Despite the apparent dominance of ‘The Great Resignation’, a promotion could well be the right career goal for you in 2022. Niamh O’Keeffe shares her six steps to landing a promotion in the year ahead.

Are you stuck in a career rut? Are former peers progressing ahead of you? Do you feel like you are doing all the hard work and getting none of the rewards? You may think you have no power over any decision to promote you and that you are simply at the mercy of your boss and your employers’ whims in this regard.

I have some exciting news for you: you hold most – if not all – of the cards in terms of shaping your future. There are many proactive strategies you can exploit to build your reputation, re-platform your skills and credibility, get noticed, and get promoted.
Consider the following six key moves you can make in your 2022 game plan to secure that much-sought-after role promotion this year.

Clarify

Before investing the time and effort required to get promoted, take a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture. Why do you want to get promoted? Are you happy with the career path you are on? How would your next promotion fit into your long-term career goals? Try to understand what is motivating you – is it intrinsic or extrinsic desires? Extrinsic motivations are quite transitory and arise from external influences like seeking higher pay and rewards, a brand or status boost, and impressing other people. Intrinsic motivations are internal drivers that touch deeper chords within you, such as your core values and what is truly at stake for you in the pursuit of meaning and what matters to you.

They are not mutually exclusive – and ideally, you want to find meaningfulness and a pay rise! However, extrinsic motivations, while very powerful, cannot by themselves lead to long-term internal satisfaction for most people. So, take a moment to take stock and check if you are pursuing the right career path and promotion that will ultimately satisfy you, your values, and your sense of purpose in life.

If getting the next promotion right in front of you is just going to get you further along a treadmill that already makes you unhappy, is it time to rethink what you want from your career and refocus your next move? With more clarity on your long-term direction and what would make you feel fulfilled, you can now focus your time and attention investment on the best promotion role and opportunity for you.

Commit

Be prepared to carve out some time and energy for the effort of getting promoted. See it as a separate project to your day job. You need to continue to work on your day job, and in parallel, you need to set up and run your ‘get promoted’ project. To fully commit to the ‘get promoted’ task, you will need to move out of your comfort zone, stop waiting, and start creating opportunities for yourself. For example, in my experience, the number one reason why a person does not get promoted is that they don’t ask for the promotion.

The adage of ‘You don’t ask, you don’t get’ certainly applies to promotions. You need to be your own best PR agent. If you just sit there quietly doing your work, thinking your boss will simply notice your hard work and that the right rewards will inevitably follow, you are just being naïve. You will likely end up in a very negative spiral of disappointment, bitterness, and regret (if not there already). The simplistic approach of ‘I will just do my work, and the rewards will follow’ might work at junior levels where many promotion slots are more mathematically available. As soon as you start to ascend the pyramid structure of the organisation, however, there are fewer available vacancies. It then becomes essential to become more proactive in asking for your promotion and working out a strategy for why it’s as much a win for your boss as it is for you to get promoted ahead of your peers.

You probably need to speak up more at team and company meetings, offer more opinions, get more involved in cross-industry and cross-company initiatives. You need to build relationships with more senior people. You probably need to learn more, grow more, and continue to evolve your attitude and approach. Wishing for the promotion you desire and committing to securing it are two very different mindsets.

Confidence

You say you want the promotion, and you may indeed really want the promotion, but are you truly confident that you can step up to the challenge and do the role at the next level up? Confidence is viral, and belief in your abilities and potential is critical if you want others to believe in you too. Stakeholders and decision-makers need to feel confident that if they place a promotion investment bet in you, that you will be able to deliver on it. Of course, they can look at the evidence of your track record and your qualifications and experience, but in the end, it is always a leap of faith to promote someone and assume that they have not yet reached the limit of their potential.

The market is constantly changing, the customer is becoming ever more sophisticated, the competition more cut-throat. Whatever the dynamics of your set-up, you will not have done this exact same role in this exact same economy or environment before, so there is always a question mark over whether it will work out. For reassurance, decision-makers will often take their lead from your level of confidence in yourself. If you believe you can take on the next challenge, others are more likely to back you.

Appreciate what you have achieved to date. Make a list of your accomplishments because only you know what it has taken for you to get here in your career. Take a moment to connect with who you are and where you have come from. And take confidence from your previous experience, learnings, and pattern of success. Have faith in yourself.

Credibility

You can give yourself an edge over the competition for the next promotion by already starting to work at the next level up – proving you are capable of the promotion. This makes you a lower-risk option than your peers, who are keeping their heads down in their current role and level. Becoming a credible candidate for promotion means you already need to be acting at a more senior level of capability, professionalism, and reliability.

Before corporate dress codes became casual, the adage of ‘dress for success’ was about dressing as if you were already promoted. Now it is less about what you wear, but the kernel of the idea is still the same – which is to present yourself in terms of impact as if you are already a more senior person. Ideally, you want the promotion to feel like a de facto admin stamp to merely confirm that you have already stepped up. In other words, the promotion lags the performance. For example, suppose the next promotion is about managing a team of people and you have already taken the initiative to manage a group of peers in a cross-functional company initiative. In that case, the evidence points to relevant skills already formed.

To gain this edge, follow these steps:

• Show a willingness to take on extra responsibilities;
• Show maturity when dealing with role setbacks and challenges;
• Respond constructively to performance feedback;
• Be proactive, take the initiative – don’t always wait to be told what to do;
• Demonstrate an ongoing drive to improve your skills and personal development; and
• Build up a strong reputation with your peers, bosses, and customers for being reliable and having a strong work ethic.

Top tip: in the end, promotions always eventually lead to a bigger management or leadership role. So, whatever your current level, invest now in developing your leadership and people management skills for the future.

Campaign

Develop a groundswell of support around you for the promotion. Your boss may not be the sole decision-maker. In fact, they may have nothing to do with the decision on your promotion. It may be your boss’s boss who makes the promotion decision. If you have never met that person and have no relationship with them, you are disadvantaged versus a peer who may have already established the right connections.
Identify the various influencers and promotion decision-makers and consider how you might get to know and impress them. A great ‘get promoted’ campaign incorporates an understanding of corporate politics and culture. We all like to believe that we work in a meritocracy and that promotion decisions are based entirely on performance. Unfortunately, this is not always the case – especially the more senior you become. The best person does not always get the job. Who does or doesn’t get promoted will be affected by myriad factors, including the strength of relationships, a history of power pacts, and a currency of favours – unwritten rules will likely prevail.
Ignore the politics of promotion at your peril. The sooner you understand the politics at play when it comes to your promotion, the smarter you can be about how to campaign with the key decision-makers.

Close the deal

In an ideal scenario, the promotion you are offered is precisely what you wanted in terms of role title and description, pay and rewards, and start date. However, this does not always play out. The promotion you are offered may not be the exact size and shape you sought. So be ready to negotiate before signing up for anything. There may be wiggle room such as formalising a better title, negotiating a higher salary and better bonus terms, and the number of days working from home.
Part of closing the deal may require you to turn down the promotion offer if it really cannot meet your terms. Perhaps you need to be patient and reset your focus on another opportunity, even if that means leaving your current company.
Always remember that a promotion without a pay increase is not actually a promotion!

Should I stay, or should I go?

Sometimes, it might feel easier and quicker to get that promotion by resigning and joining another company. Just be careful that you are not trading down on company brands too quickly in your career, as it is harder to get back into a big brand from a lesser brand. And, of course, wherever you go, there you are! Should you stay and figure out the skills of how to get promoted in a familiar environment, rather than leave just for a promotion and be immediately more disadvantaged by a whole new set of unfamiliar stakeholders and company politics? That, my friend, is up to you. Sometimes a move to another company is the only solution, and a fresh start will invigorate your motivation levels and your career. Whatever you decide, I wish you every success on your ‘get promoted’ journey.

Niamh O’Keeffe is the author of ‘Get Promoted’, part of the Penguin Business Experts book series. Niamh also advises corporate CEOs and senior leaders in London and New York.