The real reasons some people get promoted and other don’t

What is a promotion? In the twenty-first century, there is no single corporate ladder to climb. From the highest level perspective, there are two main roads a career can take: move into management, or focus on deeper specialization. This article is written with the promotion into management in mind, but most of the points apply to promotions to senior and principal roles as well.
When thinking about our careers, we need to be aware out our goals. Are you interested in more responsibility or would it scare you? Do you just want more money? Perhaps you want more power and respect? Are you discontent in your current job, and hope that the promotion will provide you the change you need? Understanding our own motivation is quite tricky, not to mention it tends to evolve in time.
Clearly, promotions are complicated — and we have not even touched the organization and team aspects yet.
Five myths surrounding promotions
Before we can try to understand how things work, we need to mention some of the myths surrounding promotions.
Myth 1: To get a promotion, all you need to do is to work hard and do a good job.
Myth 2: The best performers always get promoted.
Myth 3: If you wait patiently long enough, you will get promoted.
Myth 4: Your boss knows your results well and has a good insight into how you spend your work time.
Myth 5: The manager’s best friends get promoted.
Politics
Politics is such an important aspect that it deserves its own section.
Experience shows that there is usually little politics involved when assessing performance. Surprisingly, while there is some politics in promotions, it is quite performance based as well — we can understand it as different performance metrics than in assessment of the current job performance.
To further understand the concept of politics, we need to realize that much of what is dismissed as “politics” is simply a part of the manager’s job description. Good managers are fluent in politics, and demonstrating this skill as an employee is a good signal that the employee is fit for the manager position. In this sense, we can regard politics as just one of the performance metric you need to excel at. However, it is not the only one.
The next section will elaborate on the requirements employees need to meet to qualify for the managerial role.
How promotions work
Promotions are a matter of the broader department or possibly the whole company. The primary predictor of the ability to get a promotion is the relative organizational power of the one-up manager (i.e. the boss’ boss). The more resources he or she can get, the more room for promotion there is for you.
Unsurprisingly, luck plays a huge role — being at the right place at the right time is crucial. A couple of conditions have to be true at the same time, which is not always the case:
- A manager position needs to be filled.
- The employee can perform at his or her current position well enough. There is no need to be the very best performer though.
- The employee has to express the desire to get into management in advance. If your boss knows about your ambitions, he or she can turn to you when the opportunity arises and can push to build that opportunity.
- Once the opportunity is there, the employee has to act: apply to the position, reach out to the decision makers and his or her supervisors.
A wise person once said: “There are two steps to success. First, do great things. Second, tell people.” It is crucial for employees interested in promotion to make their work visible, even if it is not the best work in the team. Self-promotion is a skill and art, and it is not as straightforward to do correctly, without appearing presumptuous. It is important enough that we will publish a separate article about this issue in the future. Being visible as a person is equally important and equally difficult.
Excellent communication skills and emotional intelligence comes as no surprise. In the manager position, you spend most of your job communicating, and it is imperative that you are good at it. The first representation of this is getting along well with your peers.
Professional demeanor and appearance, including appropriate dress code. It is a standard advice to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. While this can be easily overdone, you should at least be consistently one of the better dressed in your team.
Reasons for not getting promoted
On one hand, there is a lot of chance involved, and many things are out of your control when it comes to getting promoted. On the other hand, some very specific and actionable items influence who is not getting into management:
- Employees who exhibit questionable integrity.
- Employees who are inconsistent in follow-up/follow-through on projects.
- People that lack initiative.
- People with weak interpersonal skills.
Unfortunately, there is also company dynamics that can prevent perfectly competent employees who deserve the promotion from getting it:
- Some teams have many high performers who should get the promotion, but not all can get it. Other teams have too few of them, which can result in relatively weaker employees getting into management.
- Some parts of the company are growing fast, creating many opportunities for promotions. Some parts not so much, and this is often a reason for not promoting people who would otherwise deserve it.
Conclusion
Promotions are a very complex subject. Some aspects are within the employees’ control, but many are not. This article gives context into how it works in the background, and you can already see several actions you can take to increase your chances to get promoted. A future article will bring more concrete tips and tricks you can do in your everyday job.
This article was taken from The fears and challenges of new managers. Visit for more insight into the fears and challenges of new managers.
What’s your experience with promotions in your company? Tell us the story in the comments!
