by Jane Perdue | Workplace tips
“Andy, I’m so bummed, ” said Kevin. “That new dude in the department got the promotion I was hoping for. What do I do?”
“Did you ask the boss why the new guy got the job instead of you?”
“Yeah. He said the new guy had better skills.”
Feeling let down and perhaps even a little angry are normal reactions when you’re passed over for a promotion. It’s OK to be disappointed, but monitor your emotions because coming across negatively won’t help your chances for future opportunities.
7 strategies for getting a promotion
If you’re gunning for a future promotion or were passed over for one like Andy, consider these strategies to get yourself better positioned for the next time.
1. Have all the hard and soft skills.
Ask your boss what knowledge, skills and/or abilities you lack, either for your current position or the one you were seeking. Work with your boss to create a development plan to fill in the missing skills.
Some items to be included in your skill improvement plan might be: volunteer for projects, attend training programs, work with a coach, read books, take classes or ask for a mentor.
2. Be a team player.
While you may have all the right skills, how you act might be holding you back. Both what you do (task completion) AND how you do it (your interactions with others) are equally important.
Do you have a reputation for being difficult? Do people want you involved in their projects? Are you self-centered? Do you throw colleagues under the bus? Technical brilliance alone won’t get you promoted. You need sincerity, authenticity, top-notch interpersonal communication skills and the ability to build relationships.
3. Build a solid and strategic network.
It’s important to be connected with individuals at all levels within the organization: people who know you, know what you do and who actively support you. It’s pretty powerful when someone from another department is talking with your boss and they praise your work.
Leadership is something that happens up, down and across the organization — make sure you’re playing equally well in all directions.
4. Demonstrate a strong work ethic.
Consider both the quality and quantity of your work. Do you do just enough to get by, or do you regularly go above and beyond? In today’s new normal, employers value people who do more with less.
5. Look the part.
We all know the days of the three-piece suit are long gone, yet looking clean, neat and appropriate never goes out of style. Observe what senior leaders at your company wear. A good rule of thumb is to dress for the job that you want.
6. Be visible.
All too often, we believe that hard work will take us to the top. Yet hard work alone isn’t the answer — your boss and others in your company must know about your contributions.
Many of us are taught not to brag and feel uncomfortable talking about our accomplishments. The workplace reality is that you must tactfully tell people, otherwise they’re not aware of your great ideas or output.
7. Know the company culture.
Every company has its own ways of decision-making, rewarding good performance, communicating up and down the ladder, handling conflict, etc. Get plugged in to how work gets done at your company so you’re working with the flow, not against it.
What promotion-getting strategies have worked for you?
Image source: Gratisography
by Jane Perdue | Be your best you
Do you place certain papers in a certain spot on your desk?
Do you travel to work via the same route every day?
Do you have a favorite coffee mug for easy Saturday mornings?
Is there a food you eat when you seek comfort (gooey mac and cheese here!)?
Most of us have some preferred routines and/or objects for a reason. They’re familiar. They’re comfortable. They make us feel safe.
But sometimes that comfort can become confining: sometimes we’re unaware that we’ve created boundaries we rarely step across.
If we’re to grow, learn, and make a positive difference, we have to propel ourselves beyond the borders of our comfort zone. Tim Butler, psychotherapist, director of Career Development at Harvard Business School and author of Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths, says:
Failure to get unstuck can put careers, personal life goals, and the healthy functioning of work teams or organizations at risk.
3 ways to grow your comfort zone
If propelling past the borders of your comfort zone seems overwhelming or frightening, try these three things:
Every week: do something that isn’t “you.”
Eat sushi. Sign up for dance or karate lessons. Wear orange or polka dots. Walk, or sing, in the rain. Make a cold call. Attend a networking event. Read and comment on a blog. Sleep in or get up extra early. What’s important is exploring and experimenting. Without new influences and experiences, a comfort zone can become a self-imposed prison.
Every month: learn something new.
Whether you learn something big or small is up to you. What’s important is learning! Listen to classical music or the Black Eyed Peas. Enjoy an audio book as you drive to work or the market. Take in a TED presentation. Take a webinar. Look up the meaning of an unfamiliar word and use it in a conversation that very same day. Learn a new software. Try out a new craft or sport. Expand all your muscles: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
Every quarter: let go of or toss out one thing.
Choose what that one thing is gonna be. It might be an object, a feeling, a practice or whatever your personal baggage might be.
That sweater that hasn’t been worn since high school – give it to a charity.
That slighted feeling you’re carrying around because Betty or Bob ignored you – write it down on a piece of paper, tie that paper to a helium-filled balloon and let it sail away, out of your head, heart and life.
Those beliefs you’re carved in personal granite about how things must always be done – grab your chisel, and start carving away.
That dress or shirt or tie you’ve been saving for a special event – declare today a special day and wear it.
Be perpetually open to learning, doing and being!
What’s your favorite way to blast outside your comfort zone?
Image source: morgueFile.com
by Jane Perdue | Be your best you
The article title “Are you willing to pay the price for success?” did its job.
I began reading.
Hard work is the key to success, so work diligently on any project you undertake. If you truly want to be successful, be prepared to give up your leisure time and work past 5 PM and on weekends. ~Charles Lazarus
By the end of the second paragraph I knew this article was something aimed at “first act” me – that ambitious woman who was all too willing to pay the price the author offered up as requirements for success: long hours, the Blackberry grafted to my palm, living out of suitcases, singing the corporate song and perpetually doing more with less.
“Second act” me would love to introduce the article writer to Marilyn, a client who says “I’ve lost my way and don’t know what to do.” (Hey, I’d like to chat with him, too.) Marilyn, like so many others (including me!), enthusiastically anteed up the big blind for corporate success, and paid it over and over again for 20 years.
Marilyn achieved the success she sought – the coveted senior vice president role for a large multi-national firm.
How do you define success?
Now, after two years in her long sought treasure, Marilyn questions not so much the price (that was clear and understood from the beginning) but rather the success itself, i.e., all that for this: longer hours, more travel, a single-minded business focus on the bottom line and the stock price, and greater pressure to do more with less.
As Marilyn described it, it was just more of the same only on a bigger scale.
“There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.” ~Christopher Morley
What the article author and Marilyn did was define the price.
Neither defined success.
- Is success the corporate corner office, the lofty salary, the grand job title?
- Is it feeling contentment, knowing that you’ve made a difference?
- Is success public acclaim or being a celebrity?
- Is it being able to work from home wearing your sweats and no mascara and/or not shaving?
- Is it writing an anonymous six-figure check to your favorite charity?
- Is success having a home on both coasts, a luxury car, designer clothes?
- Or is it something totally different? Even a combination of the above?
Every human has four endowments: self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom: the power to choose, to respond, and to change. ~Dr. Stephen Covey
Whether we define and measure success by or with things or outcomes or feelings, the choice is ours. There’s no right or wrong answer.
The key for fulfillment comes with knowing what our personal success target is. That way, when we claim our prize, we’re getting what we truly wanted.
Have you thought about what success means to you?
Image source: Gratisography
by Jane Perdue | Creativity
“My boss always wants the impossible,” sighed Trudi to her colleague over a coffee. “I’ll never pull this one off.”
“What’s that?” asked Tom.
“She says I have to be more creative in my work if I’m ever going to be promoted. I guess I better start looking for a job because there isn’t a creative bone in my body!”
How we think about creativity
Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! ~Dr. Seuss
Trudi isn’t alone thinking that being creative is out of her grasp. Many adults equate creativity with the arts – composing music, painting pictures, writing poetry, etc. However, creativity has much broader application than just the arts. Creativity was cited as the single most important leadership quality for success in a study of 1500 CEO’s completed by IBM in 2010.
In Human Motivation, Robert E. Franken defines creativity as
…the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others.
In short, seeing and connecting things in a new way.
In workshops, I hand out a piece of paper filled with 30 separate one-inch diameter circles. I ask participants to turn as many circles as possible into objects, things like a smiley face or the sun, in five minutes. It’s rare for someone to transform all 30 circles into objects. A more typical completion rate ranges from 5 to 15 circles.
A creativity study conducted by George Land, a general systems scientist, helps to explain the low circle transformation rate. Dr. Land’s results show that we’re naturally creative as children yet learn to be uncreative as we age.
1,600 children were first tested at age 5 and scored a 98% for creativity. Those same children were tested at age 10 and scored 30%; and when tested again at age 15, they scored just 12%. When adults were given the same test, they scored only 2%.
Creative thinking is not a talent; it is a skill that can be learned. ~Edward de Bono
To boost “creativity quotient” and see and connect things in a new way, try:
Play!
A study done by Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, revealed that shifting the brain into an open, playful state lowers the brain’s threshold for spotting isolated connections which allows people to decipher puzzles more effectively.
I used to keep a basket of small toys on the conference table in my office for people to play with during meetings (and they did some laying claim to a particular toy!).
Shake things up
Trying a new routine alters stuck brain patterns, creating the possibility of new associations. Jimi Hendrix played guitars made for right-handed people by playing them upside down. Just holding a guitar upside down forced his brain to create new patterns.
One day my team was brainstorming how to solve a tough business problem and was getting nowhere. I moved the meeting outside under a big tree and soon the solution was apparent!
Change your perspective
Thomas Edison invited prospective new hires to lunch. He watched to see if people salted their food before or after tasting it. Those who salted their food prior to tasting it weren’t hired.
It’s the classic if you think like a hammer, everything looks like a nail scenario. Many rules, practices and procedures outlive their usefulness and choke off creative thinking. People who challenge their assumptions and relook at a situation often discover new solutions.
BIG’s angle: it’s possible to tap into that creative spark we enjoyed as children and boost our “creativity quotient” – we just have to make the effort to do so!
What do you think?
Image source before quote: Gratisography
by Jane Perdue | Character
Thanks to a recent great post by Dan Rockwell, aka The Leadershipfreak, I took a walk down memory lane, thinking about “bonehead” career moments.
That was an enlightening and humbling walk for sure!
In light of current events, one of those bonehead positions really stood out: that’s attacking people whose position is different from yours.
My early career was spent in labor relations, a field that all too easily lent itself to adversarial positions—my position is right, yours is wrong, I’m better than you.
Enter *Mike*
Mike had joined the law firm our company used to fill the lead chair position (primary spokesperson) for labor contract negotiations. As I was second chair, this made us bargaining table partners.
He had a first-rate mind—and an extraordinary capacity to balance tolerance and rigidity, inquiry and advocacy. Some of his first counsel to me:
Just because the folks across the bargaining table think differently than you do and hold different values, that doesn’t make them an enemy to be bashed. They aren’t your adversaries. You can learn so much from them if you’re open to it. And I guarantee that negotiating will take on a whole new light for you.
Cue *earth moving moment*
If I’m open to it…I hadn’t been open it to. Shoot, I hadn’t even considered it.
As I thought about it, seeing people as adversaries and focusing on who was right or wrong was limiting…
…and judgmental.
…and uncivil.
…and unproductive.
While I didn’t have a name for it then, Mike had taught me about getting my big on:
- taking the high road and the broad view
- being inclusive rather than exclusive
- acknowledging that different opinions, values and views should open vistas, not close doors
Cue *a whole new way of living, leading and working* for which I’m forever grateful to Mike.
Ready to get your big on?
Image source before quote: Gratisography
