The C-suite isn't given. It's taken.
An always-on career manager for women of color (WOC), built on the specific moves twelve WOC used to reach senior leadership positions. Navigate every stage, clear the roadblocks, and make the moves that count.
Dr. Monica Dominguez
Dr. Monica Dominguez is a strategy and transformation executive in financial services and the founder of The New Archetype. Across a career of enterprise operating-model change, M&A, and enabling P&L outperformance inside a top-five insurer, including a Chief of Staff mandate for a $30B organization, she kept seeing the same pattern: exceptional women of color doing the work and still stalling short of the top.
Alongside that work, she spent seven years researching leadership. Her doctoral capstone went deeper still: over roughly two years she interviewed twelve women of color who reached senior leadership positions, some of them the C-suite, looking for what actually moved them. The same moves kept surfacing. The New Archetype turns that research into named, teachable plays, and into a coach that puts them in your pocket.
ASCEND: the six moves that make the difference.
Across twelve women who reached senior leadership, the same six moves kept surfacing. The Navigator reasons from them — so every step you get is grounded in what moved them, not generic advice.
Author Your Narrative
Control the story of your impact so it reaches the rooms where decisions about you get made.
Secure Sponsors
Move past mentors to sponsors who spend real capital advocating for you when you're not in the room.
Cultivate Connection
Build the Triad — sponsor, mentor, ally — that carries you, not just the network that advises you.
Embrace Authentic Brand
Be known for something clear and true, so your reputation precedes you into the room.
Navigate Bold Risks
Reach for the stretch before you feel fully ready — because that's where the next level is won.
Draw on Resilience
Protect your energy and your support system so the climb is sustainable, not extractive.
Not advice. Named plays you can run.
The framework breaks down into specific, teachable tactics — each with a concrete next step and a word-for-word script. A few of them:
The Triad
Sponsor, mentor, ally — the three relationships every ascent needs. See which seat is empty, and how to fill it.
Put Down a Chip
Not self-promotion — a senior leader spending their capital to champion you by name, in the room where your promotion is decided and you're not present. Your move is to earn that advocacy and ask for it.
The 50% Rule
Raise your hand for the stretch role at about half the criteria — because waiting until you meet all of it is how you get passed over.
The Future Resume
Reverse-engineer the path from where you are to the role you want, and turn the gaps into this year's moves.
From stuck to your next move.
Tell it what you're facing
A review in two weeks. A sponsor you need. A stalled path. Asked to take notes when you're there as a peer.
Get the named move
The specific tactic from the research, a concrete next step, and a word-for-word script you can use.
Build it or rehearse it
Assemble your promotion case, or role-play the hard conversation live before you have it for real.
Walk in ready
You leave with the exact thing to do this week, timed to the moment it actually counts.
What's holding your ascent back?
Answer a few observable facts — no ratings, no signup. In about ten minutes, the ASCEND Assessment names the one pillar most in your way, and where your sponsorship Triad has an open seat.
Free. No signup to see your result.
Mentorship was everywhere. Sponsorship was the difference. The women who rose authored their own narrative, secured advocates, and made calculated bold moves, intentionally. The New Archetype names those moves so you don't have to reverse-engineer them alone.
Seven years of research, becoming the field guide I wish someone had handed me. Join the waitlist and you'll hear the day it opens, before anyone else.
Just the book. No spam, and you can leave anytime.