How To Get Promoted

Excellence creates opportunity, skills create options, and value creation creates demand...

During the Q&A sessions of my keynotes (especially with audiences earlier in their career), one of the questions I get the most is “How can I get promoted?” They want to know what they need to do to advance, how to get noticed by decision-makers, and how to position themselves for leadership roles. After years of seeing what works and what doesn't, here are my straightforward thoughts…

First, be excellent in your current role. I don’t care what it is. My first summer job as a teenager was for a guy who owned a transportation company. One day I’d be painting the walls of a warehouse, the next I'd be getting him groceries. My mission was clear… Paint those walls perfectly and make sure I get him exactly what he wanted from Kroger. Regardless of what your job is, work to be excellent at it. Nothing else matters if you haven't gotten this right. This won’t guarantee a promotion, but lacking it promises you won’t. You can’t focus on the next thing without being great at your current one.

Next… An uncomfortable truth. Your employer pays you to do your job, not to prepare you for the next one. That preparation is your responsibility. Learn what skills are needed to be excellent at the job you want and develop them on your own time, not during company working hours. The market rewards skills it values, not complaints about a lack of opportunity. You want to become a better communicator? Write every morning before work. A better speaker in front of a group? Go to improv classes on the weekend. The skills that create career value don’t always develop during 9-to-5 hours. They're built in the margins of life. The people who get promoted choose to do extra work and develop additional skills in their own free time.

Third, become a “surplus value” employee. Companies keep and promote people who create more value than they extract. Mentor others, solve problems before they become crises, and make the company culture better. When you consistently deliver multiple times what you cost, your promotion becomes a rational business decision.

The people who get promoted fastest are usually the ones who weren't actively trying to. They were just busy doing excellent work, learning constantly, and making everyone around them better. The system works because excellence creates opportunity, skills create options, and value creation creates demand. And when all three compound together, promotion stops being something you ask for and starts being something companies beg you to accept.