Former head of $2 billion corporation: Unable to shatter the glass ceiling, I opted to go around it.

Julia Stewart's journey to becoming CEO was not a straightforward climb up a career ladder, as she explains.

For the past 20 years, Stewart, 68, has been running companies, including 10 years as CEO of Dine Brands, which owns IHOP and Applebee's, and reached a peak market cap of $2.1 billion during her tenure. Currently, she is the CEO of Alurx, a wellness company that she founded in 2020.

Stewart, with a marketing background, believes that women must be open-minded when seeking new opportunities to advance in their careers. She left good jobs and searched for new roles, including lateral ones, to acquire new skills and increase her chances of promotions.

The strategy helped her carve an incremental path forward, she says.

"Stewart shares with CNBC Make It that early in his career, he focused on obtaining more responsibility and accountability. However, he explains that in his view, this was not a path to success. Instead, he would maneuver and navigate to achieve his goals."

Leaving a 'cushy' job to learn new skills

After studying communications at San Diego State University, Stewart worked as a regional marketing manager for fast-food brands like Carl's Jr. and Burger King throughout the 1980s. She quickly learned to seek out new job opportunities whenever she felt her progress could stagnate.

Sometimes, it meant moving to different regions within the same company, while other times it meant leaving the company entirely, according to Stewart.

"Stewart reflects on his first nearly 15 years of marketing, during which he frequently moved to acquire more responsibility and accountability. He estimates that he relocated four or five times specifically for Burger King, living in various locations across the country and internationally before eventually achieving the position of vice president."

After being appointed vice president of marketing at Stuart Anderson's Black Angus Steakhouse chain, Stewart realized that she needed experience running business operations to advance to the C-suite. She left her comfortable role for an executive training program at Taco Bell, where she worked as an assistant manager in a restaurant for 90 days to gain hands-on experience.

Instead of being seen as a demotion, learning about how individual restaurants generated revenue opened up Stewart's career path. She later became the head of Taco Bell's U.S. franchising business and left in 1998 to become the president of Applebee's.

She was denied a promotion to CEO at that company but later became IHOP's first-ever woman CEO and eventually acquired Applebee's in a $2 billion takeover, forming Dine Brands.

A jungle gym, not a ladder

It's not necessary to make a lateral career move without fully mastering new skills in your current position, according to career experts. "I'm not suggesting everybody should do it," Stewart emphasizes.

Even if they don't always seem like clear steps forward, research suggests that workers with stalled careers can still benefit from taking action. In her 2013 book "Lean In," Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg described her career journey as more of a "jungle gym scramble" than a linear path, a phrase she borrowed from journalist Pattie Sellers.

While ladders limit movement to up, down, or off, jungle gyms offer more opportunities for creative exploration, Sandberg stated.

If you achieve success, you will acquire a new duty, as Stewart advises: Share the knowledge you've gained.

According to Stewart, reaching the peak was all about digging down into the organization, giving back, mentoring, making a difference, helping people, and paying it forward.

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