How to Get Promoted: Visibility

To Be Promoted You First Have to Be Seen

It’s nearly impossible to objectively measure performance in the workplace. Yet managers must make promotion decisions regularly, and despite the slowdown in the tech industry, people are still getting promoted. So what’s going on? Are managers just randomly pulling names out of a hat and promoting those people?

There are a lot of important ingredients to a good promotion packet. In fact, I’ll be covering more of them here, so subscribe if you’d like to get my take on the process!

But among all the myriad factors to getting that sweet, sweet promo is project visibility. What am I talking about? And why does it matter?

Don’t Be Invisible

Visibility is mostly what it sounds like: do leaders in your management chain know what you are working on? If your boss’ boss’ boss knows what you are working on then, then you’re probably working on a highly visible project. 

If only your immediate manager knows what you are working on, the project is probably low visibility. 

If even your own manager seems a bit clueless about the project you’re working on, congratulations, your work is invisible.

The visibility of your work matters because human attention is a limited resource. Human attention and getting a promotion might seem unconnected, but they are about as interconnected as can be.

Most organizations restrict who can actually promote someone. In big tech, depending on the team and the promotion level, it’s probably a director or VP. Those leaders are given promotion allocations. Even very senior leaders can only promote a certain number of people each cycle. Reports in their organization are stack-ranked against one another according to perceived impact. Since it’s damn near impossible to measure impact objectively, middle managers are tasked with making reports seeking promotion look as good as possible. 

But those middle managers have a limited amount of time to make their case during performance reviews. Worse, all middle managers quickly learn how to make their reports look as good as possible, which makes it really hard for senior leaders to do the stack ranking.

This is where visibility comes in. 

The Known Entity Advantage

Let’s say that your manager has 5 minutes to pitch all of your accomplishments for the last 6 months to a room of senior managers. If that sounds crazy, I can assure you from first hand experience that it isn’t.

If your manager has to start at square 0 and repeat your name to the group, explain why you’re doing your current work, and only then discuss your amazing accomplishments, you’ll be at a considerable disadvantage.

It would be much better if all the other managers already knew you, what you are working on, and the value of that project. If that was your situation, your manager could just jump right into the performance pitch and explain exactly why and how you kicked so much ass. 

If this situation describes you, then your manager listing all the ways you kicked ass in that performance conversation will mostly just be for appearances, anyway. The people making the promotion decision already work with you regularly. Maybe you lead a big project update meeting. Or maybe you are briefing senior leadership about a customer escalation. That contact – that visibility – will enable senior leaders to gauge your readiness for a promotion well before the next performance review.

This is the connection between human attention and promotion: there are only 24 hours in a day and senior leaders can only pay attention to a small handful of projects in that time. The scarcity of human attention is ultimately what limits the number of high visibility projects that exist at any given time.

How Do You Get a Slice of Leadership Attention?

In a word: relationships. 

Everyone that has accomplished great things in their career has a career sponsor. A sponsor is someone who is willing to risk their reputation to recommend you for roles that you aren’t yet qualified for. But critically, they believe that you’ll be able to do those jobs well given some time and coaching. 

In most cases, career sponsors do this because they like and respect you as a person. (Another plug for the necessity of being likable!)

Finding sponsors is exceedingly difficult and I haven’t found any shortcuts in my 16 years in the industry. You just have to work with a lot of people, prove your worth, develop relationships, and give back more than you take. If you do that repeatedly and you get a bit lucky, you’ll find someone in a senior position who just thinks you’re a great human. They will go out of their way to endorse and support you. You will be given the opportunity to work on high visibility projects that lead to promotion.

And if all of these good things happen, you will repay that kindness by always kicking as much ass as you can, staying humble, and remaining aware of your good fortune.