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The most important recent career move I have made did not come from a job board. I never submitted a resume for it.

For the long stretches of my career I did what most of us were taught to do. When I wanted the next role, I polished the resume, scanned the postings, and fired applications into the portals, then waited. Some of it worked. Most of it taught me how it feels to disappear into a stack of a thousand other qualified people and the dark abyss.

The role that changed things for me came a different way. I had spent months showing up in a new community of project managers built by Daniel Hemhauser, the founder of The PM Playbook. I was not angling for anything. I became the most active member in this startup community because the philosophy Daniel espouses genuinely matters to me, and over time Daniel came to know how I thought, how I carried myself and whether I did what I said I would do. When the chance to serve as Executive Vice President opened, there was no posting and no pile of applications to sort through. There was a relationship, and there was a reputation I had built one interaction at a time. Daniel simply named me as EVP and posted about it on LinkedIn. That is the story I want to unpack with you today, because I believe it is the story most young project managers are never told.

Think about how we are taught to look for work. We are told to treat the search as a numbers game. Find the postings, tailor the resume, submit as many applications as we can muster each week, and trust that volume will eventually turn into an interview. Indeed, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, and a dozen aggregators all reward the same behavior, which is firing as many rounds as possible and hoping one lands based on the constraints of AI powered scanners and key words for HR recruiters.

I call that the shotgun approach. this metaphorical phrase is something I heard years ago and it stuck with me. For a young project or program manager in 2026 it is a harder road than it has ever been. The portals are more crowded, the filtering is more automated, and many of us carry a quiet new fear on top of all of it, which is the worry that AI agents are coming for the very roles we are applying to. When the strategy is volume, you are one of a thousand. This job search strategy in a market that is nervous about your whole profession, due to the AI disruption wave. You really are one of a thousand and easy to overlook if your key words are not perfectly placed.

The problem was never your qualifications. The problem is the map. A shotgun scatters. It was never built to hit one target on purpose and with deep value for the decision makers behind the HR wall.

There is a different way to run a career, and I have come to believe it is the one worth teaching to other project and program managers. Instead of scattering applications across every posting you can find, you choose a small number of targeted companies you actually want to serve, you identify the specific hiring authorities inside them, and you build real relationships with those people over time. Then, when a need appears, you are not a stranger in a stack of resumes. You are someone they already know and already trust.

I call this the road less traveled, and it works like a rifle rather than a shotgun. You are not hoping volume saves you. You are aiming with intention at a few targets that matter, and you are getting hired, often without a formal posting ever going up, because the relationship did the work the resume could never do. This is deliberate career management rather than passive job hunting, and it puts your future back in your own hands.

But here is the part that most people miss, and it is the reason the rifle matters more than the map. The rifle approach puts you in front of real human beings. And in front of real human beings, one thing decides almost everything.

The rifle approach only works if the hiring authority, once they meet you, wants you in their world. That decision is not made by your credentials. It is made by your executive presence.

I want to be careful about that group of words, because executive presence is badly misunderstood. Most of us were taught that it means looking the part, sounding certain, and projecting a bigger version of ourselves into the room. That is performance, and people can feel performance from across a table. Real executive presence is quieter and far more durable. It is the steady, credible way you show up that leaves other people clearer and calmer than they were before you arrived. It is how you address a hard conversation. It is whether your word can be counted on. It is the sense a person gets, often within minutes, that they could hand you something that matters and trust you to carry it well.

Stephen M.R. Covey gives us the most useful way I know to understand this. In The Speed of Trust he argues that trust is built on two things working together, character and competence. Competence is your track record and your skill, and most project and program managers work hard on that. Character is who you are when the pressure is on, whether you tell the truth, whether you keep your commitments, whether you put the mission ahead of yourself. A hiring authority is running exactly that calculation the whole time they are getting to know you. Can I trust this person, in both character and competence, with something I care about. Executive Presence is the answer they feel before you have said a single word about your qualifications.

That is why executive presence and the road less traveled belong together. The rifle approach earns you the relationship as you find key decision makers and connect with them. Your presence is what makes the person on the other side of it want to bring you in.

Executive Presence is not seniority and it is not personality. It is a set of deliberate behaviors that anyone can practice, starting on the very next conversation with others in your network. You build it the same way you build trust, one kept promise and one steady moment at a time. And it compounds. Every genuine deposit you make into a relationship now, every time you show up prepared and follow through and stay calm when things wobble, is building a presence that will still be paying you back years from now, often in rooms you cannot yet see. This is the long game of career management, and the good news is that the same servant leadership and emotional intelligence you are building to lead your projects is exactly what builds your executive presence too. You are not learning two things. You are learning one thing that serves both ends.

Stephen M.R. Covey, whose work on trust sits underneath this whole issue, puts the leadership version of this in a single sentence.

Sit with that as someone managing a career, not just a project. Long before a hiring authority evaluates your resume, they are deciding whether they trust you. That is the first job, and it is yours to do on purpose. The relationships you build on the road less traveled are simply the places where that trust gets earned, one honest interaction at a time. When the relationship is built, then proposing creative solutions to the decision maker at a key target company can influence them creating a position for you to step into. This has been referred to as the ‘hidden job market.’

I do not want you to just nod at this. I want you to take it into your real career management over the next two weeks. Here are three deliberate steps you can start now.

The project and program managers who learn to manage their careers this way, with a rifle instead of a shotgun and with executive presence instead of performance, stop feeling at the mercy of a job market that never seems to see them for who they really are. They build relationships that open doors long before any door is officially posted, and they walk through those doors as someone already trusted. I’ve come to learn in my career that intentionally managing your career is something you do throughout your career, even when things are going well. That is a very different feeling than refreshing a portal and waiting after losing a job, and it is fully available to you, one deliberate relationship at a time. You can do this!

Now I would like to hear from you. Reply to this issue and tell me one company you would love to serve, and one small deposit you could make into a relationship there this week. I read every reply, and the best ones may show up in a future Voice from the Field so we can learn from each other.

One more thing. Everything I have written here about executive presence comes out of a chapter for the book I am writing on servant leadership and emotional intelligence for project managers. If you would like to go deeper on how executive presence is actually built, you can download that chapter rough draft, Chapter 5 of my future book, free. Just reply and I will send it your way.

Serve well, lead well, and grow the leaders around you.

Mark

On Becoming a Servant Leader is a bi-weekly newsletter on servant leadership and emotional intelligence for project managers who want to deliver valued outcomes for their teams and the people they serve.