How To Handle When Your Long Awaited Promotion Is Passed Over
Finally the day you have been waiting for throughout the year has come. It’s your annual increment — and you have high hopes, waiting to get promoted. But, tragedy breaks when you get to know that your long awaited promotion has been passed over, and someone else has received the good news.
This is a fairly common scenario in corporate culture. Things can always be a little surprising — which can many a time turn into shocks like these. So, how to deal with such situations? This can be something that can make or break your future with the organization where you are working.
In this post I am going to discuss the entire scenario in detail, putting forward some potential ways in which you can handle the scenario rather than simply blasting off in anger and rage from the organization. Let us have a look at those ways one by one -
Keep calm and ask for feedback
It is quite easy to jump the ship and switch the job when such situation arises. However, it is certainly not the right thing to do. There are plenty of reasons for the same.
First of all, you will always be unclear of the reason why you were looked over for the promotion? Was it just your fallacy that you had performed well or was it in real? Secondly, you need to know whether work performance was the only criterion based on which the judgement was made? Perhaps there was something else beyond results in your projects that were taken into consideration? You need to get answers to these questions, and similar others that pop up, when your long awaited promotion has not been bestowed upon you.
The best thing to handle such situation is talk to your managing authority and ask for feedback. Get to know about the real reason why you were overlooked for something that you thought you deserve. And, once you have that reason you can work on it to bounce back stronger in the next performance review.
Seek neutral perspective
Getting feedback from your authorities is one thing, but coming to peace with it is not easy. chances are that you might not fully agree with the verdict that has been provided. Or, maybe there is a difference in opinion between what you were expecting and what the authorities have offered.
This situation calls for getting a neutral perspective. Talk to your best friend or a colleague in the office whom you can trust. Keep everything in the open honestly, and get to know what they have to say about the entire fiasco.
Don’t take any decision in haste. Discuss things, and get a neutral perspective so that you get to know whether things are really as bad as you think they are. This will help you not only calm down, but also if handle the entire scenario maturely.
Bounce back with determination
In the entire scenario, there are two possible situations.
The first scenario could be wherein there were some issues in your performance, which according to you were not big but played a massive role in the evaluation. So, you can work on those issues in the future and know where you were lacking.
Secondly, it was something other than your work performance. Companies consider traits like leadership, team bonding, punctuality and countless other factors when judging the performance of an employee. Was it the lack in any of these factors that played role in your promotion being passed over?
In both these possible scenarios, there’s only one thing you can do — learn and bounce back. Work on the feedback you received, and move on with the determination that you are not going to let these factors hinder your growth, and they will never bring down the chances of promotion in the future.
Move on — the final frontier
Apart from the two possibilities discussed in the previous point, there could be another reason why you did not get the promotion you deserved. In that case, it is always a smart idea to look for new options, find an organization where you can expect to get better opportunities and make the move, with time. Perhaps you were hard done by due to office politics.
In that case, the first you ought to do is talk to higher authorities about it. However, before doing that you need to check for the documented proof that can support your claim. Discuss about the performance evaluation policies with the HR to know what’s been documented in the company policies about the same. Gather all the results you have achieved during your tenure with the company, and put them in front of the decision making authorities to talk about the entire scenario.
This will ensure that justice is served and you get the performance appraisal and promotion you deserved. Just in case things are not sorted out after all this fiasco, then the only option left with you is to move on!
The next step
And, it does not always have to be quitting the job. While impulse would say, if the above mentioned reason is the cause of you not getting the promotion, quit the job straight away, the logical decision would be to stick to it until the time you find something better.
Therefore, once you have come face to face with the harsh reality, whatever will happen from that point onward would be for your betterment. So, accept this fact and start looking for options.
If you have the skills, confidence and the vigor to grow in life, you will certainly find a place where your skills are valued. And, things like office politics will never come in the way of your performance evaluation. However, if there is something else that played role in you not getting the promotion (the two factors discussed in the third point), you need to do some serious thinking, and work towards negating those factors so that you can become better and grow in life at a speed that you yearn for!
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Vartika Kashyap runs the marketing team at ProofHub — a project management software for teams of all sizes. She is a seasoned marketing professional who is an expert in digital marketing and entrepreneurship. She’s been featured among LinkedIn’s Top Voices for the year 2016 & 2017. Connect with Vartika on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter.
Also follow our company page @ProofHub to get the recent updates about our tool, published articles, motivational quotes & presentations.
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