We’re seeing a lot of people churn in organizations at the moment, from wholesale reorganizations to CX leaders swapping jobs. This might be a sign of a healthy job market, or maybe it’s a sign that some seasoned CX leaders are quietly wondering whether they’ve hit a ceiling and are moving sideways.

Ever feel like you’re stuck in the CX jungle shouting, “Get me out of here!”?

CX Should Be The Best Cross-Functional Training Ground In The Business

Tina Lilje joined us on a recent CX Cast episode to talk about her time scaling the CX team at Phillips Healthcare. As she shared, CX should be “a fantastic starting point for a great career or a fantastic step in a great career because you see so much and you learn so much and you have the view of the whole organization if it’s end to end.” You see the whole ecosystem end‑to‑end; you learn commercial instinct, operational nuance, customer psychology, change management — the works. On paper, that’s exactly what prepares someone for GM, COO, or transformation roles. But:

  • CX becomes a cul‑de‑sac, not a springboard. With no shared definition of what CX leadership actually is, organizations see specialists wrapped in tools and jargon — not future enterprise leaders — and struggle to map CX skills to bigger roles.
  • Impact gets lost in translation. When CX leaders lead with metrics, frameworks, and dashboards — instead of revenue, risk, efficiency, and growth — measurement becomes a distraction, signaling “tactical operator” rather than “strategic leader.”
  • Organizations lose their strongest future leaders. CX produces proven transformation and COO and CCO talent, but weak role clarity and poor outcome linkage mean that capability is under‑promoted, miscast, or pushed out entirely.

Turn The Glass Ceiling Into A Springboard

Tina shared, “My dream had been that I want as many people as possible to go through the CX team and then go on and have other roles in the organization, because then you would suddenly start a discussion with a business leader or a financial leader or even a CEO who’s worked in CX and who’s been there and who gets it…”  To follow this advice and power up your CX or post-CX career path:

  • Define the real job. Write a clear, enterprise-level definition of your CX function: the outcomes you own, the capabilities you develop, and the value you deliver. Share it widely and use it to anchor expectations, hiring, and development.
  • Speak in outcomes, not artefacts. Translate every metric, tool, and method into business language. “This journey map identifies a £12m revenue leakage.” “Fixing this moment will reduce churn by X%.” This is the language that accelerates careers.
  • Create visible paths out of CX. Build formal rotations; align with HR on progression frameworks; and help define competencies, skills, a vocabulary, and a career path that makes CX a required stop on the leadership bench — not a destination you never leave.

An early career in CX has the potential to be one of the richest apprenticeships in how a business actually works. But unless we fix the definition problem and ditch the metric-and-tool obsession in favor of real business outcomes, too many brilliant CX leaders will remain stuck in the jungle, shouting for a way out.

Let’s build the paths that help them walk out — and up.

You can listen to the full episode on the CX Cast.