Welcome to episode #10. As I said to my nephew when he turned 10 years old, we are in double digits!!! Woo hoo.
Before we get started , I have a little celebration. As you may or may not know, I am on a mission to get 1000 managers promoted into leadership positions each year worldwide.
And last week a former private coaching client shot me an email to celebrate that she was just offered the CFO job at her company. When we started working together, just 10 months ago she was a Senior Director of Finance with long term aspirations of joining the C-Suite “someday” well that someday came faster than even she expected and I couldn’t be more thrilled for her.
She followed up her instant message with a recommendation for me and our coaching together. I wanted to read it for you really quickly: Stacy is very quick to understand the internal and external circumstances around an individual that affect their professional well-being and development. She breaks down a situation so it is easy to reflect on it and figure out where the attention should be given. Then she provides expert advice on how to approach giving the attention needed.
Stacy is a great listener, while she also provides invaluable guidance and is not afraid to speak her mind.
I worked with her only 6 months where we structured my growth strategy and I got my promotion and a whole lot more! She has helped to shape me into the professional I am today and I am infinitely grateful to her for all that she gave me and taught me!
Super cool, right? I encourage every single one of you to also brag about your accomplishments. It’s a big deal to get promoted and I want to know what you are all about too. Let me know what you are up to, what are your challengings, you can reach me on Facebook, Linked IN or my website stacymayer.com. I would love love love to hear from you.
Now here is the deal with this podcast episode. Today we are going to talk about why it is a TERRIBLE idea to wait for your performance review to request a promotion.
I get on my soap box A LOT about this one. And many of you will try to argue with me. “But my performance review is less than a month away, isn’t it better to just wait and see?” Or my boss tells me we will talk about it at review time so I am just lining everything up for then.
Great!!! Wait until your performance review. I am not stopping you. But I will tell you ALL THE REASONS why that is a terrible idea.
And don’t worry, I am also going to show you exactly what you can do instead.
So let’s first start out with why it’s a bad idea.
Imagine if you got booked to do a TED Talk, something you have been wanting to do your entire life. Is it just me? Some people think Ted is dead. I completely disagree and will be booking my own ted talk soon. I promise you.
So let’s say the talk is two months from now. And instead of practicing your talk, you are head down in your work. You are busy. You keep doing what you’re doing. You show up at work and put out fires all day, you answer emails in the middle of the night and then you wake up and do it all over again.
But while you are doing all this stuff, you are secretly hoping that the Ted people will write your speech for you. They will notice all the hard work your doing and just create the entire thing. Then 2 months later when it’s finally time to present, without writing a single word yourself, you will walk onto that stage with a perfectly crafted speech -memorized and your boss is in that audience and is so moved that she just hands you a promotion on the spot.
This is ridiculous right? You would not walk onto a stage having dont nothing to prepare and simply hope for the best. Yet we do this ALL THE TIME with our performance reviews.
We work really hard all year long. We meet every single deadline. Our team loves us. We produce extraordinary results. Then we walk into our boss’s office at review time and expect a promotion. Instead we get a modest pay increase and a pat on the back.
I have clients who reach out to me in tears, usually toward the beginning of our sessions because after working with me, they learn how to advocate for themselves.
I had one client, a Vice President call em in tears, “They hired someone from the outside into the position I have always wanted.” I asked, “Did you tell anyone you always wanted that position?” well no! OK then, how did you expect to get it? Well welll welll they should ahve known.
Or another client who was super bummed that she received “highly effective” on her performance reveiew. She EVEN got the higest pay increase she could recive but she was still pissed off. It became a running joke in our coaching, I would remind her “Do you want to be rated as highly effective again? Or do you want a promotion?
Once you can understand that waiting for performance reviews to speak up is such a bad idea, then you can do something about it.
And just last week, another BRAND NEW client in tears because she didn’t receive a title bump at her performance review. In her case, she had received a responsibility change several months earlier. But instead of advocating for a title change then, she opted to wait until her performance reveiw. I said, “I am not saying this to make you feel bad but here’s the deal and it’s a great thing you hired me now. It is my job to notice opportunities. If you were my client and you told me that you were getting this huge responsibility change I would have immediately followed with OK what’s your title changing too. - THEN. It’s not your fault that you didn’t advocate for yourself. You were probably so excited to just have the increased responsibility BUT just know that the reason your feel disappointed now is more so because this is actually your second opportunity for promotion this year and all you received was a pay increase.
So I tell you each of these stories not to see the hardships that most hardworking head down managers go through but to see that the problem with every single wone of them faced was that they waited for their performance review to advocate for themselves and in all 3 of these cases they ended in disappointment.
And let’s say you do get a promotion at review time - great! That’s awesome. BUT that doesn’t put you in the drivers seat of your career, that doesn’t help you feel empowered and it definitely doesn’t guarantee that it will ever ever happen again.
A few other reasons why waiting until your performance review to begin advocating for yourself is such a bad idea:
- You don’t know what you don’t know. 9 times out 10 managers hear something at their performance review that they wish they had known sooner. The receive feedback that they need to get in front of leadership more. Well, if they had known this sooner, they could have been doing it. And NOW at performance review time they are having a deeper level conversation like - OK I think this was good but the CEO still doesn’t know my name, what should I do?
- Too much competition. Often times my managers receive the feedback that there are a lot of senior managers right now in line for promotion or we only have opportunities for so many directors or the budget states xyz. And while this might be true it’s just another reason that you must advocate for yourself sooner. You want to be seen as an island of one, not just another senior manager. You want your boss to have no choice but to promote you, not because you threaten to leave but because they can’t risk losing you. You are too valuable. You wait until review time and you are competing with a bunch of other “senior managers.”
- Too many other things going on. Some companies, if it’s a good one have a performance track and a promotability track at performance review time. You spend MOST of the conversation on performance. Why? Because it’s the easiest to quantify, either you produced results or you didn’t. So they can speak to those things. Then you get into your promotability and at performance review time, they are going to give you a whole mess of things to improve. Of course that is unless they tell you you are getting a promotion. But either way, you are left with a heap of stuff and no real direction. See you next year!
These are just some of the reasons that waiting until your performance review is such a bad idea. And now I am going to show you what you can do instead.
You are going to have regular development conversations with your boss. These are different than your performance updates where you let her know all of the tasks you are working on. These are just like the development conversations that happen at review time only I want you to have them every single month.
What??? If that sounds scary, awful, intimidating or impossible then you REALLY need to be having these conversations. And if you are truly at a loss for what to say in these meetings, I have created a pdf with 20 professional development questions you can ask your boss instead of talking about what you are working on….
Download it for free at stacymayer.com/questions
So in addition to asking better questions to your boss, you have to understand exactly what you want out of your career. Get out of reaction mode - you know what I mean - the kind where you wait to be accepted, wait to be promoted - wait to be valued - you know what you want out of your career and you go out there and get it.
And don’t make this so hard on yourself. The simplest way you can set a goal is pick a title - just like my client Diana - I want to be CFO in 3-5 years (it happened in less than 10 months) but still - it started with her claiming it. Maybe you want your boss’s job? Own that too. The next time you meet with your boss to have one of these professional development conversations, instead I want you to walk in there and say “what would I need to do now to have your job someday?” What???? That is such an amazing question and you will get the answers.
Now you have probably got the message by now but just in case it hasn’t sunk in - DO NOT WAIT UNTIL YOUR PERFORMANCE REVIEW to have a professional development conversation with your boss. I could write 3 more podcast episodes about this one topic (and I might) it is so freakin’ important. But I know you can do it. You are amazing. Your are powerful and you are strong. Now get out there and tell people WHAT YOU WANT!
See you next week.
