It’s time to get those annual reviews and I’ve gotten some letters recently about people getting passed over for a promotion they felt they deserved. I’m going to share with you a particular letter and my thoughts on what this person should do and what people should do in general. This will be something I do from time to time so we can all learn from different people’s experiences.
Dear Savvy Life Coach,
Help! I am so mad right now! I just got my review from my boss and I was told that I wasn’t getting a promotion. I’ve worked in this same job for the last 5 years and I feel like I deserve to be promoted. My boss told me I was doing really well and there were no negative comments. But, he also told me that my co-worker who just started 2 years ago was going to be promoted. Last year, he told me I had a chance of being promoted so I worked extra hard this year. I always stayed late and I turned in all of my work early. When I asked why I wasn’t going to be promoted, my boss said that it was because he didn’t feel I had demonstrated the “right leadership skills.” What should I do to get promoted?
Unhappy
I got this email last week and thought a bit about it. Many of us have faced a similar position before. We’ve worked extra hard and we’ve done things early and on time, but still we haven’t gotten a promotion and our co-workers have. This could be a combination of a number of things. However, I’ve found that there are 3 main areas that will help you get in a better position to be promoted. Learn these, do this at work, and you just might find yourself with a new title next year.
Relationship Building
The first thing to understand as you move up is that it is often not about how hard you work, but about your abilities to build strong relationships with other people in the company. A manager needs to rely on multiple parties to get things done and this is where your ability to build relationships comes into play. Instead of just sitting at your desk and focusing on your own projects, take the time to build relationships with different people. Not only should you focus on people on your team, but you should also focus on your manager, your manager’s manager, and other managers of cross-functional teams. It is important that you build strong relationships with different people across the organization. This shows that you will be able to have the influence to advocate for your team when necessary. Also, this helps put your name in front of other teams so that your boss can hear how much other team members like working with you. The more people that like you, the better your reputation and the more likely your name will come up when discussing promotions.
Self-Promotion
Here is one I’ve talked about before. It involves bragging about yourself and you can find this in my How to Brag series. Self-promotion is key to success at work. Your boss knows what you did, but he may not know the extent of the work or the impact of the work. Other people such as his boss may not know this either. It is up to you to promote your work and yourself so that key people understand your skills and your abilities. You have to be your own biggest advocate, since you are the one that was closest to the work and the impact that you made.
Leadership
The final quality that most often is not demonstrated on a daily basis is leadership. In order to be promoted, you have to demonstrate that you can lead. This means, can you lead a team, can you lead a meeting, can you lead a project. You have to show that you can be a good leader and that people will listen to you and follow you. Otherwise, you will not be an effective manager. Every manager needs to be a good leader and you need to demonstrate this as much as you can. Even if you are not in a position of leadership, you can still demonstrate it in many other ways. You can speak up in meetings, lead the team brainstorms, volunteer to lead a project, train and mentor other people on the team, and continue to show others that you would be an effective leader. Make sure you are constantly demonstrating this quality if you want to be promoted.
If you want to avoid being passed over for a promotion, focus on relationship building, self-promotion and leadership and continually strive to demonstrate them to your manager and other managers around you.
If you do this successfully, you just might find yourself getting promoted sooner.