Imagine you’d like to take on more responsibility, complexity, scope, impact, and/or be promoted to the next level in your organization. How much time is enough time to start your promotion planning before you hope to move forward?

Leaving ample time to prepare yourself and implement your promotion plan is part logistical and part mindset issue. Allowing enough time to thoroughly research your proposed advancement can help you put your best foot forward.  As we’ve already discussed, before you ever initiate a promotion conversation with your manager, you would have already: 

·          Ensured your performance has differentiated you positively 

·          Gotten to know norms and people involved in the promotion process 

·          Established and begun to build trusting relationships...

Understanding the criteria for advancement and emphasizing your aligned attributes accordingly, or working hard and expecting to be recognized for your contributions. Which strategy do you prefer? Many women, myself not excluded, wittingly or unwittingly have employed the latter. I think we can do better.

Two work experiences illustrate the importance of understanding the system and positioning yourself appropriately. In one case I was responsible for Diversity at an Investment Bank where only a handful of women had risen to the highest level title, Managing Director. I was researching how promotions worked so that I could better support creation of more balanced leadership teams.

I found that a large committee reviewed the candidates who were up for promotion to MD each year. The committee broke the list into three groups: those who were an obvious no, an obvious yes, and the maybes. The candidates in the obvious yes and obvious no groups were barley discussed; the...