One of the questions I hear most from young people in the workplace
is how to ask for a promotion. I am a big fan of taking charge of your
own career. After all, you can’t sit back and expect someone else to
figure out who you want to be when you grow up.
But
what most junior employees don’t understand is that landing the big
promotion is less about your individual skills, interests, and need for
development, and more about how you are contributing your talents to
advancing the objectives of your company. Moving up in responsibility
requires figuring out how you can be the most helpful to the company’s
goals. In many ways, this is easier to achieve in a startup where there
is so much to do and so few people to get it done. Here are a few tips
to land your dream promotion:
1.Have ambition for the team goal, not your individual objectives.
As Ben Horowitz says in his recent book The Hard Thing About Hard Things,
it’s important for senior managers to have the right kind of ambition,
which is about optimizing for the company’s success (“global
optimization”) over personal success (“local optimization”). In a
nutshell, it is impossible to do all the right things for all the wrong
reasons. Regardless of where you are in your career, my best advice is
to fully understand the goals of your company, and figure out what you
can do to help. If you don’t know, then ask.
The fastest path toward a promotion is to contribute to the success
of the team. Paradoxically, the more you focus on your abstract ideas of
timing, titles, or colleagues who were promoted over you, the less
likely you are to focus on the things that matter to your team. Imagine
you are in my shoes, the CEO of a company. One team member approaches
you with charts and graphs about where she would have been in terms of
salary and title if she had stayed at her former company, saying she
deserves a promotion. Then, another team member who is clearly helping
the company achieve its goals with speed, clarity, and downright fun
asks for more responsibility so she can achieve even more success for
the company. Who would you promote ?
2.Start doing the new job now.
Never wait for someone to hand you a title. If you want more responsibility, start doing your dream
job today. Most of the time,
nothing is stopping you. An official promotion is only the external
recognition that comes after the fact. The most important thing is to do
your best work always. Take initiative on projects, seek out new ways
to solve problems, and come to meetings with new ideas to help grow your
company. Prove you can flourish in a new role by actually doing that
role. Most companies will rejoice in the opportunity to say yes to a
request to “catch up” your title and salary to a job you’re already
doing.
3.Help your manager achieve her goals.
One thing that shocked me when I first entered the workforce is that
my manager didn’t spend all day thinking about how great or terrible I
was at my job! In fact, he spent very little time thinking about me at
all. Coming out of a big meeting one day, I asked, “How do you think
that went?” His answer did not focus on me and my performance. Instead,
he launched into a long assessment of how much impact we were having as a
team. That’s when the light bulb went off for me that my career path
was not my manager’s top priority; he was focused on what we were
accomplishing as a team. Duh! The best way to get an executive to say
yes when your manager asks for a promotion for you is to help your own
manager achieve her goals. If your manager can provide examples of how
your work has enabled her to produce results, it’s an easier sell to get
you promoted. As a CEO, when a manager tells me one of her employees
has really contributed helping her succeed, I’m always open to providing
that person with the recognition she deserves.
4.Have a thoughtful conversation.
Whether the relationship is romantic or employment related, “taking
the next step” requires hard work and vulnerability. After all, the
final decision is in someone else’s hands. I find it’s especially
important in this context to start off by being brutally honest with
yourself about WHY you really want the promotion. Is it about the
title? The public recognition? The responsibility? Or the money?
Although there may be many reasons you want a promotion, the only reason
your manager is interested in is whether you will be better positioned
to help the company succeed after the promotion than before. Your need
to buy a house, get married, or have a title on your resume is
irrelevant. So find the areas of overlap between your needs, and your
managers, and build the conversation from there.
At the end of the day, a promotion isn’t about what you deserve, and
it’s not something you earn by doing a great job. It’s really an
opportunity to make a more significant contribution to your team’s
objectives. If you think about your work through the lens of teamwork,
you’ll surely find yourself in more and more exciting roles where you
can make a huge difference.
#Source:
How To Land A Big Promotion
The following guest post is by Jane Park, CEO of Julep Beauty
13.04.2014
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