The Glass Cliff: When You’re Promoted to Fail
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
You finally got the C-suite role you’ve been working toward for a decade. But the company is in crisis, the resources are gone, and the board is watching your every move. This guide explores the “glass cliff” phenomenon, why women with relational trauma are uniquely vulnerable to it, and how to survive a leadership role designed for your failure.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Poisoned Chalice
- What Is the Glass Cliff?
- The Neurobiology of the Crisis Manager
- Why Driven Women Accept the Glass Cliff
- The Childhood Root: The Parentified Child
- Both/And: You Are a Leader AND You Are Being Set Up
- The Systemic Lens: The Scapegoating of Female Leaders
- How to Survive the Cliff
- Frequently Asked Questions
The glass cliff is the organizational phenomenon in which women are disproportionately appointed to leadership positions during times of crisis or high organizational risk, effectively setting them up to fail in roles that were designed without adequate resources or stakeholder support. Research first identified the pattern at the board level, but it occurs at every tier of leadership from team lead to CEO. Women with relational trauma histories are particularly vulnerable to accepting glass-cliff appointments because the pattern of stepping in to fix an impossible situation often reactivates the childhood role of the parentified child. In my work with driven women in executive roles, the glass cliff is usually framed as an opportunity right up until the moment it becomes evidence that they ‘couldn’t handle it.’
In short: The glass cliff is the pattern of appointing women to leadership roles during institutional crises, then using their failure in structurally impossible positions as evidence of their unfitness to lead.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
I’ve worked with driven women navigating glass-cliff leadership roles across more than 15,000 clinical hours and consistently see the appointment reactivate the childhood wound of being asked to manage what can’t be managed. The glass cliff phenomenon was identified empirically by Ryan and Haslam, and the relational trauma dimension connects to research on complex trauma and the parentified child (Herman 1992).
The Poisoned Chalice
Talia is a 42-year-old VP of Operations. For years, she was passed over for the Chief Operating Officer role in favor of male colleagues. But when the company faces a massive supply chain crisis, plummeting stock prices, and a hostile board, the male COO abruptly resigns. Suddenly, Talia is offered the job.
We live in a culture that pathologizes the individual while ignoring the system. A woman who can’t sleep is given melatonin. A woman who can’t stop working is given a productivity app. A woman who can’t feel anything in her marriage is told to “communicate better.” None of these interventions address the foundational question: what happened to this woman that taught her that her worth was conditional, that rest was dangerous, and that needing anything from anyone was a form of weakness?
The systemic dimension matters because without it, therapy becomes another form of self-improvement. Another item on the to-do list of a woman who is already doing too much. Real healing requires naming the forces that shaped her: the family system that parentified her, the educational system that rewarded her performance while ignoring her pain, the professional culture that promoted her resilience while exploiting it, and the relational patterns that feel familiar precisely because they replicate the conditional love she learned to survive on as a child.
This is the tension I sit with alongside my clients every week. The driven woman who built something extraordinary. And who is also quietly breaking under the weight of it. Both things are true. Both things deserve attention. And the path forward isn’t about choosing one over the other. It’s about learning to hold both with the kind of compassion she has never been taught to direct toward herself.
What I’ve observed in over 15,000 clinical hours is that the healing doesn’t begin when she finally “fixes” the problem. It begins when she stops treating herself as a problem to be fixed. When she can sit in the discomfort of not knowing, not performing, not producing. And discover that she is still worthy of love and belonging without the armor of achievement.
This is what trauma-informed therapy offers that no amount of self-help, coaching, or hustle culture can provide: a relationship where she is seen. Fully, without performance. And where the nervous system can finally learn what it never had the chance to learn in childhood. That safety isn’t something you earn. It’s something you deserve simply because you exist.
She is thrilled. She views it as the ultimate validation of her competence. But within three months, the reality sets in. She has been given the title, but she has not been given the budget, the authority, or the runway to actually fix the crisis. When the quarterly numbers inevitably fall short, the board points to Talia as the problem. She realizes, with a sickening drop in her stomach, that she wasn’t promoted to lead; she was promoted to take the fall.
If you are a driven woman in corporate leadership, you likely recognize Talia’s situation. It is a well-documented phenomenon known as the “glass cliff.” But what is less discussed is why highly intelligent, capable women accept these poisoned chalices in the first place.
In my work with clients, I see this pattern constantly. The driven woman who built her career as a fortress. Not because she loved the work, though she often does. But because achievement was the one domain where the rules were clear and the rewards were predictable. Unlike her childhood home, where love was conditional and the ground was always shifting, the professional world offered a transactional clarity that felt like safety.
What makes this particularly painful for driven women is the isolation. She can’t talk about it at work. Vulnerability is a liability. She can’t talk about it at home. Her partner sees the successful version and doesn’t understand why she’s struggling. She can’t talk about it with friends. If she even has close friends, which many driven women don’t, because genuine intimacy requires the kind of emotional availability that her nervous system has been rationing since childhood.
What Is the Glass Cliff?
The term “glass cliff” was coined in 2004 by researchers Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam at the University of Exeter.
A phenomenon in which women (and marginalized groups) are disproportionately elevated to leadership roles during periods of crisis or downturn, when the chance of failure is highest.
In plain terms: It’s when the “old boys’ club” steps back from a burning building and hands you the hose, knowing there is no water pressure, so they can blame you when the building burns down.
The glass cliff is the insidious cousin of the glass ceiling. You break through the ceiling, only to find yourself standing on a precipice with no safety net.
A theory in organizational psychology proposing that women and other marginalized leaders are granted authority specifically during periods of organizational crisis because their leadership is viewed as less valuable by the organization. A form of implicit bias in which risk is disproportionately assigned to those with less institutionalized power. Michelle Ryan, PhD, professor of social diversity at the European University Institute, and Alexander Haslam, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, developed this framework through their foundational research at the University of Exeter, which revealed that female FTSE 100 appointments were significantly more likely to follow periods of poor organizational performance.
In plain terms: It means the promotion wasn’t recognition. It was a calculated risk transfer. The people who handed you the burning building weren’t betting on you. They were hedging their own losses. Understanding that the setup was structural, not personal, matters enormously: your struggle in the role isn’t evidence that you weren’t ready. It’s evidence that no one was meant to succeed in those conditions.
The Neurobiology of the Crisis Manager
To understand why women accept glass cliff roles, we have to look at the nervous system. If you have a history of relational trauma, your nervous system is likely highly adapted to crisis.
When a company is in chaos, a person with a regulated nervous system might look at the situation and say, “This is a mess. I’m not taking this job.” But a trauma survivor’s nervous system looks at the chaos and says, “I know how to do this.”
Chaos feels familiar. Your amygdala is already primed for hypervigilance. When the board offers you the impossible task, your sympathetic nervous system activates, flooding you with the adrenaline and cortisol you need to manage the crisis. You don’t feel fear; you feel a profound, intoxicating sense of purpose. You are finally in your element.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- Four latent profiles of people-pleasing tendencies identified in 2203 university students, with higher tendencies associated with lower mental well-being (PMID: 40312075)
A chronic state of heightened neurological alertness in which the brain’s threat-detection system. Primarily the amygdala. Continuously scans the environment for danger signals at a lower threshold than is adaptive, producing sustained stress-hormone elevation even in the absence of acute threat. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes this state as a hallmark of trauma’s impact on the brain, in which past experiences of unpredictable harm rewire the nervous system to treat uncertainty itself as a threat.
In plain terms: In a glass cliff role, this isn’t paranoia. The threats are real. But your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between the actual organizational crisis and a routine email from your boss, so it stays on high alert around the clock. The exhaustion you feel isn’t weakness. It’s the cost of your brain treating every moment of your workday like a genuine emergency, because for a while, it was.
Why Driven Women Accept the Glass Cliff
Beyond the neurobiological pull of chaos, there are specific psychological patterns that make driven women vulnerable to the glass cliff:
The Scarcity Mindset: Because women have to fight so hard for leadership roles, you may believe this is your *only* chance at the C-suite. You accept the impossible conditions because you fear that if you say no, you will never be asked again.
The Savior Complex: You believe that through sheer force of will, intellect, and 80-hour work weeks, you can save the company. You overestimate your individual power and underestimate the structural rot of the organization.
The Need to Prove Worth: If your ambition is driven by a deep, unhealed wound of inadequacy, you view the crisis not as a business problem, but as a personal test. You believe that if you can fix the unfixable, you will finally prove that you are valuable.
The Childhood Root: The Parentified Child
Gabriela is a managing director at a global investment bank. She is forty-two years old, holds degrees from two institutions most people would recognize, and hasn’t taken a sick day in three years. Her colleagues describe her as unflappable. Her direct reports describe her as inspiring. Her therapist. When she finally found one. Would describe her as a woman whose entire identity was built on a foundation of proving she was enough.
“I don’t know when it started,” Gabriela told me during our fourth session, her hands clasped in her lap with the kind of stillness that looks like composure but is actually a freeze response. “I just know that somewhere along the way, I stopped being a person and became a résumé. And now I don’t know how to be anything else.”
What Gabriela was describing. This sense of having performed herself out of existence. Isn’t burnout, though it can look like it. It’s the quiet cost of building a life on a childhood wound that whispered: you are only as valuable as your last accomplishment.
In my clinical work, I frequently see that women who end up on the glass cliff were often “parentified children.” This is a core component of the Achievement as Sovereignty framework.
If you grew up in a home where the adults were incapable of managing the household, due to addiction, mental illness, or emotional immaturity, you likely stepped in to fill the void. You became the crisis manager at age ten. You learned that love and safety were conditional on your ability to clean up other people’s messes.
When the board hands you a failing company, they are unconsciously tapping into your deepest childhood programming. You accept the role because your inner child still believes that if you can just fix the mess, the “parents” (the board) will finally love and protect you.
Both/And: You Are a Leader AND You Are Being Set Up
One of the hardest things for a woman on the glass cliff to admit is that she cannot save the company. It feels like a personal failure. You think, “If I were just smarter, or worked harder, I could turn this around.”
We must practice the Both/And. You can be a brilliant, capable, extraordinary leader AND you can be in a situation that is structurally designed for failure. Your inability to fix a broken system is not a reflection of your competence; it is a reflection of the system’s brokenness.
You do not have to internalize the company’s failure as your own. You can grieve the loss of the opportunity without taking on the shame of the outcome.
Pete Walker, MA, MFT, author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, identifies this as the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between physical danger and relational danger. When the threat was the person who was supposed to love you, your brain learned to treat intimacy itself as a survival problem. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s an adaptation that made perfect sense at the time.
The Systemic Lens: The Scapegoating of Female Leaders
We cannot discuss the glass cliff without acknowledging the systemic misogyny that drives it. When a company is failing under male leadership, the board often brings in a woman because she represents a “change in direction.” She is the symbolic sacrifice.
If she miraculously turns the company around, the board takes the credit for making a “bold hire.” If she fails, the board blames her, and then often replaces her with a “safe” male leader (a phenomenon known as the “savior effect”). You are not paranoid for feeling like you are being set up; you are accurately perceiving a well-documented sociological pattern.
Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, would call this the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between physical danger and relational danger. When the threat was the person who was supposed to love you, your brain learned to treat intimacy itself as a survival problem. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s an adaptation that made perfect sense at the time.
How to Survive the Cliff
If you find yourself on the glass cliff, or if you are considering a role that looks suspiciously like one, you need a trauma-informed strategy to protect yourself.
1. Radical Assessment: Before accepting a crisis role, you must evaluate it with a regulated nervous system, not a trauma-activated one. You must demand the budget, the authority, and the timeline necessary to actually succeed. If they refuse, you must walk away.
2. De-coupling Worth from Outcome: If you are already on the cliff, you must do the deep psychological work of separating your fundamental human value from the company’s stock price. You have to know who you are, even if you are fired.
3. Healing the Savior Complex: We must address the childhood trauma that makes you believe you are responsible for saving everyone. You have to learn how to let the burning building burn, without throwing yourself into the fire.
You have spent your life cleaning up other people’s messes. It is time to stop volunteering for the cleanup crew. If you are ready to begin this work, I invite you to explore therapy with me or consider my foundational course, Fixing the Foundations™.
Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist at Indiana University and developer of Polyvagal Theory, calls this the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between physical danger and relational danger. When the threat was the person who was supposed to love you, your brain learned to treat intimacy itself as a survival problem. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s an adaptation that made perfect sense at the time.
If you recognize yourself in any of this. If you’re reading these words at midnight on your phone, or in a bathroom stall between meetings, or in your parked car with the engine off. I want you to know something that no one in your life may have ever said to you directly: the fact that you’re searching for answers is itself a sign of health. It means some part of you. Beneath the performing, beneath the achieving, beneath the years of proving. Still knows that you deserve more than survival dressed up as success.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
You don’t have to earn the right to heal. You don’t have to hit rock bottom first. You don’t have to have a “good enough” reason. The quiet ache that brought you to this page tonight. That’s reason enough.
What I want to name here. Because so few people will. Is that the struggle you’re experiencing isn’t a failure of willpower, discipline, or gratitude. It’s the predictable outcome of building a life on a foundation that was never stable to begin with. Not because your parents were monsters. Most of my clients’ parents weren’t. But because the love you received came with conditions you were too young to articulate and too dependent to refuse. And those conditions. Be good, be easy, be impressive, don’t need too much, don’t feel too much, don’t be too much. Became the operating system you’ve been running on ever since.
The work of trauma-informed therapy isn’t about dismantling what you’ve built. It’s about finally understanding WHY you built it. And gently, carefully, with someone who can hold the complexity of it, beginning to separate who you are from what you had to become to survive. This distinction. Between the self you invented and the self you actually are. Is the most important and most terrifying threshold in the healing process. Because on the other side of it is a version of you that doesn’t need to earn rest, or justify joy, or perform worthiness. And for a woman who has been performing since childhood, that kind of freedom can feel more dangerous than the cage she already knows.
If you’re reading this at an hour you should be sleeping, on a device that’s usually running your calendar or your Slack or your email. I want you to know that the ache you’re feeling isn’t pathology. It’s your nervous system finally telling you the truth that your performing self has been too busy to hear: something needs to change. Not your productivity. Not your morning routine. Not your marriage, necessarily. Something deeper. Something foundational. The thing underneath all the things.
Healing isn’t linear, and it isn’t pretty. My clients who are furthest along in their recovery will tell you that the middle of the process. When you can see the pattern clearly but haven’t yet built new neural pathways to replace it. Is the hardest part. You’re too awake to go back to sleep, and too early in the process to feel the relief you came for. This is where most people quit. This is also where the most important work happens.
The nervous system that spent decades in survival mode doesn’t surrender its defenses easily. And it shouldn’t. Those defenses kept you alive. The work isn’t to override them. It’s to slowly, session by session, offer your nervous system the experience it never had: being fully seen, fully held, and fully safe, without having to perform a single thing to earn it. Over time. And I mean months, not weeks. The system begins to update. Not because you forced it, but because you finally gave it what it was starving for all along: the experience of mattering, exactly as you are.
This is what I mean when I say “fixing the foundations.” Not fixing you. You were never broken. Fixing the foundational beliefs about yourself that were installed by a childhood you didn’t choose, reinforced by a culture that exploited your adaptations, and maintained by a nervous system that was just trying to keep you safe. Those foundations can be rebuilt. But only if someone is willing to go down there with you. That’s what therapy is for.
What I want to be direct about. Because directness is what my clients tell me they value most in our work together. Is that naming this pattern is not the same as healing it. Awareness is the beginning, not the destination. The woman who reads this post and thinks “that’s me” has taken an important step. But the nervous system doesn’t reorganize through insight alone. It reorganizes through repeated, corrective relational experiences. The kind that can only happen in a therapeutic relationship where she is seen without performance, held without conditions, and allowed to fall apart without anyone trying to put her back together too quickly.
Deb Dana, LCSW, author of Anchored and The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, describes healing as “building a platform of safety that the nervous system can stand on.” For the driven woman, this means creating experiences. In therapy, in her body, in her closest relationships. Where safety doesn’t have to be earned through performance. Where she can be confused, uncertain, messy, slow, and still be met with warmth rather than withdrawal.
In my clinical experience, the women who come to this work aren’t looking for someone to tell them what to do. They’ve been told what to do their entire lives. By parents, by institutions, by a culture that treats feminine ambition as both admirable and suspect. What they’re looking for, even when they can’t articulate it, is someone who can sit with them in the space between who they’ve been performing as and who they actually are. Without rushing to fill that space with solutions, affirmations, or action plans. The willingness to simply be present with what is, without fixing it, is itself a radical act for a woman whose entire life has been organized around fixing, achieving, and producing.
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Q: Should I ever accept a turnaround role?
A: Yes, but only if you have the structural power to actually execute the turnaround. A turnaround role is an opportunity; a glass cliff is a trap. The difference is the resources and authority you are given.
Q: How do I negotiate when I’m offered a glass cliff role?
A: You negotiate for your exit before you enter. You demand a massive severance package, guaranteed runway (e.g., 18 months before evaluation), and written authority over budget and personnel. If they balk, it’s a cliff.
Q: I’m on the cliff right now and I’m failing. What do I do?
A: Document everything. Communicate the structural barriers clearly and in writing to the board. And begin working with a therapist or executive coach to manage the profound psychological toll of being the scapegoat, so you don’t internalize the failure.
Q: Why do I feel so guilty for wanting to quit?
A: Because your inner parentified child believes that quitting means abandoning the family. You have to remind your nervous system that a corporation is not your family, and you are not responsible for saving it at the cost of your own life.
Q: Will failing on the glass cliff ruin my career?
A: It might be a setback, but it is rarely fatal. The key is how you narrate the experience afterward. If you can clearly articulate the structural challenges you faced, future employers will often respect the grit it took to take the role in the first place.
Related Reading
[1] Ryan, M. K., & Haslam, S. A. (2005). The Glass Cliff: Evidence that Women are Over-Represented in Precarious Leadership Positions. British Journal of Management, 16(2), 81-90.
[2] Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders. Harvard Business Review Press.
[3] Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery.
[4] Gibson, L. C. (2015). Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. New Harbinger Publications.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
- Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
- Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W., 2018.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT #95719 · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
