how to get promoted part II

spilling some more secrets

Last year, I wrote some advice on how to get promoted. Performance review season is coming up, so I wanted to share some additional thoughts, continuing my ongoing thesis that many performance management programs involve at least some level of gaslighting.

This post is for anyone who has ever received an unsatisfactory answer about why they weren’t promoted.

Have you ever felt you were denied a promotion for a reason that didn’t really make sense? Like, feedback on a weakness that had never been raised before, or that felt extremely subjective, or not core to your job?

It’s possible that the feedback was correct and fair, and your self awareness is not as finely tuned as you believe. (It’s important to learn from feedback even when you disagree with it. Almost every time I have ever gotten feedback I disagreed with, I ended up coming around and realizing there was some truth in it.)

But it’s also possible that there is something else going on, and your manager isn’t being totally transparent with you. People fail to get promoted all the time for reasons that would really frustrate them, and managers often want to keep the peace with their direct reports, because managing a frustrated person is difficult and emotionally draining. So they come up with a plausible “growth area” that you need to work on, hoping to give you the impression that the promotion was completely in your control and you didn’t quite get there. While this is frustrating, it is presumably less likely to make you rage quit than saying, “My boss’s colleague doesn’t think you’re leadership material, and I lack the social capital to disabuse him of that notion.”

Again, I’m not telling you to ignore the feedback they are giving you. There is probably truth to it! But it is also helpful to learn to read subtext so you can figure out the whole story of what is going on. Only then can you pass go, collect $200, etc.

OK, so what’s really going on?

The most important thing to understand is that, beyond a certain level, “doing good work” is not enough to get you promoted. Promotions to leadership positions are not a reward for working hard and doing a good job.

To receive a promotion, three things need to be true:

1. There needs to be a business reason to expand the scope and resourcing of the role, one with demonstrable positive ROI.

2. The company needs to have the resources available to pay for that role.

3. And your manager, their peers, and their reporting chain all need to see you as the right person to fill that role, both capable enough to do the job and mature enough to handle the job’s interpersonal challenges.

You may notice that only one of these three criteria is really about you. That’s important to internalize! But you can, in fact, influence all three points. To illustrate how, let me walk through some of the most common failure modes I see.

How to fail at getting promoted

You haven’t articulated a clear business case for why a new leadership role should exist. If you’re genuinely baffled because everyone seems to love you and yet you simply cannot get a promotion to save your life, it’s very possible you need to change course from selling yourself to making a clearer case for what, exactly, this new role would be and why, exactly, this is a good investment for the company. If you are at a senior manager level and your pitch is basically, “I’d like my job to be more important and better compensated,” you may not get very far.

You have allowed a negative narrative about you to persist. The narrative may not be fair, and you may not even know about it. Doesn’t matter! You have to sniff these out and counterprogram them. Negative narratives are a problem for you, and good leaders solve problems. It might be that you overcomplicate things, or are hard to work with, or that you simply “don’t get it.” Find trusted colleagues and ask them for candid feedback.

People do not trust you. Everything I can say about this has already been said, much better than I could say it, in this post about the “trust equation.” Pay particular attention to the underminer of trust, “perception of self interest.” This often happens when people think you are more concerned with your own career advancement than with the needs of the business. That’s a negative narrative; see above paragraph!

You have failed to build strong relationships with promotion decision-makers. I know, I know, ugh, politics. Whatever. It’s important. If relationship building feels like a burdensome obligation to you, you ought not to pursue a corporate leadership job.

You react unpredictably, or poorly, to bad news. As a leader, you get bad news all the time. Sometimes it’s about you, or your team, like someone will openly criticize you in a meeting. Sometimes it’s about the business, like things are not going well or we have a problem. Your manager may not have seen how you behave in a situation like this, in which case they have to guess. Again, negative narrative, back to square one.

Inability to hold the room. See: Speak up! I bang on about the importance of clear and concise communication, but there’s a level even above that, which is: Can you drive a conversation toward your desired outcome? Do you notice when someone’s attention is drifting, and change course to pull them back in? Can you think on your feet when asked a tricky question? There are plenty of ways to “hold a room” that are authentic to different types of people: introverts, extraverts, storytellers, weirdos, etc. If this feels unnatural to you, find examples of people who do this well, without rhetorical tricks or grand charisma. Plenty of people do this simply by being excellent and respected. But that brings up an uncomfortable question..

You are wrong about how excellent you are. Listen, I’ve been there. It’s a tough pill to swallow. But swallow it you must! Only once you accept that you’re not actually crushing it can you realize how much you have to learn from the people who seem to understand something you don’t about how to thrive in a professional organization. And by the way, “my work is actually excellent but nobody knows about it” doesn’t count as excellent. See: The self-promotion horror show.

Finally, if you’ve read through all of this, and you still think you are doing everything right and yet your growth is being stymied for unjust reasons (like a manager who won’t go to bat for you), it’s also very possible that you simply do not have Employee-Employer Fit. Many such cases! Sometimes you are great, but your greatness and the way your boss (and/or their boss) measure greatness do not align. In these cases, I unfortunately think your best bet is to get a new job. Companies value different things at different times. Finding a manager who’s buying what you’re selling might cause short-term pain, but it pays off when you stop running into a brick wall at every performance review.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck out there!

xoxo, hils

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