Who gets promoted?
Those who get three things correct
Today: Andrés discusses the relevance of communication skills in most professional careers
Who gets promoted in an organization? Those who develop the abilities to consistently establish trust, manage up, and influence others.
Here’s why I think this.
It has to do with something I’ve been doing for the past two years: trying to understand how billion-dollar organizations work.
In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the Talent Management cycle in these organizations.
I’ve reconnected or met a lot of people who work in organizations such as Google, Citi, Vanguard, MARS, Campbell’s, Perrigo, Colgate-Palmolive, KPMG, Microsoft, LVMH, L’Oréal, Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages, the University of Pennsylvania, and Diageo.
When I’m with these people, many of whom are my friends, I ask them questions about their experiences, past and present.
Throughout hundreds of conversations, I’ve started to discover patterns:
Who gets hired
Who gets mentored
Who gets selected for professional development
Who gets rewarded
Who gets promoted
Here are my three insights on why some people grow fast and others seem to be stuck. (Obviously, this only represents my POV, and I’m pretty sure I’m missing a lot of information, and underestimating luck.)
So, who gets promoted?
Those who are consistently able to
Build trust (quick-ish)
Manage up
Influence others
I’ll share some short stories and supporting evidence around each of these.
Build trust (quick-ish)
Some months ago, I wrote about Dunkin’ Donuts’ slogan: America runs on Dunkin’, and suggested that, actually, America ran on something different—something that seems to be on the decline— trust.
This and any country require a decent amount of trust to work, and the same applies to organizations and businesses: it is difficult to survive when others do not trust you.
Now, here’s the bad news: trust takes time.
A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a panel on how to use storytelling to grow your career at a giant CPG company in NJ, and asked this question to a SVP:
How do you establish trust quickly with someone you just met?
You can't! Trust takes time.
Another piece of bad news is that you don’t have a lot of time. I was reading LinkedIn’s Work Change Report that they published a couple of months ago, and found this surprising stat:
Yes, trust takes time to build, but you don’t have that much time, both because you’re changing roles or companies faster than before, abd because those around you—internal stakeholders, bosses, direct reports—are also switching roles faster.
So here’s my suggestion on how to build trust faster:
Learn how to introduce vulnerability into your conversations with others. A good way of doing this is by learning how to share connection stories. Some time ago I wrote a post on this topic. You can read it here.
Let’s move to the second skill I’ve noticed set people apart.
Manage up
A friend—let’s call her Zoe—got a new job in a huge Fortune 500 company in the snacking industry. Last weekend, she texted me, and I’m transcribing her exact words:
Tomorrow I have an important meeting, and I have to present a part of it, so I'm preparing right now. The slides have been ready since Friday—they mainly cover financial projections and market share. Right now, I'm writing my key talking points.
She asked me my general opinion: How should she structure her presentation?
Easy, I said.
First, put your information into three different buckets, a framework that we call the 3Q:
What happened? Problems, data, facts, numbers
What does all of that mean? Interpretations, insights, why the data matter, consequences
What’s next? Plans, possible solutions, suggested actions
If you order your information like this, you’ll make it easier for the busy people in the room to digest everything. This will make them feel good about themselves, and in turn, about your abilities.
As one of my favorite newsletters said yesterday:
They have a lot going on and might not remember the details of your project. Senior leaders typically oversee multiple direct reports, multiple teams, and multiple functions—each with projects, updates, decisions, risks, trade-offs, and evolving circumstances.
If you need to get better at managing up, make sure to register to our live virtual workshop next week, where we’ll cover 3Q and other tools.
Now, to be honest, this isn’t enough. Sometimes, you need to persuade people to change a belief and to actually do something.
That’s where successful people especially excel.
Influence others
One of the trickiest parts of being an effective communicator is that you need to understand where your audience sits with respect to what you’re saying:
Are they paying attention?
Are they onboard?
Do they trust you?
Are they tired?
Do they believe that you’re annoying?
Do they think that your role/project/idea is a waste of money?
Because it is impossible to read others’ minds, you have to pay attention to whatever information you can get from them and then make up your mind.
One thing is certain: if you need them to do something—approve a budget, vouch for your idea, say yes to your proposal, change the way they pitch the product, hire people with the mindset you think is required—it is very easy to think that they already want the same thing.
As Wes Kao wrote some months ago,
No one cares about how a process works, how a spreadsheet is structured, how to find X feature in your software, or how to hit an intense series of project milestones…. if they haven’t decided to take action yet.
Tony Fadell, the iPod inventor, put it this way in Build, his book on product design:
You can’t hit customers in the head with the what if you haven’t told them the why.
Now, it isn’t enough to share why X has to be done.
Here’s Kao again:
You must share why’s that are most likely to compel your recipient to take action.
Communicating with clarity is not enough when managing up: you need to be able to win busy people over, by making them see and feel why X has to be done from their POV.
I know, I didn’t say it was easy.
Here is one suggestion from Tony Fadell on how to do this:
Infect them with the virus of doubt. If you do this (“maybe my experience is not as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”), then you prime them for your solution.
(I wrote a post on more Tony Fadell recommendations. You can read it here in Spanish.)
If you do these three things, you’ll heavily increase the likelihood that you get promoted, and with that, you get the chance to scale your impact.
That’s all for today!
See next week.
– Andrés