What skills will be critical in the next 12 or 18 months? Linda anticipated the regional role opening and positioned herself as a contender.
2. Do the Pre-Work: This is your homework. Build relationships, gather data, and understand the needs of the decision-makers before you need something from them. This pre-work step is vital as taught by Sun Tzu that… “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”. This is the importance of the pre-work!
3. Take Decisive Action: Strategy without execution is hallucination. Raise your hand for visible projects, voice your ideas in meetings, and apply for the promotion.
4. Measure the Outcomes: How do you know your career strategy is working? Define what success looks like—is it an interview? A seat at a new table? Positive feedback from a key leader?
5. Reflect and Adapt: Learn from every win and setback. What worked? What would you do differently? This turns experience into enduring wisdom.

The Breakthrough Assignment: Making Others See What You See

Linda’s key challenge, and perhaps yours, was a classic one: How do you demonstrate the value of your function to those who don’t inherently see it?

Her homework was to answer these powerful questions:

• How can you make senior leadership see what you see? What data, stories, or business outcomes can you present that connect your work directly to their core goals (e.g., sales enablement, market share, customer retention)?
• How can you integrate your unique skills to break through? Linda had sales skills, marketing skills, and strategist skills. Her breakthrough would come from integrating these to solve bigger business problems, not just marketing tasks.
• Who or what can support your breakthrough? Identify your allies, mentors, and organizational resources. You don’t have to do it alone.

The Final Word: Become the Strategic Architect of Your Career

The profound insight that came up was: “Integrate your core skills as your advantage to break through your career limitations.”

Our session ended with a one-word insight from each of us.

Linda chose “Achiever.” I chose “Breakthrough.”

You are already a strategist in your domain. The next—and most important—campaign you will ever run is your own career.

Call to Action:

What is the one strategic action you can take this week to increase your visibility and value in your organization? Start with awareness, anticipate the opportunity, and take that first step.

About Atip Muangsuwan: Coach Atip is an executive leadership coach who specializes in helping high-achieving leaders overcome internal barriers to unlock their full potential and drive organizational success. Through a blend of strategic frameworks and profound personal insight, he empowers leaders in transforming their mindsets, emotional states, and behaviors for lasting impact.