#35 - So you want to get promoted?
Sharing 11 points of advice for those of you who want to advance to higher levels of responsibility in your career
Skipping the pre-amble and storytelling this week, to just get straight into the meat. So, you want to get promoted? Here are some of my takeaways after 6 promotions in 10 years.
Stop asking people for permission to do more. Just start doing more.
Check your ego. Sometimes you actually just are not ready. If you’re the kind of person who always thinks you’re ready for the next, bigger job, maybe first ask 4-5 other people who you work with (including folks more senior/experienced than you) why you are not ready to “outperform” at the next level. There is great maturity in saying, “I’m not quite ready yet” — this is the kind of thing that many senior leaders will respect, and the self-awareness will set you apart
Focus on making others around you successful. Around you = immediately around you (your team), and generally around you (your broader organization).
Talk about how to improve the business and the team and the organization 90% of the time, and spend 10% of the time talking about how a change of role could play into that
Proactively ask for constructive and affirmative feedback, give yourself feedback, and mercilessly prioritize learning ways to address the feedback. (closely related to point 2). This also means maintaining what’s working well.
Get results. Promotions aren’t achieved by blips; they’re achieved by trends. Find ways to get the jobs handed to you done well, and do it consistently.
Recruit a team of mentors (ideally 5+ people) to guide you, and then have your “board” of sponsors (super mentors) (at least 3 people). (I talk about this a bunch in earlier letters that you can find here). Come to these people with tangible concepts/ideas for how you want to move forward, because it will make capturing feedback from them easier
“I need for you to see the f*cking bigger picture” (letter 11) — Advancing to higher levels means that you need to think at a higher level, where you see more around you. Tactically this looks like: understanding what other teams across your company are pursuing, understanding what your competition is doing, understanding broader market trends and how they might impact your group
Be f*cking bold, and follow-up on your ideas/proposals. If you have an idea that you think could really advance your organization, then map it out over three slides (Problem, Solution, What We Should Do Next), pitch it to your boss, pitch it to your boss’s boss, pitch it to other leaders around you. Keep talking about it until you are told, “You need to stop on this, it’s not going to fly right now”
Make sure you actually enjoy what you’re doing. Because if you don’t enjoy your work, then having to deal with more of it is likely to cause a degree of resentment, faster burnout, and subpar performance. Passion is infectious, and if you lack passion for what you do, those who you work with will notice, and it will likely drag down results
Make sure the ecosystem around you knows who you are, what you do, and what your dreams are. The fact is that advancement is not some mathematical formula; it’s a factor that is deeply influenced by human emotion. And in order for anyone to feel anything about you (positive or negative) they need to first know you. Take the time to do meet and greets with counterparts at your level, “below” (ugh I hate this word in this context) you, and “above” (ugh again) you. If you’re wanting to advance in the next period of time, It’s OK to state it, but be careful about coming across as brash. “I want to get promoted in the next cycle” is maybe a bit too much; “I’ve been dialing up at work lately, am enjoying the growth, and am starting to think about gaining more responsibility…” is better.
There’s way more to share here, and I’ll do it in a follow-up at some point in the next few months, but I do want to call out something: if your only reason for wanting to get promoted is to make more money, then you might want to re-evaluate if what you’re doing now is actually the thing that brings you joy. The attainment of money is an important and worthwhile aspect of one’s career, but if that’s all you’re going for, work will feel like just that: work, and it won’t feel like what it could be: a calling.
MD