147: Five Excuses Your Company Is Using To Keep You Hopeful, But Not Promoted

Last episode, I asked you to go check your own situation against five real signs of investment. That was episode 146. If you haven't listened to it, pause this episode, go back to 146, start with that. Some of you did exactly what I asked, and some of you found real gaps.

Today I want to talk about what fills those gaps. Because when a company hasn't actually decided to promote you, but doesn't want to lose you either, it doesn't usually say nothing. It says something. Something warm, something plausible, something just believable enough that will keep you showing up and keep you overperforming, keep you waiting.

I call these the five excuses. And once you can name them, you will never hear them the same way again. You'll be able to identify them, call bullshit on them, and then make the decision on how you want to react to them. This is part two of our promotion art heading into my live masterclass that I'm hosting on August 29th.

How to get your executive promotion in 90 days. Again, if you haven't listened to episode 146, which is the last episode, go back and start there because today's conversation is building directly on that. All right. I guess I should also introduce myself, particularly if you've just come here, you've just found me.

This is the first time you're hearing the sound of my voice. Hi, my name is Dr. Nicole Bryan, and I help black introverted women get promoted into senior leadership roles at the vice president level, at the senior vice president level, executive vice president level, and chief. So today, what we're talking about is the five excuses that companies will use to keep you from getting promoted.

Okay. Let's start with number one. Number one is the budget excuse. They'll say something like, there's no headcount right now.

This is the most common excuse that I have heard. And it's also the one that sounds the most reasonable, right? Because sometimes it's really true. Budgets really do freeze.

Here's the test: a real budget constraint comes with a real reopening timeline. You'll hear something to the effect of we're revisiting headcount in quarter one. And here's what needs to be true for your role to be part of that conversation. A stall sounds like the exact same sentence on repeat every single cycle with no date ever attached to it.

So if you've heard no budget more than twice with nothing else added, that's not a budget problem anymore. That's an answer they've decided is easier to give you than the real one. The second excuse that's very common is the seasoning excuse. You will get feedback that you need more experience.

Also, it's sometimes true. Also, one of the most commonly weaponized. The real version names the specific gap. You need more PL exposure, or you haven't yet led a team through a re-org, and it comes with an actual plan to close it.

The stall version moves the goalpost. You close the gap they named, and suddenly there's a new gap that you need to work on, something else that they didn't mention before. And then there's another gap that comes up mysteriously, out of nowhere. If the requirement for your promotion keeps changing every time that you meet it, the requirement was never really the requirement.

Excuse number three that your company will use. It's called the someday excuse, or at least that's what I call it. Just keep doing great work and it'll get noticed. This is the most emotionally comfortable one to receive, which is exactly why it's dangerous.

It sounds to you like it's encouragement. It functions like a stall because it has no mechanism attached to it at all. Noticed by who? Who do you need to get noticed by?

Reported to whom? Advocated for what? In what room? If you can't answer those questions, then keep doing great work isn't a strategy for you.

It's a way of telling you to keep waiting without technically saying the word wait. Common excuse that your company will use number four. I call it the shape excuse. They'll say something to the effect of there's no role that fits you yet.

Sometimes structurally, that could be the case. Some organizations really don't have a natural next seat for you. The real version comes with movement, though. They're actively reshaping something or building a case for a new role.

Or you can see evidence of that effort on the company side or the organization side. The stall version is an org chart that hasn't changed in five or 10 years, right? It's used as a permanent explanation for why nothing can change, ever change for you either. Common excuse from your company number five is what I call the cycle excuse.

It will sound something like let's revisit this next review cycle. Of every excuse on this list, of all five, this is the one that I want you to take most seriously because it's the one that compounds over time. One cycle of let's revisit this could be your patience. Two cycles starts to be a pattern.

Three cycles of let's revisit this later or more, and you are not in a delay. You are in a design. Somebody has quietly decided that revisit next cycle is a sustainable long-term answer to give you because so far it's worked. You've not questioned it.

And they keep saying the same thing over and over again, and you're falling for it. I want to tell you about a client that I worked with, and I'll call her Renee, just again, to protect her identity. And what I'm gonna tell you about Renee, to be fair, I've seen time and time again with women who come to me for help in terms of getting their next level promotion or getting their next level role. So I know that you are living this or some version of this if you're listening now.

Renee had heard some version of all five of the excuses that we just went, we just talked about, but she had been hearing them for over three years. Not all at once, one at a time, spaced out over the three years, each one landing right when she was about to get frustrated enough to push back. No budget this year. We don't have a budget this year, or you need to do more functional experience.

Keep doing what you're doing. There's no VP seat right now that fits you. Let's talk about this again next cycle. Here's what she said to me when we started working together.

None of those excuses individually felt like a lie. And that is exactly why it works, lady leader. No single excuse needs to be dishonest, right? It needs to be dishonest enough to make you angry.

Each one on its own is really plausible. It's the pattern across time that actually should be telling you the real story. And almost nobody steps back far enough to look at that pattern, to see that pattern, because they're too busy responding to each excuse individually, one at a time, believing each one is the whole truth instead of one line in a longer sentence. Or you may hear each excuse and you think it's not the truth, but you have no way of determining that.

You have no way of proving that. So what do you do? You choose to believe them. You choose to keep doing your work, you choose to put your head down and continue to deliver and over-deliver.

This is the same psychological mechanism that I talk about in my work on the high achievers hidden track. You were trained to solve problems, not to question whether the problem was accurately described to you in the first place. So when your company and your organization hands you a reason, your instinct is to go to the fix, right? It's to fix the reason.

Get the experience if they tell you you need more experience. Wait for the budget if they tell you that it's a budget issue. Do your great work quietly. You're not being naive.

You're doing exactly what made you excellent at your job in the first place. It's just being used against you. So here's how you actually test this. And you can start doing this this week.

You can test it this week. If you're hearing one, two, or more of those five excuses on repeat, you can start testing right now. What I want you to do is I want you to write down every version of every excuse you've been given by your company. And I want you to write them in order with the approximate date that you heard each one.

Not from memory. Like actually write it down on a piece of paper or type it in your notes on your phone. This is the single most powerful thing that you can do because a pattern that lives only in your memory is very easy for you to dismiss. A pattern when it is on paper or in your notes app on your phone, that is a pattern where you can actually look at it and you can see it and it becomes more tangible.

So you can't ignore it. Once you do that, I want you to ask yourself: has any excuse on this list ever actually been resolved? Not gotten better, right? But was resolved.

It was addressed. Did the budget open when they said it was a budget issue? Did the experience gap actually close and lead somewhere? So did you get the experience and the uh training that you needed and then they took action on that?

Did someone actually advocate for you in a room? If the honest answer to those questions are no, more than once, you are not looking at bad luck. You are looking at a pattern with a purpose, even if no one involved will ever call it that out loud. And then I want you to take the direct step.

Go back to whoever or whomever gave you the most recent excuse and ask them the question: what specifically needs to be true, and by when for this to actually change? And if this doesn't happen by then, what's the conversation after that? And I want you to watch how they answer, like really pay attention to how they answer that question. Because a real answer will have specifics and a timeline attached to it.

A stall answer will feel, once again, probably warm but vague and strangely familiar to you because you've been there, you've heard that, and it's you know it's not gonna move anywhere or go anywhere. So here's what I want to leave you with, lady leader. Excuses are not always lies. Sometimes there really are budget freezes.

Sometimes you generally do need one or more pieces of experience to make you the most viable candidate for a promotion or for a new role. The problem isn't that these things get said to you once. The problem is when these things get said to you on repeat without a mechanism or without a timeline and without ever being resolved. And you keep quietly accepting each one as if it's a brand new piece of information or a brand new issue that needs to be resolved.

You now have the list. You've got the budget excuse, the seasoning excuse, the someday excuse, the shape excuse, and the cycle excuse. Those are the five excuses that your company is using. Once you can name them, they lose their power to feel like individual, isolated, reasonable explanations.

You now can see them and start to see them as what they really are. The same stall, just wearing five different outfits, just using five different terminal different types of terminology. And if you're ready to stop responding to excuses one at a time and build an actual 90-day plan to get your promotion, that is actually why I built the August 29th masterclass. How to get your executive promotion in 90 days.

It is free, lady leader. It will be live, and we're going to take everything from these last two episodes, episodes 146 and this one 147, and turn it into your next move. If you want to join us, I will welcome you. The link is in the show notes, and I'll see you there.