How to Get Promoted at Work
7 tips to maximize your chances for success on the career ladder
7 steps to maximize your chances for success on the career ladder
I’ve been working in the design and tech space for the last 20+ years. I’ve worked as both an individual contributor and manager across bootstrapped companies, startups, scaleups, and corporations. I’ve been promoted a number of times and been responsible for promoting others.
For years I just wanted to do good work. I didn’t care about job titles and approached each day wanting to do the best work I could. When I encountered things that stood in my way, I tried to figure out how to overcome or avoid them. I did this daily for years, with no real career goals I was working towards. I wanted pieces for my portfolio; designs I was proud to have made.
I received promotions during this time, but they were driven largely by others, or by the needs of the business. I did a lot of work I was proud of, and don’t regret the path I took, but my choices definitely slowed my career growth.
In the last few years since taking a step back into management, a lot of lessons from my career have started to come into focus during performance discussions and coaching sessions.
While I’ll be talking from a design/tech industry point of view throughout this article, I hope many of the steps here will be applicable more broadly.
1. Understand what you want
It sounds simple, but the first step to getting anything you want is figuring out what you want, and why you want it.
You might be thinking “A promotion. That’s what I want.”, but I invite you to look a little deeper and ask yourself why you want it.
Some common themes I’ve identified are:
Compensation
Almost everyone wants to be paid more. At more senior levels it can be less of a primary driver, but money is usually a piece of the puzzle. It can be hard to talk about, but the more you understand your salary expectations, the easier conversations can be. Find safe ways to talk to peers within your company, or in the wider industry about what they’re being paid. As long as these conversations don’t happen on company systems or devices, they are usually pretty safe (not legal advice).
Influence
When you’ve had ideas constantly shot down by stakeholders, managers, and peers, it can often seem like a promotion is the only way to level the playing field and get your ideas moved forward. In localized situations, this may help, but be aware that there will probably always be people with more decision power than you in a room, and one of the best things you can learn is how to influence people without having direct seniority.
Perception
If you go into a meeting with stakeholders or clients, being introduced as a “Junior” may simply change how people interact with you, regardless of your abilities (and especially if you’re from a traditionally marginalized background). Clients may feel they’re getting less value for their money than if they had a senior in the room. This isn’t good or right, but it’s certainly a reality a lot of people have to navigate.
Equity
You might see others who you feel are at similar or lower levels than you on higher salaries or with more impressive titles. There may be factors at play that aren’t visible to you, and you should work to understand if that’s the case.
Validation
Maybe you see career progression as validation that you are doing a great job. This one is in my opinion a very traditional mindset but certainly is valid in many businesses and situations. It can be incredibly validating to get a promotion, but it shouldn’t be the only way you seek validation, or you’ll be unhappy most of the time.
Think about these areas and anything else that’s a factor for you. Being precise about what you want can sometimes open up the solution space. Maybe a promotion won’t actually solve one of the areas above in your current context. Maybe there are ways to increase your salary or influence without one, or maybe a promotion is a path to get what you want.
Not having a goal in mind means you can’t calibrate whether you’re heading in the right direction. It will also limit how much help others can offer you. People can give better guidance or advocate for you when you can communicate clearly what you want and why.
2. Understand the role
Take some time to fully understand the expectations of the role you’re trying to get.
Some companies have clear progression frameworks with specific pay bands tied to performance, some may have vague ones that no one really looks at, or there may be none at all.
If there is a progression framework in place, look at the description of the role you want. Whatever description that is there will only be a starting point. The description is likely to be lossy, and open to interpretation. Frameworks like this are usually a guide, rather than a checklist, and how companies and people interpret them can differ wildly. If there is no formal progression framework, then you can skip this part and:
Talk to your manager about the role
Understand what their interpretation of that role is, and talk through the description in detail if there is one. Doing this early on, when there’s little pressure from either side, will help anticipate and diffuse any confusion later on. You don’t want to be in a performance review when you first receive critical feedback on an area you misunderstood the meaning of.
Performance reviews will help here, but try to understand exactly where the gaps are between your current performance and the expected level. If performance reviews happen every 6 months or every year, suggest to your manager that you dedicate some time more frequently than that to discuss only career development goals and to track progress against those goals. Schedule this time yourself if it doesn’t happen.
If imposter syndrome is causing you to sit on the fence about whether to go for a promotion, that’s another good point to discuss with your manager. If you feel comfortable as soon as you go into a new role, you probably should have been promoted much earlier.
Calibrate your expectations
Talk to others who have the role you want. Talk to them about what their path looked like, what expectations they have of themselves, and whether they have tips for success. Seek out external communities if your company is small and these people don’t exist.
It’s important to keep a realistic perspective on your speed of progress. Seniority should be tied to ability more than tenure or age, but learning and experience can take time, even if the correlation is loose. Don’t expect to climb the ladder from Junior to Senior in 18 months, or to be leading a team by the time you’re 24. Again, talking to your peers about their journey is a good way to set your expectations here.
3. Understand the environment
The people
Regardless of the maturity level here, one thing is usually true:
Your manager is the person with the most influence on your chance for a promotion.
This can obviously be great, or terrible, depending on your manager. Even with solid progression frameworks in place, your performance against them is going to be evaluated through the lens of your manager. They are probably the person who has to justify that promotion on your behalf.
They have their own workload, business pressures, and context. They might have multiple people reporting to them, and in some cases way too many. Understanding this context can inform how much you need to lean in, and what you can do to help them help you.
The process
If there’s a process for promotions, seek to understand what it is. If there are forms that need to be filled out to request a promotion, ask if you can see an example of them. Understand what happens once they send off that paperwork. Who reviews it? Who ultimately signs it off?
The timing
There may be only certain times of the year that promotions are given, such as annual/biannual performance review season. You can use these timings to manage your own expectations primarily, but also to manage your time when it comes to ensuring that conversations with your manager are happening at optimal times.
The organization
In the tech industry, it’s possible in many organizations now to increase your compensation and responsibilities without needing to shift into management roles, which opens up the ladder considerably. I’m very aware that in many other industries this isn’t the case, and that upward progression is often gated by the availability of open management roles.
If this is a factor for you, you may have to consider lateral moves within the org to places with available roles, or possibly looking for opportunities in the wider market.
The economics
There may also be factors completely out of your control. If there’s (as a purely hypothetical example) a global recession and the company isn’t doing well, maybe promotions are going to be much more competitive than normal, as everyone competes for budget.
4. Tell impact stories
The biggest problem by far with performance review cycles is that everything you worked on early in that period is usually forgotten, and everything you worked on most recently possibly hasn’t shown impact yet.
This is why it's important to write down everything you work on, so that earlier stuff doesn’t slip through the cracks. You might call this a brag doc, a list of wins, or a work log. Make it easy to remember the big or impactful things, and things that might map directly to skills or traits discussed with your manager earlier.
One simple framework for telling impact stories is the CARL framework:
(C)ontext
What was the problem you were trying to solve? How was this identified as a priority? Who did you collaborate with? How would success be measured?
Be specific with measurable goals if you can. Understanding this framework before you start working on problems means you can push for measurable goals or better problem statements on the project if they’re something you typically lack.
(A)ction
What did you do to try and solve the problem? Were there things you tried that didn’t work? How did you ultimately decide on the solution?
This is the thing that will probably shrink or expand the most depending on your audience.
(R)esult
What changed as a result of your actions? How did you measure them? What was the impact on the business?
This might be an impact on a metric specific to your team, it could be a qualitative result (include quotes if you can), or it could be a company-level impact (bonus points if revenue or gross margin is involved).
(L)earning
What did you learn as a result of this project, that you will take into future projects?
This is important and often missed, especially in situations where there perhaps isn’t a measurable impact. Your story doesn’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to follow a perfect process. If something was skipped, or missing, how did that affect the result and what would you do differently next time? Humility and self-reflection are hugely important factors in more senior roles. Demonstrate them.
Your impact stories can be as short as a sentence or two, or as long as a full case study. Practice both if you can.
Here’s an example of a short impact story:
API Adoption
We aimed to reduce the average time that it took customers to adopt new versions of our API. We created an email newsletter aimed at developer and owner roles, and aligned our releases to a quarterly cadence. These efforts resulted in a 25% faster adoption time on average.
Keeping a list of these types of statements per-project will be an excellent starting point and will help you write better self-reviews. Make sure your manager has access to this list before they need to write a review or submit a promotion form. If there are a lot, maybe just give them the top 3 to 5.
Remember your manager likely isn’t in the room with you while you’re doing your job, and doesn’t have the deep context that you do about the work you’re doing. These lists help demonstrate the value of your work outside of just showing up and having people say you’re good to work with.
The truth is that the people who are most likely to get promoted are those who tell coherent and convincing stories about their work and impact, rather than the people who do the best or most impactful work.
5. Proactively seek feedback
The sooner you can get feedback from your manager, your peers, and your team, the better. Talk to your peers regularly, and actively ask them whether there’s anything you could be doing better. It will just be opinions, but receive them assuming good intentions, and there can be a lot to learn from this feedback. Use a similar framework to tell stories about these interactions too.
I received feedback from an engineer that they didn’t feel involved enough in the solutions for our most recent project. We agreed to experiment with a process that would include them in initial ideation sessions, and invited them as an optional attendee to our design critique sessions. In our next sync they expressed the kickoff was “a really positive experience” and that they felt more included.
On a 6-monthly (or longer) performance review cycle, your manager might only receive constructive or critical feedback about you at the same time they might be assessing you for that promotion. This is the absolute worst time to get surprising feedback, and will mean potentially waiting for another whole cycle to address that feedback and demonstrate improvement. Keep those timeframes in mind, and plan the time period with check-ins, and feedback loops with enough time to show progress.
6. Avoid the victim trap
The most common trap I see people fall into earlier in their careers (and one that’s often never unlearned) is the victim trap (also sometimes called the drama triangle).
To grossly oversimplify for a second, this is where you rely on the actions of others to dictate your happiness or success in a given situation. This usually manifests in feeling powerless, blaming other people or external factors for why a feeling or result is the way it is.
e.g. We weren’t able to measure success for this project because the product manager didn’t schedule enough time to build the required metrics.
This pattern of thinking can be self-perpetuating and can be reinforced by others who fall into rescuer or persecutor roles. It’s important to understand that this way of thinking isn’t necessarily your fault, as it can be the direct result of past experiences and trauma.
I’m not just advocating a wishy-washy “think positive!” slogan here. What’s important is that the way you approach problems is in your control to change. There are books written on the subject if you want to dive deep, but my advice for most people is:
Build awareness of when you’re falling into a victim pattern
Understand you can’t control everything
Reframe the problem around things you can control
Take action
To go back to our CARL impact framework from earlier: given the context, what have you done to try and address the problem? What were the outcomes? What did you learn?
e.g. The product manager didn’t think there was enough time to build in the required metrics. I worked with an engineer on the team to define the most important success metric, and estimate the time required to build it. I had a 1:1 conversation with the PM and explained the expectations my manager had for me to be able to measure the impact of my work. We agreed to a compromise where we would schedule the work the following sprint.
While not everything is in your control, a lot may be able to be influenced. Have you had honest conversations with the right people? Have you suggested alternative approaches or potential solutions?
Write these down. Think about the things that frustrate you in your job, and ask what you’ve done to try and fix, improve, or work around them.
7. Own it
Finally, and most importantly:
You own your own career progression.
Your promotion is far more important to you than anyone else. It’s your story to write. Don’t fall into the victim trap. No one ‘gives’ you a promotion; you work for it.
That work will be more than just the work you’re being paid to do. It’ll be working to make a plan, to understand your environment and the people and systems that make up that environment. It’ll be setting goals. It’ll be putting time into ensuring you’re communicating well, at the right times, with the right people. It’ll be improving your note-taking and storytelling. It’ll be reflecting and improving.
If all of that doesn’t yield results, you’ll have built a lot of the skills you need to sell yourself, your impact, and if it comes to that: some of the skills to more easily find another job.
Originally posted on Medium