The secret to getting promoted

I’ve heard from lawyers that juries decide cases based on their emotions and only use the detailed courtroom evidence to rationalize their verdict. The same thing applies when you are looking to get promoted: first you need to win emotionally, and then supply the proof. In this case, the emotion you must win on is trust.

Winning trust

Winning trust¹ might mean many different things: volunteering for bigger projects; creating more visibility for the work you already do; taking on fewer projects but getting them done better; communicating progress better; etc. That’s why so much canned advice about getting promoted can be helpful in some situations and not others. For example, you might hear “stay out of office politics” while someone else might tell you “make sure your work is visible”. These pieces of advice are a bit contradictory, so which do you follow? You follow the one that leads to more trust.

For example, if you’ve quietly done great work but no one knows who you are and what you’ve accomplished, you might be great at your job but lack the trust of those who haven’t seen you in action. In this case, focusing on visibility is probably the right advice, and you probably need to face office politics to get your work seen. On the other hand, if people see you can do great work, but you’re perceived as getting in the way of other projects, people will be suspicious instead of trusting. In this case, staying in your lane (and out of office politics) might be better advice.

I once worked at a company where the product team was responsible for planning. They would often present a mostly completed plan to engineering and ask for our feedback. What they really wanted, though, was not feedback, but rather for us to rubber stamp their plans. Knowing my team was going to be responsible for implementing much of these plans, I would often ask questions or raise objections. Because this slowed down the planning process, I got a reputation for not being a “team player”.

The more they disliked hearing feedback, the more they tried to ram their plans past me, and the more I protested and brought up objections. In the end, the solution was to improve my relationship with the product team until they trusted me enough to collaborate on the plans. Volunteering to do gruntwork needed for planning, like making spreadsheets and so on, went a long way towards winning back their graces. The gruntwork also got me involved earlier when it was easier for them to incorporate my feedback, and restored their trust that I was trying to help see things through, rather than slow them down.

The promotion process

Every company of more than a few employees has some sort of policy about promotions.² The policy I see most often³ is an expectation that the employee works at the “next” level for some amount of time before being formally promoted (See Figure 1). In this model, a promotion is seen as a recognition of work you are already doing.⁴

This is simple enough in principle, but it depends on defining clear expectations for each level. Companies have varying quality of “career ladders” where these definitions live, but even the best ones can be unclear to people who don’t have experience with these kinds of documents. What constitutes a “large project” or “deep understanding” or what counts as a “cross-team” project? For most of us, you know it when you see it.⁵

Level	Expectation
L4	Can lead cross-team projects, handling dependencies and timelines.
L3	Can manage complete medium and large projects from start to finish, getting help from teammates as needed.
L2	Can tackle simple, multi-ticket projects with little ambiguity. Has a deep understanding of their team’s core technologies.
L1	Can tackle simple tickets without help. Can handle complex tickets with support from the team.

Fig 1 shows a typical, simplified career ladder for engineers. If you are a level 2 and want to be promoted to a level 3, you are often expected to work at level 3 for some amount of time (eg six months) before you actually get the promotion.

While you should read your company’s policies and do your best to meet the requirements as you understand them, nine out of ten times, if you are up for a promotion and you are trusted, you will get it. That doesn’t mean you can get a promotion you aren’t qualified for, or that you don’t need to review the rubric and follow the rules. Rather, it means that following the rubric and the rules is only used to justify a decision that’s already been made emotionally.

If you don’t get the promotion and the explanation doesn’t make sense to you, think about who does and doesn’t trust you. Figure out a way to win everyone’s trust and you’ll be a shoe-in next time.

When it’s not about trust

Admittedly, sometimes it’s not that simple. Sometimes someone gets promoted because the CEO likes them. Sometimes there’s a gap and whoever’s closest to filling the gap gets promoted into it. In some orgs, people get promoted because they are popular, loyal or were early employees. Sometimes organizations think about likeability instead of trustworthiness. In worst cases, people sometimes fail up.

This can be frustrating, but take heart that promotions not based on trust often prove to be mistakes. I remember seeing someone get promoted because they had pleased the CEO right around the time an opening appeared. Eventually the mistake became office gossip when the promoted employee got drunk. While leading a meeting. An important meeting. A meeting with the company that had just acquired us.⁶

Other complications happen when there’s simply no promotion available, or there are no opportunities to prove yourself trustworthy on something bigger or more impactful. This sort of thing happens a lot, and is especially common in companies that aren’t growing. If developing your career is non-negotiable and you are in this situation, you could consider moving on. However, this can also be an opportunity to focus more on personal growth instead or to work on improving trust in other ways (eg doing gruntwork) that might lay the foundation for later.

Notes

1. In this article, I don’t say much about who’s trust you need to win. That’s because it depends a lot on the organization and your particular circumstance, but it usually means a few people, most importantly, your boss. After that, it might include your or head of department, CEO, or other people in power above you. It often also includes anyone who’s feedback is solicited or listened to, which usually means people with soft power, who might be in other departments or might even be below you in the org chart. ↩

2. Some small companies may not have a written policy, and there might be disagreement about what the right policy should be. In this case, do your best to figure out how things are going to work before going through steps to try and get promoted. ↩

3. My experience is mostly in tech startups. I’m sure other workplaces, like universities, governments and other large organizations, are different, putting more emphasis on credentials for example. ↩

4. This model can seem unfair or difficult to navigate if you don’t know how to work within the org and get access to the the higher stakes projects. If your manager isn’t looking out for you, it’s even worse. However, the system does prevent people from getting promoted into jobs beyond their abilities. ↩

5. Complex “competency matrices” used at some big tech companies are designed to make this as precise as possible, but it’s a double-edged sword. I appreciate attempts to make the process as standardized (and therefore fair) as possible, but the more complex and nuanced it gets the more people ignore the rules, which tends to make the process more biased and unfair, not less. It can also become a design-by-committee challenge as everyone contributing to the rules adds their own pet ways of judging people. One place I worked laid out exactly what percentage of time people should spend on “tactical” vs “strategic” work to qualify for a promotion. While I have the utmost respect for the importance of strategic thinking, measuring people by how much time they spend on strategic vs tactial work is preposterous (people should spend whatever time they need to create the most impactful outcomes. Sometimes that’s strategic thinking, other times that’s filling out spreadsheets). To make it worse, this was a company where few people had a good idea of what strategy even is. ↩

6. It was a morning meeting. ↩