Getting Promoted Essentials: How to Get Your Manager’s Support

Let's say you're working on getting promoted or somehow taking your career to the next level, but you're not sure if you have your manager's support.

Here are three things you can do to make sure that you're aligned and that s/he is fully behind you. These are relevant for getting great support in a promotion process or in moving your career forward, whether it's winning a new role, taking on more complexity, responsibilities, taking on managing a team, or even upping your game and your compensation in your current role.

High level: the first one is check in on your current performance, second one is to get into the right mindset to negotiate your next step forward, and the third is to make a forward movement plan together with your manager.

More detail: the best place to start is to check in about your current performance. You want to make sure that before you have any conversations about moving forward that your manager and your stakeholders are satisfied with the performance you're delivering now. 

Even if the step forward is something you're planning for the future while you’re still mastering your current role, you don't want to have any big performance gaps that you're unaware of for two reasons.

One, because you don't want to have any performance gaps that you're unaware of (!), but two, you also want to demonstrate self-awareness. And if you're talking about moving forward without being clear about your perceived performance in your current role, you will not be perceived as being as self-aware as is required for continued progression. So understanding your strengths and opportunities for development is key. Everyone has opportunities for development, it’s just a matter of understanding, owning and addressing them.

Let's assume you've collected the feedback, and you're working on strengths and opportunities for development. That is, you've gathered feedback from your manager and your key stakeholders, and you’ve established an understanding with them that feedback is welcome, you're open, you're not defensive, and you're always gathering data about how you can take your performance to the next level. Maybe you've even had that conversation directly: “How can I take my performance to the next level?” And you're continuing to have that open dialogue.

Additionally, you’ve ensured your goals are aligned with your manager’s. What does that look like? You understand how your company performs in the marketplace and how they win in the marketplace. You understand how your team and your manager's goals align with the company goals and you understand how your goals fit in with your manager's goals and the corporation’s goals. And that’s all working not at cross purposes but in alignment.

Second strategy is to make sure you're going in with the right mindset. On ends of a continuum there’s too much and too little, so you want to make sure you're right in the middle. Let me clarify. For instance, you're not entitled, but you are deserving. You're assertive, but you're not aggressive. You have a positive mindset and you're claiming it to yourself. You're saying okay, I've worked for it. I'm ready and I own that I'm wanting to move forward and I'm ready to communicate about that. It's a fine balance and it’s helpful for your case to be perceived to be in the right place on that continuum.

The other thing is that you're approaching it as a partnership. You're looking at it from the perspective of: what does this require of my manager? Because in most cases, managers have to use chips, meaning they have to use their political capital to put their name behind whoever they want to get promoted. And there's a bigger play that they have to participate in, where other people - other managers, their peers - are wanting to promote their people.

So thinking about does your manager have enough time, and whatever else they need to get this done. What would help there be as little friction as possible? Starting this conversation early enough so that it's not so urgent that it has to happen *immediately* and allowing time to build to it. Really thinking about what would have it be a win-win for your manager and thinking about from his/her perspective, what's in it for them? And how do they benefit from this?

The third step is setting up a promotion plan with your manager. First, you want to understand what the threshold in your organization that you have to cross to be considered promotable looks like.

Your manager can help you clarify that, can provide you with assignments to make sure that you're being seen as someone who crosses that threshold, and can help you are gain visibility with the stakeholders who are going to have part of the decision-making process.

You can say something to your manager like “I'm really wanting to be promoted in the next year or so. Here's what I'm thinking about doing. Here's my plan. Are these the right things to be doing? Am I missing anything? Does this make sense to you?”

That way you gain their buy-in early on and calibrate your thoughts about the timeline. It might be a year, it might be more than that, but even if you're thinking about a longer horizon, you're having a conversation with your manager about preparing yourself for the next thing, so that they know that you're interested and they're working with you to support you in a way that is different from what you can do on your own.

When I first started my coaching practice, I worked on building a repeatable, reliable process for women to use to uplevel their careers. I researched by interviewing executives and people who had been promoted, especially women, to senior levels, to understand what they had done.

At that time, I had not really been promoted… I got a little promotion but I didn't get a title change. I went in as a VP and I was a VP for many years. I wasn't really focused on getting promoted because I was all about getting my deliverables done. After I built this process though, when I went back in to corporate, I got promoted to Executive Director. It was the partnership of my manager, somebody who I trusted, that made all the difference. Because she made sure I had the assignments where I was going to be visible in front of the people that needed to weigh in on my promotion. And I don't know that it could have happened without her.

So even though the whole process is important, I really got in my own experience how important partnering with your manager is to make it work.

Working with your manager to gain their support for your promotion is one step in a bigger process. If you'd like to learn more about my eight-step process for taking your career to the next level, download my free guide at www.fullpotentialrealized.com/advance.

It's based on the process that was developed through those interviews with executives, women who'd been promoted to senior levels, and HR people like me who watch promotions and talent management happen behind the scenes and can provide the context that’s not usually discussed openly.

I think it's really useful and would love your feedback on it. Let me know what you think!