Stop Waiting to Be Noticed: Your Performance Is Not Going to Promote You

In your career, have you been sitting around waiting for people to notice the type of job you're doing? And then do you wonder why other people get promoted around you? Well, a lot of people I find are playing defense instead of playing offense in their role. And you, dear leader, you need to understand how to promote yourself, how to move forward, and how to be bold to get to where you want to go.

Welcome to Leadership Mindset 2.0, practical neuroscience and psychology to transform you from a tactical doer into Welcome to A Strategic Leader. Here is your host, former Social Entrepreneur of the Year and coach to some of the world's top executives, R. Michael Anderson.

This episode was driven by some recent events, as a lot of other episodes are. I like to talk about something that's fresh that just happened with me and my clients recently, because then you get some better insights on it. Two of my clients have gotten passed over for promotions. What happens is I get a lot of leaders, especially earlier in their career, and they're just head down, focused on doing a good job.

And they think that their numbers, their performance should speak for themselves. Well, I hear you and I understand why you think that way, but that's not the way the real world works. You need to understand the game, the influence game, the political game. You need to promote yourself.

You need to put yourself out there. You need to take risks. Because you know what? That's what strategic leaders do.

What individual contributors do is they just keep their head down and work. So again, like we talk about from the doer-to-leader shift, these are people that are in doer mindset and they need to be in strategic leader mindset. The first client, she got passed over for a CEO role that she was slated for in a year. And the investors, they wanted somebody in there earlier.

And so she got passed over for the CEO role. I have another client, he's a VP, and there was a shuffle because somebody left out of the blue. So they needed to fill some positions and he wasn't actively promoting himself for that. We did a check-in and a debrief and he's like, you know, to be honest, I hadn't put myself up there.

I haven't been on the radar of the right people. And dear leader, that's what you need to do. It is a bit naive to think that you are just going to do a good job and a leader is magically going to recognize that and promote you for a couple of reasons. One thing is, that leaders have a lot of things going on.

And so it's not their responsibility to keep a pulse on every single thing that's going on. Some leaders have 5, 10, 20, 30 people reporting to them. Also, what we have to keep in mind is that leaders are also dealing with a lot of things we don't even know they're dealing with. In addition, put yourself in the shoes of a leader.

If you're in a leadership position now, if you had two people that were doing a good job, the one you don't talk too much, they just go about getting their stuff done. The second, They're always engaging with you. They're asking how they can get better. You know that they want a promotion.

You're actively coaching them. You're actively mentoring them. They have a relationship maybe with your boss, the founder of the company, whoever it is. Who do you promote?

You promote the person you have a relationship with. Relationships create trust. Relationships create familiarity. And you are going to promote the person that is visible with the upper levels.

And you know who you're going to keep in their position? Is the person that keeps their head down and does a good job, but never participates strategically, doesn't take initiative, et cetera. Now, my job as a coach is not to make you comfortable and tell you what you want to hear. It is to tell you what you need to hear to be more successful.

You keeping your head down is a form of protectionism. It is you trying to keep yourself safe. So it takes boldness to network, to interface, to interact with people older than you, higher up in the organization, people that have a bigger title than you, have more responsibility, et cetera, because you're putting yourself out there and it's risky. Also, what bold leaders do is they say yes before they're ready.

Do you know who's never been ready to be a prime minister or a president of a country? Pretty much everybody who's got elected president or prime minister. If everybody would wait and say, okay, now I'm finally ready to be president. Or prime minister?

Nobody would raise their hand because nobody's ready. So you, what are you waiting for? What are you waiting to be perfect? What are you waiting for to be correct?

I'll be honest with you, women are affected more than men. There's the old adage, if there was a job posting for a promotion and there was a man and a woman and they both had 4 out of 5 of the qualifications, the woman would say, I only have 4. I gotta wait till I get the last one. And the man says, ah, I have 4 of them.

I'm gonna go for it. This isn't always the case, but again, it's my job to point these things out. And so where are you at right now with positioning yourself? Maybe you're a business owner, but if you're a business owner, are you interacting and interfacing with people, influencers, people that can recommend, people that are a couple that run businesses that are much, much bigger than yours?

So this type of hiding happens a lot everywhere. And that's my challenge to you, dear leader. Where are you hiding? Where are you waiting?

Where are you trying to just do your little thing and hope the world recognizes it? What do you need to do to step out of that? What do you need to do to promote yourself? Who is going to move your life forward?

Whether it's your boss, the boss's boss, the CEO, the founder, or the owner of another company, et cetera. Who do you need to go reach out to? Who do you need to promote yourself to, to significantly move your life and your career further? Identify them, and take action.

It sometimes is that simple. That's it for today's episode, but I have one more question for you. Do you have an upcoming event that could benefit from a Leadership Mindset 2.0 keynote or facilitation?

One of my favorite things to do is speak and work with groups at events and leadership meetings. If you want to learn more about my speaking, go to rmichaelanderson.com/speaking where you can see me on stage and inquire about bringing me in for your event. Then we can both meet in person and your team can get empowered with the latest mindset tools and strategies.