Often, companies don’t like promotions. They are expensive and risky. The company has to spend more money to put known entities in unknown circumstances. There is a risk of failure that did not exist before.
This is a broad generalization, but it is a useful one. You may deserve a promotion, but rarely do it in itself really get You are promoted. There are some strengths that are against you: the cold, tough unit economics of your business. Risk aversion and politics of managers. inertia.
I have held roles from entry-level writers to CMOs over the past decade. Sometimes, I did a great job and completely failed to get promotion. I will point out my countless successes, talk about my desire for more responsibilities and new challenges, and I will shrug: You did a great job, but we can’t do it now.
In other cases, the promotion almost all fell into my legs. Very few of the difference is my level of effort, or my persuasion – that’s mine Leverage.
Leverage is your ability to instill need To make your company promote you, the company has the opportunity to avoid some pain or get something wonderful.
In my experience, there are four types of leverage you can use to catalyze promotions:
The obvious form of leverage is competitive work. You bet your company would rather pay more than lose you.
This is the “core” option. It works, but I think it’s the most attractive. It takes a lot of effort Interview and make sure of an offer beside. There are risks: In the worst case, you end up not working. Even if it works and you get a promotion, there is a possibility that your relationship with your colleagues is sore.
I’ve been in this situation before, and it’s not particularly interesting, but it works. Partly because I work in a great company, partly because I try to be…
- sincere. Resigning is not a cynical negotiation strategy, and if the negotiation passes, you need to leave your company completely and sincerely.
- Direct. Regarding the reason for leaving, the more specific the change you leave and the timeline of the entire process, the easier it will be for your current company to respond in a useful way. Avoid changes and empty threats of resignation.
- Honest. Be clear about why you left and be honest and excited that you stay. (There should be reason to stay: Why try to advance in a company you don’t like?)
- type. Bad resonance is easy to occur in the process, but ultimately, it is a business transaction. You can and should be friendly with the most chaotic departure things.
Another form of leverage: establishing promotional narratives. Raising some big public success brings implicit pressure to the company to reward it.
Promotions require socializing throughout the company. If everyone is more likely to be promoted expect You want to advance; it creates less resentment among peers, making it easier to get a budget and prove the expenses of the company leadership.
There are many talented and hardworking people Difficult Promotion is because their success is too quiet, or behind the scenes or modest. They lack a narrative of promotion: promoting them seems unexpected or unreasonable, because few people see their value. Earning promotions is much easier when you point out the huge, obvious, high-value success of your name, as well as stable, more complex wins.
Or in other words: you need High efficiency (Excellent in your work), high performance (Experience in proving your success in obvious ways):
Part of it is Working in highly visible projects. While it is not always possible to think of the moon volume of your career from the ether, more energy can be diverted to activities with greater visibility and greater potential upward space. Applying to speak at a meeting may be bigger than publishing another reliable blog post.
You can raise your hand to work on your flagship account. You can suggest and lead experimental services. You can drive new roles and responsibilities, build new workflows, give tone speeches at conferences, and test new marketing channels.
Another part of it is to guarantee yourself. The more public examples you succeed, the easier it is to justify your promotion (inversely proportional, the greater the collective cognitive dissonance). no Promote you).
This can be very difficult. Most people find it difficult to have a positive discussion of their achievements. The idea of winning on the company’s Slack channel can reduce the nausea of the best marketers.
I always find it helpful to reimagine this idea. When you tell your managers that it is going well, you make it easier for them to get the job done. When you tell colleagues an experiment on a paid or successful campaign, you will help them get better at work, providing more data points to illustrate what a “good marketing” looks like in your industry. When you celebrate someone other With success, you can more easily celebrate your own one by one.
Another type of leverage: develop a unique skill set that cannot be easily replaced by others.
Some are obvious “10 times employees” who are able to have superhuman feats and be able to direct whatever salary or promotion they want. But for mortals like us, I have seen people become:
- The face of the company. Employees often become the most active content creators and can become the public faces of the company. The public’s perception of the company becomes synonymous with what the public thinks of employees – the company has the motivation to keep them around (and happy). But be careful about this and Your company’s fees.
- Mediators between different worlds. When I work in a content organization, a skilled writer can also Code is one of the most valuable people because they can be converted between different languages of writing and software development. They can talk to technology founders with persuasive conversations, use data analytics to create research reports, and build software prototypes to make our content workflow faster.
- The custodian of mysterious and important company processes. If a company is built on a base that can be airborne, mountain and massive integration, then the person with the API key is the king.
Another type of leverage: allows others to profit from your promotion. If you move upwards, you can also make someone Something else To get promotions, you can double the potential benefits (or risks) to promote your promotion company.
I used to imagine that promotion was a manual vertical climb in the ranks of organizations. My practical experience is exactly the opposite: Most of my promotions are the result of a “power vacuum” created by managers entering higher positions.
This is a reality that many organizations promote. In order for you to rise, the person above needs to move upwards (or continue) to create space. By supporting their ambitions, you can increase the possibility of opening up opportunities, while also creating the kindness and trust you need to position yourself as the right successor.
You can solve the problem by finding a replacement for the manager. You create leverage by double the number of people who benefit directly (and financially) from your promotion.
You can encourage this by working closely with people you think will do well. Pair your wagons onto their vans, learn from them, and position yourself as your natural successor.
I like the story of my boss in the previous company, GermanShare with me: When asked what the then-CEO wanted from her career, she said, “I want your job.” She moved into the vacuum and became CEO as he continued to build a new business.
Some companies simply lack the infrastructure needed to promote. They didn’t grow up. There is a recruitment freeze. The marketing team lost half of its budget. The new CMO doesn’t care about your character.
There isn’t enough hard work to overcome these obstacles – given the limitations of the business, you’ll try to get into things that exist physically impossible.
This is not a moral judgment or a criticism: it is a fact of reality. At every moment, it is not feasible in every company. Being with the company can be a big benefit during these tough times, but sometimes it’s easier for you to do it elsewhere if getting a promotion is your primary goal.
