Position Yourself for Promotion
Senior leaders ask me all the time how to position themselves for a promotion.
Most of the advice they’ve been given is the wrong advice. It’s:
• Make your accomplishments visible.
• Build relationships across the org.
• Take on stretch assignments.
All true. None of it tells them what actually determines whether they get promoted.
Here’s what I’ve watched in 20+ years on the talent side, including hundreds of internal promotion decisions I had a seat at:
Promotions are decided in a conversation you’re not in. It’s the moment your boss describes you to their boss. Or the moment the CHRO asks the room “is she ready?” The decision happens in 30 seconds of language, in a room you’ll never see.
So the question isn’t “how do I make my accomplishments visible.” The question is: “what is the sentence I want my boss to say about me in that room and have I given them the language to say it?”
Most senior leaders have not. They’ve delivered great work. They’ve built relationships. They’ve done the visible things. But when their boss has to describe them in 30 seconds to a decision-making group, the boss is improvising. And improvised descriptions are usually fine. They are rarely promotion-winning.
The leaders who consistently move up are the ones who, deliberately, give their boss a clean sentence to use. “She’s the one who fixed the enterprise segment.” “He’s the leader the team trusts during chaos.” “She’s the one who’s already operating at the next level.”
That sentence doesn’t appear by accident. It gets seeded through what you choose to emphasize in 1:1s. What you let your boss take credit for. What stories you tell about yourself when the chance comes up. What language you use to describe what you’re working on.
Most leaders don’t think this way. They think being good is enough. Being good is the floor. Being describable is the ceiling.
If your boss had to describe you in one sentence to the decision-makers next month what’s the sentence? And is it the one you’d want them to use?