Getting Promoted Essentials: Requesting Actionable Feedback to Accelerate Your Advancement

Since I’ll bet you're curious about what the easily promoted rockstars do that distinguishes them from everyone else, I'm going to share one of their secrets with you. It has to do with getting and using really honest feedback. I’ll also leave you with five scripts that will help you more easily and confidently request actionable feedback.

One of the things I had to do when I was responsible for Diversity and Inclusion was to really figure out how the promotion process really worked.

What I learned was that there's a promotion committee. They put the candidates being considered for promotion into three groups: definite yes, maybe, and definite no. The committee doesn’t spend any time on those considered definite no. They spend very little time on the definite yes candidates. They spend most of their time arguing, negotiating and jockeying around the maybes and figuring out who's getting through and who is not.

My question was: What is it about the definite yeses that makes them a definite yes? I got to ask that in my research interviewing executives and people who had been through the process to get to senior levels.

What I heard as a theme over and over was that people who are rockstars get the feedback, they react to it well, and they use it to enhance their performance.

So I'm just wondering - have you ever used getting feedback as a tool to advance your career? And if so, how did you go about getting the feedback? What did you say? Please post in the comments below. I'd love to hear what approach you used and what you said that worked well for you.

Three things about feedback popped for me in this research about how superstars move their careers forward. One was that you have to understand what the promotion process looks like: who are the people making decisions, what are they looking for, and how do you make it easy to showcase what you have to have it match up with what they're looking for?

One of the leaders I spoke with put it this way: "Don't assume you're doing a good job. You can't be oblivious to how these decisions are made. You have to know how to influence the decision and you must ask for it."

Number two: you might not have gotten the honest feedback that you need. The execs in the interviews shared that sometimes for women it's even harder, because while managers are not great at giving feedback in general, they're especially tentative when it comes to giving feedback to women. And if it's great feedback, then they're happy to be articulate. But if it's constructive feedback, a lot of times they're silent and awkward.

Another leader suggested the following: "Seek the information that isn't getting fed. Get over the wall preventing you from hearing what you need to hear."

There might be something that you need to know that will take having the right relationships and asking the right questions to figure out, because that information may not just be volunteered to you.

Third thing is that there might be something that needs to be repaired, but it might be in your blind spot. So again, having the right relationships and asking the right questions can help you uncover where you need to go back and do some damage control.

A third exec shared: "Figure out the person who is least supportive of you and get his or her feedback. If you can convert that person, everyone else falls into place."

Let's talk about three actions that will help you use feedback in a way that moves the needle.

• I've alluded to the things that you can do to have this be part of your ongoing process, and the first one is actually have it be part of your ongoing process. So you're continuing to ask for feedback, you're making it part of your routine and career development activities to seek information, process it, make sense of it, and use it to tweak or align your performance.
• The second is to keep building broad relationship networks and cultivate the kind of connection where people will be honest, where there can be candor.
• The third is to figure out how to ask the effective questions that will get you the information that makes a difference for you.

One thing I learned in my role as a consultant was that asking the right questions makes such a huge difference about what data you get to work with.  Because you can ask questions and get a lot of information that never gets really at the heart of the matter. Whereas when you ask the right question, it can all of a sudden open up the floodgates and allow you to really understand what's at play and how to make sense of it. 

For example, in my interviews, when I asked things like ‘tell me about the unwritten rules’, people would say ‘well, there's no unwritten rules, you know, it's really pretty straightforward.’ But then I would say ‘okay, tell me about somebody who was very successful, was promising and was promoted. How would you distinguish them from somebody who was very promising but did not get promoted?’ That’s when all those unwritten rules came out, because the question was framed in a way that allowed interviewees to think of details that the broader question didn’t uncover.

Here are five different ways to request feedback in a way that makes it less uncomfortable for you and also less uncomfortable for the other person, so that they can access the information that you need and deliver in a way that you can hear it.

The first one is around results. You might say something like "I'm trying to produce these specific results with my team/with my client/in the organization/and I'm wondering from your vantage point what I might stop, start, continue, (or continue with modifications) that will help me best drive these results."

Another question under the results heading is "Have you ever had an experience like this and might you offer any tips about how I might produce these same kind of results?"

The second one is event based, and you're asking ahead of time. "Can I please have some feedback when I do this pitch/presentation/sales close/team meeting? I’d love to know what you’d recommend that I do to raise my game. Your unvarnished feedback would be really appreciated here."

Third one is relationship based, about navigating your network effectively. So the question is "Who might I prioritize spending time with to build my relationship and what do you think would really improve that relationship?"

The fourth one is level based, and you want to do this with enough lead time, like maybe a year or more for when you want to be considered. You're asking your manager or a key stakeholder: "I'd really like to be considered to be nominated as a [VP/Director/MD], can you walk me through what it would take to be successful?" "How can I be proactive in this?" "I'm thinking about my future career and I'm looking forward to being promoted to Director at some point. Can you walk me through what I need to do to be successful?" "What might I need to do for you to want to nominate me to promotion for Director?"

The fifth one is role based: "I'm really thinking about a role in the future as an xyz and I'm building my development plan to help me prepare for that. I'd really like you to help me prioritize. What do you think excellent performance in that role like that looks like, where do you see my strengths aligning with that, and where do you see me needing to close some gaps or raise my game?"

Asking for feedback is just one step inside a bigger process, so if you're interested in learning my eight-step system for moving your career forward with ease, access it at fullpotentialrealized.com/advance.

Would love if you would take advantage of that, and given everything we’ve been talking about, happy to hear your feedback [lol] on how you are able to use it and how specifically it helps.