5 Dumb Mistakes People Make When Trying to Get Promoted at Work
Everyone wants to make more money, everyone is looking for their next promotion. Unfortunately getting a promotion or climbing the ladder is becoming more difficult than it has ever been.
That’s because companies are getting flatter and with less management hierarchies making it more difficult to move up in organizations. If you want to get a promotion then you have to shift your mindset from thinking about getting a new job title and constantly moving up the ladder and instead look at opportunities more broadly.
Now most of the things that I’m going to tell you are not going to be your tactical “check in the box” type of solutions. However you’re going to need to think differently than you have in the past and look at how you can create opportunities for yourself.
You don’t need to wait for an official job posting in order to create more value and ultimately make more money or expand your responsibilities, but you’ve got to make it happen. You can’t sit there and wait for your manager to talk about your career path.
I’m going to reveal some of the biggest mistakes that people make when they are trying to advance their career.
1. You think that everybody knows what you want in your career.
This one is huge and most people assume that everyone knows what they want, but they don’t. Your manager doesn’t spend their free time thinking about what you want in your career. They’re busy thinking about their boss and keeping their boss happy and so you can’t assume that they’re reading your mind.
Even if you think it’s obvious it probably isn’t and trust me your boss more than likely does not have any clue what you want unless you explicitly stated that and have had that career conversation.
2. You wait until the performance review to have a conversation about what you want in your career.
If you’re waiting until the formal performance review to have a conversation about where your career is going or asking for a promotion, then it’s already too late. At that point, all of the budgets and discussions behind closed doors have already happened.
In reality, your managers likely already made the decision about what they are going to pay you and so it’s just not the right time. You definitely want to get ahead of it and have a more proactive conversation in advance of reviews.
That way your manager knows months in advance what you’re looking for and by the time your review comes along you both are already on the same page.
3. You assume that performing really well on your job means that you deserve a pay increase or a promotion.
This is a tough pill to swallow. At the end of the day if you’re just excelling at your job, well that’s what you were hired to do! Yes, that does make you a top performer in your current role, but you haven’t necessarily exceeded anybody’s expectations!
Just because you’re outperforming your peers in the job description doesn’t mean anything to anyone. If you want to start getting noticed and if you want people to start realizing your potential, then you need to start operating outside of your job description!
You need to be going out of your way to solve problems for leaders and take initiative to add value to others without being asked.
4. You have no idea what you want and you expect simply working hard will be rewarded.
This is the worst case of all. If you have no clue what you want and you haven’t taken the time to figure that out, then it’s not your managers job to solve the problem for you. It’s not HR’s job and it’s not the training department’s responsibility to develop your career.
You need to take the time and put the emotional and mental labor into figuring out what you want to do. This means taking the time to assess what are your strengths, what are your interests and what are the skills you have.
What are the skills you’re missing and what are your options? You need to take the time to really dig into this. This isn’t something that’s easy to do and most people go through life accepting what’s available to them instead of being deliberate to decide what they want.
Then find people that have what you want and reverse engineer how they made it happen.
You can’t wait and rely on others to spoon feed you and wrap up a pretty little career path in a perfect package for you.
The days of formal career paths are over. We are in a much more complicated and competitive environment and you’re going to need to learn how to take things into your own hands.
5. You do not have a deliberate conversation with your manager seeking feedback about what it’s going to take to get to where you want to be.
People who are afraid of constructive criticism or who don’t actively seek it out are really doing themselves and their career a disservice. You need to know what your manager and the leaders think about you.
If you have no clue what people are saying about you when you’re not in the room, then that is a huge risk to your career. You need to make time to find this out so you are able to make course corrections because nobody’s perfect. Everyone can constantly improve.
If you really want to take your career to the next level, then I strongly suggest you check out this interview I did with Michael Merrill. He started as a film guy working at Macy’s selling shoes, then somehow advanced to become one of the youngest executives at Disney!
He reveals exactly how to take the steps necessary to get promoted and the exact things he said to manage his career in those conversations with his boss to get a raise.