What is more worthy than being aware of everything to advance your career in your company? We all crave appreciation and recognition, and we will do almost anything to get it. But sometimes, the hard work of the most deserving guy does not even pay him off, and some average guy took advantage of something they didn’t even do. You can’t blame every time to your karma by enduring your loss with great fortitude. Instead, you need to know the rules to get into the promotion game.
Earning a promotion enables you to achieve a higher salary and career advancement on the corporate ladder and provides you with a sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction. So if you want to be the natural choice of your boss to get you promoted at work, you must provide him your competitive edge as a potential candidate. In this article, I am not advocating you a bag of tricks, but you will know about the things needed to be focused on to get promotion and about the things needed to be avoided, which can pave hurdles to the path of your shined future.
Do’s of the promotion game:
Here are some dos and strategies that needed to be focused on in getting a promotion.
Be Visible and Heard
As Roberta Matuson, a public speaker and a global career executive coach, says, “You have to toot your own horn to be heard in a sea of cubicles.” You can’t just rely on your hard work alone to get noticed until you update the concerned persons about it. It is essential to be visible and heard in your organization to grab a promotion. For this, always try to present your knowledge and capabilities in brainstorming sessions, staff meetings, board meetings, committees, and performance reviews. Voluntarily be a part of other projects (company-wide) so that you can get noticed and be visible. Always keep a log of your achievements so that your employer can track your every accomplishment and can give you positive feedback. By keeping him update about your achievements, solicit your boss for a promotion. Make him aware of what you want and build value-based and friendly relationships with the key persons in your department or organization. To build a value-based network in the company, try to solve their problems even before their asking. Try to attend work functions and team lunches to build friendly relationships. This will help you build trust and make you understand the clear vision of the company’s goals and objectives and its business state.
As Bonnie Marcus says in her book The Politics of Promotions, “Workplaces are highly political environments where decisions about who gets ahead, who gets more compensation, and who gets access to scarce resources are not based on performance alone. Our naive assumption that our performance will guarantee a successful career is a dangerous one.” Building corporate networks socially and politically will bring opportunities to you, and you will be highly considered in important tasks, which ultimately will lead you to get the promotion. Also, when you have good relationships with senior management, they can help and advice you to solve certain issues faced in any task.
Support and Help Your Boss
If you want to get a promotion, you must work hard to get in the good books of your boss. It does not mean that you have to flatter him all the time. Instead, genuinely try to support and help your boss by resolving his problems and easing up his work. Through your abilities and knowledge, take some of his responsibilities other than your job description and become a need of your boss. By such practice, he will be impressed by you and realize that you can manage higher responsibilities. Moreover, This will build his trust in your work, and he will rely on you for most of his work. It will allow him to focus on new areas or pending work neglected by him so far. All this will enable your boss to get positive results, and he will acknowledge your efforts.
Sometimes personality differences with your boss or supervisor create hurdles in your promotion. On the other hand, you can’t get a promotion without your boss’s approval and positive feedback. So, you must keep a healthy relationship with him, even if you have to pretend for that. Try to handle your differences with him logically, carefully, and correctly.
See the Challenges as Opportunities
“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.”- Winston Churchill. Most people leave difficult projects to ease up their lives. But tough jobs always provide you opportunities to prove yourself and as a chance to grow. As Dale Carnegie said, “Keep your mind open to change all the time. Welcome it. Court it.” To get noticed for promotion, always see the challenges as opportunities. Because the more you take the initiative to solve challenging situations and tasks, the more you will be praised and noticed. Accepting challenges and solving them effectively will exhibit your strong leadership skills, which a company needs most to attain growth and success. Your ability to attempt challenges and decision-making and your contribution to the company will convince your employer that you are the most worthy and deserving person for promotion. Moreover, solving tough jobs enhances your credibility and reputation in the organization and builds your profile.
Take Part in Important Projects
“Successful leaders know how to line up support for their initiatives and create the right environment for change and innovation.” ― Bonnie Marcus, Your corporate network and value-based relationships can help you to inform and get important projects. You can’t win success as it comes to your plate. Rather you have to strive for it. Always search and discover opportunities to take part in important projects of the company. The success of important projects can easily get you noticed. The more you are involved and pay attention to accomplish these projects, which have high stake value for the company, the more you will be rewarded with bonuses, commissions, and faster promotion.
Work on Your Skillset
“A gap in skills and abilities reveal a golden opportunity!” ― Abhishek Ratna, No Parking. No Halt. Success Non-Stop!
It is important to upgrade your skills to articulate to the employer how to make a difference in the workforce. In this regard, always monitor the skill set of people who recently got promoted. Try to prob the job responsibilities and find out the skills needed for your desired promotion. Always take pieces of training and business workshops to get state-of-the-art knowledge to exhibit your competitive edge. Improve your knowledge by reading industry journals, business and leadership-related books, audiobooks, and business blogs. Please take part in difficult tasks to learn how to handle them. Ask help from your employer or seniors for your capacity building in mastering your professional qualifications. Seeking help from your mentor is not your weakness rather, it helps you go up in their estimations and notices. Improving your skill set will render you to provide better results for your company.
Motivation and Positive Personality
Positive motivation provides you a real sense of purpose. Never lose your focus. Keep your eye on the big picture. Whenever you feel low esteemed for your promotion, always be motivated until it occurs. Always keep continue your efforts to achieve your goals and never get disheartened by recalling the reasons you want your promotion. By exhibiting your positive personality, you can become an asset to the organization, creating your definite chances of promotion. For this, be punctual, be a role model among your peers through your incredible work performance.
Support your team for productive outcomes. Be organized and dress neatly and professionally to showcase your good impression. Meet deadlines and achieve targets and performance metrics. Always be ready and up to date and an active listener in meetings to impress your boss—present new business ideas and strategies to boost the company’s progress. Find problems and generate solutions to them. All this will help build your positive image in the company and show your loyalty to the company.
Select Productive Team Members
To attain the desired outcomes of your project and business goals, you need to select a productive and creative team to work with. Hiring a talented and hardworking workforce can cultivate a productive team to achieve quality work for your company. Second, mentor your team in such a way that makes a difference. Because for a leader, finding a mentor or being a mentor is not a sidelight. It’s an essential component of peak performance. Third, apply strategies and tactics to raise your team from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of financial success. Create an environment where all the team members work cooperatively and collaboratively. Support the team decisions and help to bring them about. This ability will show that you can effectively build and manage a profitable team, which ultimately leads to a clear promotion.
Smartly Deal Office Politics
Sometimes office politics distract you from obtaining your desired goals. People get offended when they see you as a rival and competition. For their survival, they try to backstab and affect your career goals and reputation by leg-pulling. This may reduce your chances of getting promoted. Smartly deal with them and tackle them calmly about their behavior. As Eleanor Roosevelt says, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” So, don’t just let them put you in danger, your image, and your efforts. Instead, try to regularly update your supervisor about your job performance to track your achievements and efforts in the project and give you the credit you deserve.
Don’ts of the promotion game:
Following are some of the pitfalls and drawbacks which hold you back to get a promotion and are needed to be avoided.
Avoid too much work at once.
Taking some of your boss’s extra work and job responsibilities is good, but as an excess of everything is bad, being over indispensable and becoming so valuable in the role you are doing sometimes create hurdles in your promotion path. Because by doing so, you become irreplaceable, and your boss will want you to remain in your current role as always. To avoid this, mentor someone else behind you who can replace your position. Also, smartly choose that work which helps in showcasing your abilities to manage higher responsibilities.
Moreover, doing too much work at once is not realistic or natural for a human being. Initially, you will deliver it so well, but it will lower your energy with time, and you will lose interest in even delivering your job responsibilities. So, it is necessary to smartly pick the extra work which directly impacts your career growth. Keep in mind to choose extra work to improve your skills, not to amplify your burden.
Don’t be a brown-nose.
“Nothing is more effective than sincere, accurate praise and nothing is lamer than a cookie-cutter compliment.” – Bill Walsh
Nobody indeed wants insincerity. Similarly, nobody wants flattery. Always keep in your mind the above-mentioned quote while complimenting your boss. Avoid trying too hard to impress your boss because every boss does not appreciate this brown-nose behavior. These principles will work only when they come from the heart. It would be best if you believed in the fact that promotion is always merit-based and performance evaluated. Flattery doesn’t always work for you. Occasional compliments to your boss are fine but continuous buttering up your boss will impart your negative image. Promotion will automatically come to you if you achieve tangible and impressive results to your performance metrics.
Unnecessary fear.
The biggest mistake that paves obstacles in the path of promotion is the unnecessary fear of talking to your boss about the promotion. Don’t just hold back yourself to speak about this. Stop waiting for someone to hand it to you. Plan to master yourself with the attributes and skills required for the desired promotion, showcase yourself as a valuable asset and perfect fit for the desired promotion, and then confidently ask for it.
Avoid complaints about your current role.
Do not show your boss that you are not satisfied with your current job. Do not blame your team when you lose the race. It will harm your promotion. The employer will not support your complaining behavior in your current job. He will try to diminish your influence in the organization so that it may not infect other’s job satisfaction in the company. Because when you are in a higher role, your decisions will significantly impact others or your subordinates. And if you are problematic and complaining, then this can proliferate a jeopardizing and negative effect within the organization. Also, this behavior shows that you lack leadership skills and don’t have control over the petty issues in your current role. So this ultimately serves as a stumbling block in the way of your promotion. To avoid this, take ownership of the mistakes and do not blame anyone. Instead, point out one’s mistake positively and proactively while at the same time being clear and constructive.
Don’t mix your length of work with the performance metrics.
Don’t expect that the length and longevity of your working hours will result in your promotion. Promotion always depends upon the quality work you deliver in your prescribed role and task. The more effective you bring profit to the company’s growth, the more you will win a chance of potential candidate for promotion. Your seniority will not pay you off until you equipped it with quality.
Avoid sluggish attitude.
As a famous maxim says, Slow and steady wins the race. So, to get a promotion, it is necessary to be consistent and preplanned in your performance. You can’t get promoted by half the hard work of just a month or term before the promotion is announced. You must need to strive a constant struggle to achieve your goals.
Avoid raising issues without solutions.
Other people may be wrong in their ideas but don’t condemn them right away unless you know the solutions. If you raise issues, you must have clear ideas to solve them. Otherwise, it will portray a negative image of you, and it will reduce the chances of getting a promotion. Also, It will show that you have a lack of knowledge to solve the loopholes, and you are mentioning it just for the sake of argumentation and competition. Rather, approach your boss privately by proposing your ideas of solving them with well-equipped homework.
Avoid comparison to others while asking for promotion.
Do not compare yourself with others who have made half your efforts while asking for a promotion from your boss. Because this will criticize and question their decisions. Also, it can offend the person who got promoted and the people who promoted him. Rather, logically present your case and build your case strong by showing solid in-service performance and achievement records.
Grabbing a promotion without having proper knowledge and awareness to achieve it is not a piece of cake. There are various factors like office politics, lack of corporate networking, being invisible, and unwillingness to take extra responsibilities and challenges that can distract you and play an increasing role in suppressing your promotion. To avoid these factors, you must be well focused on the holistic information that can help you achieve opportunity upward. Every hard-working person wants professional success, job satisfaction, up-gradation, and reward in the form of higher salaries, compensational benefits, and promotion. For this, one should acquire a proper skill set for the desired promotion. They must represent an optimistic and constructive mindset to solve problems. One should work hard, meet deadlines, achieve performance metrics, be punctual and supportive among his team members to avoid hindrance in his success and promotion. Always think of office politics for mutual benefits but not to lessen or harm any person for your gain. To avoid and defend yourself from lobbying and office politics, one should always be positive. Always say no to workplace bullying by documenting everything t. Never be a part of idol gossip; instead, show them that you are busy. Your focus must be on completing your goals and adding value to your organization, not on leg-pulling and backstabbing by negative influencers. To get a promotion, you must compel and convince your boss logically that you are deserving. By applying above mentioned techniques and avoiding pitfalls, people can boost their professional growth. They can easily get noticed in the eyes of their employers and signify them as potential candidates for promotion at work.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What are the attributes and skill set required to get the promotion? Your leadership skills, solid work ethic with a positive, focused, and organized attitude towards your job can lead you to the horizon of success. In addition, your state-of-the-art knowledge to solve the problem and high-performance level in assessment review can maximize your chances of getting a promotion. All these attributes make you a star performer.
- Can you get the promotion at work without the interference of office politics? Yes, you can acquire it by your talent, by fulfilling your key performance indicators, and by mastering your skills. But you must need to develop value-based friendly relationships with seniors and your boss to keep them up to date about your skills and accomplishments. Also, their hand on your head can prohibit your enemies and rivals from your leg-pulling. You don’t need to butter up your seniors or include yourself in any lobby for this purpose. Rather you need to act smartly to navigate politics within the organization to achieve your long-term goal.
- What an employer sees most when promoting? Employers rely upon those employees more who take additional responsibilities, own their projects from start to end, and derive solutions for major work problems without complaining. This behavior distinguishes an employee as a team player and demonstrates his exceptional value in the organization.
- What if your boss gives you a lukewarm response for getting a promotion? After getting a lukewarm response from your boss, don’t get on his nerves. Instead, never give up and try to improve your skills by asking him what attributes he want to see in you for the promotion. Never tries to escalate the complaint about your boss to his boss. Because this practice will offend your boss, and he will pass on your negative feedback, which ultimately ends up in no promotion.
- What if there are no chances of growth in your current department and organization? If you have tried every tip and have avoided pitfalls to shape your personality suitable for promotion but still you are not getting a promotion, try to switch to another department or organization with a better compensation plan and benefits. Do not waste yourself by sticking to the same place and current role when there are no chances of growth. Instead, choose and try such industry areas to advance and progress by exhibiting your knowledge and skills.