How To Get Promoted At Work: 10 Best Advices On Job Success

If you want to understand how to get promoted at work, you will love this article.

In your work life, you must navigate a football field-wide spectrum of situations. Everything from interviews to performance reviews; from sick days to holidays, and everything in between. One particular area seems to cause the most confusion, anxiety, and frustration; confusing new and experienced employees alike.

How To Get Promoted At Work:

It’s a subject that evokes deep emotion, causing clever people to question their worth, drawing on insecurity in even the most confident of individuals. I often find people confused by the promotion process, and listen to complaints of unfairness and even conspiracy theories as to why someone does not get promoted. More often than not, there are fundamental actions every employee must take to get promoted that these people ignore.

Here are tips to help you get promoted.

1. Spend time with winners.

Winners in your workplace will challenge you both directly and indirectly through their example and work habits. The association is robust. Rubbing shoulders with the right people will change your life. If you want to be more successful, spend time with successful people.

If you want to be an amazing Project Manager, spend time with an amazing Project Manager. If you want to get promoted, associate with the winners in your office who have already been promoted. They have done something right. They’ve cracked the code. Contagious habits. Spend time deliberately with the best and you’ll become more like them.

Sometimes, spending time with the greats just is not an option. If that’s your case, do the best you can to watch the winners in action. Watch how they get things done. Listen to things they might share or say at work. This thrilling piece of news can provide clues as to what you need to do differently to get noticed and promoted.

Another option is to find a mentor at your workplace. You may be lucky enough to have an experienced co-worker who will take you under his wing and show you the ropes. Some companies have a formal mentor program that you can sign up for, and then you’ll be assigned to someone as their protégé. If a friendly mentor or formal mentor is not available at your company, you can at all times approach someone and ask them professionally if they would be your mentor. It should be a structured relationship where they in fact teach you something and not just ask you to make coffee and fax.

Finally, you can use social media to find winners. Websites such as www.linkedin.com and www.twitter.com are designed to allow users to follow every kind of winners. These opinion leaders often share their thoughts and secrets online, and this wealth of wisdom and data is waiting for a young, proactive professional like you to come along and make it all occur.

2. Avoid spending time with losers.

This point is extremely important. The losers are the people in your company who aren’t good at their job. They never learn or grow. They have a really bad attitude about everything. They complain about many things. They arrive late, leave early, and make little effort. They are normally unhappy and they enjoy company. They will seek you out and offer you some “clues” about how things “really” in the office. These are people who have been wronged, and will find a way to attach it to the man.

If you spend time with complainers, whiners, or those who feel like they have been conned over a promotion, you are more likely to fall into a victim mentality and you will just tread water rather than swimming to your destination.

You are part of the problem or part of the solution. Choose to be the solution. Enough said.

3. Good attitude is life; bad attitude is death.

You may be the brightest accountant, designer, or analyst in the company, but if you’re difficult to work with, then you are your own worst enemy. You make it almost impossible to promote. Being supported by others is extremely important to get a promotion. If you are stuck, self-aggrandizing, short-tempered, self-centered, moody, or simply plain nasty, you will not be getting any kind of support anytime soon.

When people at work say, “Good morning. How are you?” Your answer should always be, “Never been better.” Or something equally optimistic.

Never talk about your problems at work. People love to gossip and if there is even the slightest bit of trouble associated with your name, people will spread it. It makes you sound unstable or weak, and attracts the wrong kind of attention. People will question whether you are a promotional material or not.

4. Keep your boss in the loop.

No one knows better than you what you do, however, it is more important for your boss to know. It’s important that you find effective ways to communicate your accomplishments to your manager in a way that suits their style, not yours.

It must be written, to the point and consistent. A few bullet points each Friday afternoon will go a long way in keeping your boss informed.

You may be thinking, “but my manager does not ask for weekly status reports.”

Just do it.

Otherwise, your boss will have little understanding of your contribution. Limited understanding means no or little promotion.

Keep a folder in your email application, or an actual folder on your desk, and use it to collect all of your contributions or accomplishments for the week. Hold onto all of these materials as you will need time for your annual review where you hope to get a raise or promotion.

5. Get involved.

Just like in high school, being involved is very important if you want to do well. You will make more connections and increase your network. You will get your name out there. You will be noticed for being fully engaged.

You have to speak up. Participate in meetings. Interact with your team. Volunteer for a special committee or project, no matter how small. Enthusiastically join team building activities, even if they may not achieve much. (That is a discussion for another time.)

If you don’t participate, people will assume you don’t have anything to contribute. You run the risk of being lumped in with the losers. If people think you have nothing to contribute, your chances of getting promoted are low.

6. Network, network and network again.

Being invisible won’t help you get promoted. The promotion process usually involves discussion among managers. They will do employee comparisons to find out who is and isn’t ready for a promotion.

If your boss recommends you for a promotion, but other managers don’t know you, it’s going to be a very difficult climb for support. You may be doing an amazing job, but if people don’t know you, they definitely don’t know what you do.

Get to know people across the company. This relates well to engagement. Make sure you’re visible enough that when your name comes up, people know exactly who you are and know the impact you’re making.

7. Don’t obsess over getting promoted.

At some point, you may find yourself stuck in a rut and spending too much time thinking about when you’ll be promoted. It’s so easy to give up, but recognize when it happens to you and do something about it.

Conversations about promotions can happen once or twice a year, but not every month. Constantly bringing up promotion risks makes your manager ignore them. Too much conversation like this will work against you.

Instead, focus on work. Understand your industry. Read. Stay informed. Be part of the solution and not the problem.

8. Go with the flow.

Most companies have a regular time or rhythm when promotions are considered, and this often ties into an annual performance review. Sometimes every six months.

If you are going to convey to your boss that you should be promoted, do it before this regular cycle. Here’s the key. Don’t wait until you sit down for your annual review to bring up this important topic. By that time, it was too late.

Work with the corporate flow, not against it. This means you need to get out of the curve on this one. Sure, off-cycle promotions happen, but it’s easier to be the rule and not the exception.

Don’t fight the odds. Timing your requests to align with the company’s natural flow, you will increase your chances. At least one month before the annual review is best.

Too many people hope that everything will work out. Sometimes, they make demands that are counterproductive to furthering their goals. Don’t fall into that trap.

9. Be so nice that they can’t ignore you.

Whatever your current job, if you want to get promoted (especially into management), you have to be absolutely brilliant at what you do. It will take some time. It will take effort. Remember, you can’t skip planting in the spring and looking forward to a harvest in the fall. You have to do a job, and by this I mean a job to be very, very good at what you do. There are no shortcuts.

10. Learn to decode.

Every job has something about it that is more important than anything else. This special something is often a secret that only the higher-ups know. The reason it was known only to his superiors was because it was something his superiors felt deeply about, and his superiors might often talk about this special something but would never actually bring it up and say that it is the key to excelling at this job. .

Let’s say you work in a call center, and your boss is under immense pressure from his superiors to keep the duration of each call, or talk time, to a minimum. The average call length at your call center is ten minutes, for example, but your employer wants it closer to five minutes.

Now, he would never come out and say he was pressured from above to lower call times, but he probably talked about call times a lot at team meetings. It should be like a siren going off in your head. This is a secret code or key to watch out for.

If you can find a way to consistently get your talk time under ten minutes, you’ll find your name moving up the ranks in terms of productivity and you’ll get noticed.

This tip goes very well with being so good they can’t ignore you.

Conclusion

Getting promoted isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it can be done. By following the advice outlined in this post, you will greatly improve the quality of your promotions. You will be the winner you know yourself to be, and everyone around you will know it too.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read my article on how to get a promotion at work. I really hope that its content has been of good help to you.