Unlock your next career level
Apply these principles and get promoted in 2024
Welcome to performance season. The season where your work hours suddenly double and you pick up an additional shift giving feedback every day. Hurray!
“Feedback is a gift they say!” I jokingly complain but truly believe in these exercises because they are a crucible moment that forces a check-in with yourself. Are you on track to get the things you want? Y/N. If the answer is no, then what is your plan of action? Let’s make 2024 the year we get the things we want at work ✊
-Nickey
When you reach a certain level in your career and hit a certain number of LinkedIn followers (cringe but true), you start to get regular inbound from people asking you for career advice. This is a thrill for me because I get so much energy from answering career questions, talking career strategy, and generally being a walking career ask me anything.
What question do you suppose I get asked the most? HOW DO I GET PROMOTED? Shocking, I realize. And I hear it most often this time of year because ‘tis the damn season. Promotion obsession had me in its clutches in my early career, though its importance lessened greatly once I had earned more career agency. It’s easy to look back and shake my finger at myself for spending all that energy stressin’, though you could argue that those early promotions set me up for the career agency I have today. Was that stress worth it? The answer is complicated.
If I had a magic wand, I’d replace your promotion anxiety-doom spiral with a well-crafted plan designed to help you reach your goals. But we all know that’s not realistic. The path to career advancement looks a bit different for everyone and differs by org, by role, by level, by manager, and more. Furthermore, the performance review process and career growth opportunities are hotbeds for structural and systemic bias, making them even more unreachable for marginalized groups (most especially women of color!).
So given all of the above, how do we orient ourselves on the career growth path?
Unlocking career growth mode
After watching many of my peers drive their career growth through the years, I've picked up on key themes and principles that are vectors for career growth. Enterprising people tend to create their own magic wand and make their own luck and here’s how they do it:
🪡 Focus on your craft
If you focus on one single thing at work, make this your thing! Craft matters. Shipping good shit is IT. I sit in calibration sessions, in product reviews, and read dozens of specs each week, and it’s easy to see when someone knows their shit and is a true master of their craft. This mastery is a portal you should seek out because once you slip through it you’re beyond promotion!
💸 Optimize for impact
Not everywhere you work will let you have the autonomy to choose what you work on. But dear builder, get good at advocating to work on the things you know will make a difference. This is a skill, and you are uniquely poised to advocate for yourself in this way because you are closest to the customer.
🆘 Find a sponsor
Write down one person who is advocating for you at work. If you’re staring at a list of zero names, you’re in a bad place. How to fix? Refine your craft and make an impact and sponsors will come out of the woodwork. Also, ask people to play this role for you. Ideally, your manager is also doing this for you, if yours isn’t find one who will.
🕴️Manage your manager
You drive the relationship you have with your manager. Full stop. Getting good at this upward management is a hard-won skill and it’s one you can start building tomorrow. How do you do this? You use your regularly scheduled check-ins as a constant drumbeat on your work and its impact. Ask for feedback at least once a month. Share your career ambitions and where you want to go. Go so far as to outline how your manager can help you get there. You’d be surprised at how few people own this relationship, and how far it will take you if you wield it well.
📣 Share your ambitions
A lot of people who want something are quiet about what they want. Especially women. They are trained to stay silent, to not advocate for themselves, and to make their ambitions small at work. Retrain yourself. Jettison the cringe and just tell people what you want already.
🔧 Create your own role
If you’ve got an idea for a new team or new role that should be spun up, hit the pavement and bring it to life. As a manager, I hate to stand in the way of well-directed “start-up energy” because it usually means that the person is passionate and obsessed with the problem/idea enough that they’re going to do what it takes to figure it out.
🗺️ Project manage your growth
Did you know that making a plan drastically reduces stress because what you stress about is the absence of a plan? Use a simple framework like WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacles, Plan) to take your goals from idea to reality.
🌶️ Argue what it would take to replace you
I read this great post on LinkedIn last week from a former coworker, who advocates understanding what it would take to replace yourself at work, and to use that as leverage to get promoted. For example, if backfilling your role would require two people, you’re probably under-leveled, underpaid, or should be given more people to grow your team.
🛑 Call out bias
Sounds obvious but if the promotion process at your organization is not fair for you it’s not fair for anyone. Call out bias when you see it and push your organization to do better when it comes to equitable and inclusive performance processes.
👋 Go somewhere else to make it happen
Sometimes you’re not in a good spot for promotion. And getting to a spot where it’s more likely to happen, is going to take a ton of energy that doesn’t feel worth it. If you’re here, consider leaving. You can often negotiate up elsewhere and then can spend your energy mastering the craft somewhere else. Having an honest conversation with yourself on likeliness and timeline is healthy. Have this conversation with your manager too.
Career growth 101
I’ll leave us with some great reads on career growth:
The Magic Loop | Lenny’s Newsletter
How to get promoted | Lenny’s newsletter
Learning vs. Impact | Perspectives by Deb Liu
To get promoted, get better at complexity, autonomy, and throughput | The Hard Parts of Growth by Ami Vora