In every organization there are two kinds of jobs—“staff jobs,” which keep the organization running smoothly (finance, accounting, HR, marketing, etc.) and “line jobs,” which focus on making profits (“line” referring to top-line sales growth and bottom-line profits; extra credit on the quiz, later.)

While both kinds of jobs are important, one type—line jobs—leads to executive roles and the corner office far more often than the other. “to prove you can run the company, you need to have been successful with profit-and-loss responsibility, which means that you have demonstrated that you can make money for the company and not lose it,” says Betty Spence, PhD, president of the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), a Working Mother Media organization. Sounds simple, right? Yet women often aren’t advised about the importance of taking on entry-level P&L roles—such as sales positions—early in their careers. “They get told they’re good with people and benignly mentored into staff roles,” says Dr. Spence.

It’s not that women aren’t, indeed, great at staff roles; in fact, such jobs have been the beginning of the route for many women into the executive ranks of large corporations. But they’re not traditionally CEO feeders.

Dr. Spence says data collected over the last decade reveal that women hold just about 1 out of every 10 P&L jobs at Fortune 500 companies. Even at the most progressive companies, there aren’t enough women in P&L roles: Among the 2013 NAFE Top 50 Companies, which earned their places on our list by showing serious commitment to the advancement of women (see list), just 22 percent of all the corporate executives with P&L responsibility are women, even though women represent a full 51 percent of the total employees at the companies.

For advancement, “you want to be in the business of the business, getting hands-on experience on how the company makes money,” emphasizes Sheila Wellington, clinical professor of management and organizations at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Having a P&L job means that you build a team, make operational decisions, creatively solve complex problems and set immediate and long-range strategy. Best of all, unlike in staff jobs, good performance in a P&L role is easily recognized and quantified—it shows up right on the bottom line.

For the three high-powered female executives profiled here, getting P&L responsibility was life-changing. They’ve been able to prove their mettle running multibillion-dollar operations (while staying very involved with their kids’ lives), and all of them are now qualified to be ceos one day. Here’s why:

Lynne Anne Davis, Asia Pacific president and senior partner, Fleishman-Hillard

Always know your numbers.
This was the lesson Lynne Anne learned from her first P&L role, running the firm’s Hong Kong office (which she made the most profitable in Asia during her tenure there), but it might as well be a life motto, too.

Over the last five years, Lynne Anne has grown revenues for Asia Pacific—a 10-country region spanning India, China, Japan and Australia—136 percent and profit a whopping 280 percent. Her teams handle a client base ranging from governmental ministries to large multinational corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Visa, Philips Electronics and others. The profits she’s generated and the team she’s built have legitimized her high potential. “Success as general manager earned me the privilege of stepping up to the regional leadership role for Asia Pacific, an opportunity that is fulfilling and rewarding in more ways than I can count,” she says.

Yet Lynne Anne, who reports directly to President and CEO Dave Senay, counts herself “especially proud” of a different stat: across 18 offices, she has a 50-50 gender balance in senior leaders. Women run nine of Fleishman-Hillard’s offices in Asia, and the majority of these leaders are mothers. She wants to see other working parents succeed: One of her protégés, Joanne Wong, a working mom, is Asia Pacific’s head of client services, and when Lynne Anne went to launch the firm’s new global investor relations practice, she tapped another working mom, Ruby Yim. Both are P&L roles.

Across her 18 offices, Lynne Anne has established a culture that marries high expectations with flexibility. Senior leaders like Joanne and Ruby, for example, balance travel time by telecommuting on days they’re home. Nearly all workers have laptops, smartphones and other tools to work flexibly. “When you take care of people first, the numbers take a healthy path to profitability,” she says.

Lynne Anne leads by example, setting boundaries that protect family time (crucial when you work across eight time zones!). She and husband Jackson, who runs Asia Pacific for Gulf Oil Marine, coordinate travel schedules so that one remains home in Hong Kong. When possible, both take red-eye flights to shorten days away from sons Beecher, 5, and Vance, 3.

“I broadcast the fact that living life deeply and enjoying a wealth of experiences outside of work is essential to our business,” she reflects. “It stokes our creativity, clears our minds, keeps us close to cultural trends and up to speed on lifestyles. You have to be in the thick of it!”

Tina Schiel, executive vice president of stores, Target

In the world of Tina Schiel, good leadership doesn’t have to be fancy—and it definitely shouldn’t be complicated. “Often in business people think the way to make something better is to add to it,” notes Tina. “I prefer to simplify.”

This from a woman whose life has gotten quite a bit more complex since she entered Target Stores’ management trainee program 26 years ago. (First assignment: stock the shelves of the Abilene, TX, store.) She went from running a single store in Florida to, now, being in charge of every store—that’s 300,000 associates and roughly $65 billion in sales—and being a mom to her twin tween daughters.

Describing herself as “always hungry for more,” Tina has found the fast-paced, team-oriented life of retail a natural fit. Asked once in an interview what time she got up for Black Friday—the retail world’s equivalent of the Super Bowl—Schiel quipped, “Get up? For me, it’s always too exciting to even consider going to sleep!”

Tina loves to win and finds competition a blast. It’s fitting that her two favorite board games are Monopoly (buying and selling) and the word-guessing game Taboo (teamwork under pressure). Tina also believes in the power of loving what you do. “This feeling is very important to me, and I want my team members to always feel that way as well.”

There’s an old saying that “retail is detail,” and though Tina is at the organization’s topmost levels, she understands how to gather ground-level intelligence and use it to streamline operations. For example, there used to be a list of 40 standard “best practices” for how to stock a Target sales floor. The rules were onerous and sometimes confusing. Tina’s team took a hard look at them, combined some steps, eliminated others and chopped the list to less than half. “Now our teams understand what is expected of them, and they can spend more time doing their jobs instead of figuring out how to do their jobs,” she says. It’s a time savings that has been multiplied across all 1,782 stores, resulting in thousands of labor hours saved, inventory moved and, most important, sales made.

Such improvements are vital to Tina’s success. “Much of my time is dedicated to thinking creatively about the store- associate team, which I truly believe is Target’s competitive advantage,” she says. “How do we inspire them to deliver even better guest service? How do we ensure our stores model an inclusive culture? How do we act on what guests tell our team members as they shop at our nearly 1,800 stores every single day?”

To that end, Tina tours stores across the country every week to see how programs developed in head- quarters play out on the sales floor. (Yes, her wardrobe is stocked with red and khaki, the retailer’s famed uniform colors.) Because she travels so much, she finds herself doing a fair amount of negotiating over how she spends her home time.

“As a family, we look at our calendars together,” Tina says. “My girls decide what the most important things to them are, and I do my best not to miss those moments.” Both of her girls are involved in cheerleading and gymnastics.

Staying connected is “part of our family DNA,” she adds. There’s lots of texting. (They’re tweens. That’s how it works even if your mom doesn’t travel as much as Tina does.) There are games of HORSE and pretty much anything on the waterjet skiing, boating, swimming. And for mom, there may even be a bit of cheerleading practice, “although I’m getting a little rusty,” she admits.

“I work very hard but also do my best to avoid having any regrets,” Tina says. “I am confident my daughters will pursue their dreams, but not at the expense of their own happiness. They know I love what I do, and they will one day settle for nothing less in their own professional lives.”

Deb Henretta, group president of global skin care, beauty and personal care, Procter & Gamble

It seems unthinkable now, but when Deb Henretta took the helm of the Pampers business in 1999, Procter & Gamble was actually considering dumping the brand from its portfolio after a decade of declining sales. “We’d gotten enamored with our technologies and manufacturing systems, and in the process we were out of touch,” recalls the mom of three (Caitlin, 22, Connor, 20, and Shannon, 15.) “It almost seemed as if engineers were writing our advertising.” The result was a baby brand with little emotional appeal. (Think television commercials showing beakers of liquids and diapers blotting up their spills. Yawn.)

Deb challenged the brand to get back into the nursery, where mom and baby actually lived. Under her leadership, new products were aligned with baby’s development—Cruisers for moving toddlers, Easy Up Pants for potty trainers and Swaddlers for newborns. The change was profound: With the product refocused and the marketing engaging, the brand leaped forward. Sales grew by $2 billion in a four-year span. These days, Pampers is P&G’s biggest brand.

Deb has spent her 28-year career reimagining brand stories. After overhauling Pampers, she went on to run P&G’s operations in asia and then to her current assignment overseeing the company’s roughly $20 billion global beauty business. Some observers believe she is among a handful of internal candidates who could eventually succeed CEO Bob McDonald. She has a remarkable ability to step back to see the big picture—even when others have lost sight of it. “I like to think of myself as a change agent,” she says. “Someone who pushes the boundaries of conventional ways of thinking and doing things.”

Deb’s first P&L job was small scale (in Procter & Gamble terms): She had responsibility for the North American fabric care brands. There, she built a team, experimented with repositioning for Downy and Bounce and took some risks. Not everything succeeded immediately. A new fabric spray, for example, fared poorly in a consumer pilot. The company’s management considered stopping the test market, but Deb dug in, spending hours researching why consumers had snubbed the scented spray, and argued the case to give the brand a go. A full launch went forward, and Febreze went on to become one of P&G’s flagship, billion-dollar brands.

Experiences like these fuel Deb’s conviction that women are a natural fit for P&L jobs, which require creativity, people skills and passion. “I believe passion is the real power of women,” she explains. Rather than giving women’s emotions a bad rap, she argues, managers need to see them as a powerful motivation for accomplishment. “Passion helps us stay persistent, giving us the ability to pick ourselves up over and over again until we succeed,” she says.

"Many of my greatest business successes have occurred when I have been just about to throw in the towel, but decided to give it one last try.”

Deb has embraced change and risk, not just for the brands she’s helped reinvent but for herself and her family, too. She recently moved back to Cincinnati after a seven-year assignment in Singapore. Her older children, Caitlin and Connor, attended high school overseas; Shannon, the youngest, has spent half her life outside the United States and considers herself more Asian than American. Deb also took her family on a three-month European business assignment where they visited eight countries.

Through opportunities provided by P&G, “my kids have been able to see and appreciate the vast diversity of the world,” she says. As adults, she hopes they’ll be able to be persistent, passionate and able to see the bigger picture. Just like Mom.