About
Hi, I’m Alicia.I read how you're being interpreted. Then I strengthen your authority and build evidence for what's next.
I have spent my career paying attention to what happens after someone becomes successful.
I’m Alicia Perkins, founder of The Positioning House, author of The Executive Read, and a former recruiting, executive placement, and talent leader.
My work is built for executives who already have experience, results, and a reputation.
At this stage, the questions change.
What has that experience actually prepared you to own? What are you becoming known for? Is your authority growing with your responsibility? Does the organization or market understand the level at which you now operate? And is everything you have built still creating the options you want?
Those are the questions behind The Positioning House.
As featured in
- Forbes
- Built In
- Yahoo Finance
- HerMoney
- Money
- LinkedIn News
Where the work came from
I spent more than 15 years close to how decisions about leaders were actually made.
I worked across recruiting, executive placement, and talent management, close to decisions about who was hired, promoted, selected for greater responsibility, and trusted with something larger.
I saw strong executives with years of results still get reduced to an old reputation.
I saw people carrying far more responsibility than their title suggested while decision makers continued evaluating them against the role they had originally been hired to do.
I saw executives become extremely valuable inside one company without knowing how much of that value would make sense anywhere else.
And I saw how quickly the needs of a business could change what experience mattered, who was considered ready, and what opportunities became available.
After leaving corporate, I began advising senior leaders privately. More than 400 leaders later, I kept seeing versions of the same problem.
The executive had changed. The work had changed. The organization had changed.
But the way the executive was being understood, what they were trusted with, or how they were evaluating what came next had not always changed with it.
That became the foundation of The Positioning House.
The question behind the work
What should everything you have already built create now?
A long career gives an executive more than experience.
It creates a reputation. It creates authority. It creates relationships, access, judgment, and a record of what people have trusted you to handle.
But those things do not automatically keep building in the right direction.
Another year can add something important to your record, or it can keep proving what everyone already knows.
A larger role can expand your authority, or simply increase what you are accountable for.
A strong reputation can create opportunity, or keep pulling you back toward the same kind of work.
That is why I do not look only at whether an executive has been successful. I want to understand what that success is producing now.
My perspective
I have seen executive decisions from both sides.
My years in recruiting and talent gave me a view of how organizations form conclusions about leaders.
My private advisory work has given me a view of what those conclusions look like from the executive’s side: the role that has changed around them, the promotion that is not as straightforward as it appears, the reputation that no longer fits, the new leader reassessing everyone, or the question of whether staying is still worth it.
That combination shapes how I work. I am interested in what the facts support, what the organization is actually signaling, what your experience has prepared you to own, what you may be giving up, and what a decision is likely to make possible later.
I am not there to give you generic career advice. I am there to help you read the situation more clearly.
The methodology
How executives are understood affects what they are trusted with next.
I created the Executive Signal System to identify the gap between how an executive is actually operating and how that leadership is being interpreted.
The system examines five signals.
- 01
Language
Can people understand what you think?
- 02
Judgment
Do they trust how you think and decide?
- 03
Presence
What happens to how you show up when the stakes rise?
- 04
Visibility
Are the right people actually seeing enough evidence of your leadership?
- 05
Authority
What does all of that lead people to trust you to own?
These signals help explain why two executives with similar experience can be trusted with very different levels of responsibility.
They are one part of the larger work of understanding what your experience is producing and what needs to happen next.
In their words
The kinds of decisions I am brought into.
“Alicia was the person I called before I made the decision, not after. She understood the politics of the situation, what the board was actually weighing, and what my experience made defensible.”
Chief Operating Officer
Global logistics
“She reads organizations accurately. She could tell me how my leadership was being interpreted at the executive level, where that reading was wrong, and what it would take to change it.”
Senior Vice President
Enterprise technology
“New leadership came in and reassessed everyone. Alicia helped me think clearly about scope, authority, and what I wanted the next chapter to be instead of reacting to the reorganization.”
Vice President
Financial services
The Positioning House
The work now extends beyond private advisory.
I founded The Positioning House as an executive education and advisory company for leaders and the organizations responsible for developing, evaluating, and preparing them.
The company is built on three pathways: executive education for leaders, private executive advisory, and work with organizations responsible for senior talent. Speaking, The Executive Read, and The Positioning Room extend the same body of work.
The formats are different. The question underneath them is the same:
What should the experience already built make possible next?
The Executive Read
Start with The Executive Read.
The Executive Read examines how organizations form conclusions about senior leaders, what signals shape trust and readiness, and why substantial experience can still be misunderstood or undervalued.