Get Promoted: Guaranteed or Your Money Back
February 5, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under Business
One question I get asked all the time is:
“How can I get promoted?”
As a manager, you’d think I would know the answer to this question, and after thinking about how I’ve gotten as far as I am, I am ready to share with you how to get promoted.
How to Get Promoted: Guaranteed or Your Money Back
Do your job AMAZINGLY well, better than anyone else on your team, or in the company, and cause everyone else to say, “Damn, I want that guy/gal on MY team!”
Simple and effective.
Sure, there is no time limit to how long you’re going to have to do your job amazingly well to get noticed. Sooner or later, you WILL get promoted.
That’s the ONLY way to guarantee you’re ever going to get promoted.
Photo credit to Greg O’Connell
So I take it you don’t subscribe to the “Office Space” line of thinking? It’s a great movie though… almost as good as your photo in this post.
At a joking level, I think Peter Gibbons had the right idea on Office space – skip work and get promoted.
At a serious level – I think that Dr. David Swartch get’s it right in his book, The Magic of Thinking Big – “Put service first and the money will take care of itself.
The same applies to promotions, those who undertake proactive initiative and consistently seek ways to add value to their organization will more often than not wind up doing very well in their company.
Steping over the dead bodies that you back-stabbed works juat as well! (kidding)
Yes if you’re working in a great company maybe this is all you need to do. But from what I’ve seen there are plenty of times where someone is doing a fantastic job and they don’t get squat. Why?
A. Management wants to pay employees as little as possible
B. Whoever is that person’s immediate supervisor wants to keep that person so they can continue to be successful due to that person’s efforts. Or even worse, they want to continue to take credit for the star employee’s efforts.
C. The management simply is not overtly concerned with promoting people.
D. Someone may be doing a super job but it is not immediately visible to the decision-making head honchos
Just doing a great job may not be enough. Superiors need to be made aware of the extra effort and they also have to be aware that the given employee desires more responsibility. Even then, that may not be enough, they may decide that, “We’ll wait until annual reviews” or until a project ends.
In that case the star employee may need to communicate that the lack of promotion is forcing them to look elsewhere. And ultimately the easiest way to get a large bump in pay and a promotion is to switch companies.
Let me add to @G.Irish:
E. The higher executive is so scared of being dethroned by an excellent performer that he looks for exclusively mediocre managers around him.
And let me add MORE to that ..
“A” [layers hire “A” players; “B” players hire “C” players.
Meaning: Great people hire great people, and mediocre people hire candidates who aren’t as good as they are so they can feel superior to them. If you start down this slope, you’ll soon end up with “Z” players; this is called “The Bozo Explosion.”
And to add to that …
If an incompetent leader is removed, the why should we appoint his/her highest-rankning subordinate to take his/her place? For whan a leader has failed, so likewise have his/her subordinate leaders!