A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader

Chapter 12. So You Want to Be Promoted

My expectation early in my career was that promotions just showed up. You worked hard, and you figured out how to get along with your teammates. Every year or so, my boss would have a one-off conversation with me and alert me that I had a new role along with increased compensation. This hands-off cycle went on a lot longer than I am comfortable admitting. Years.

You start your career believing that your boss knows. They know how to do the job, how to get the project done, and how to grow you professionally. Most do, but many do not. More importantly, most are compulsively quite busy, and the essential strategic work of growing the team becomes a lower priority than whatever fire drill we’re all worrying about this week.

My advice: while you are not the decision-maker regarding your next promotion, you are 100% accountable for driving it.

Before I start, we need to frame this chapter:

• You can replace the word promotion with review for much of what’s coming. Promotions usually align with the review process, but here we’re focused on the former.

• Promotion processes reflect a company’s culture. While I’ve seen a lot of engineering cultures, and their processes have common elements, each company has slight differences. At one place, promotions were never spoken of, ever, to anyone. Another place left it totally up to the manager—no oversight other than budgets. While I hope the threads of this chapter resonate with you, your current promotion ...