‘Play the part, get the job’
How to earn your next promotion
When Iwas growing up, my dad gave me a piece of advice that I think is worth passing on. He toldme that if Iwanted to get a promotion at work, the bestway to get itwas to take the initiative. He told me, “Play the part, get the job.”
What he meantwas that the bestway to earnmy next promotionwas to start doing some of thework involved in that next job even as I continued doingmy current job. That’s howyou get recognized by leadership and prove to them that you’reworthy of the promotion. It comes froman attitude that the company owns the job, but you own your career.
I can tell you that, inmy own role as a manager, thisworks. Whenever I see someone who shows the aptitude and the ambition to take on greater responsibilities while simultaneously holding down their “day job,” I often make the call to promote them.
Why? Because they are helpingme lessen the risk of their promotion. If I see that they can tackle the extraworkwith only a 50% investment of their time, then I have much greater confidence they can do even more if I give them 100% of their time to focus on those responsibilities.
This is also a powerful technique for you to control your own pace of promotion. Rather thanwaiting for a leader to see your full potential, you don’t have to rely on others to pace your career. Your choice to demonstrate competency and ambition will drive your rate of promotion and advancement.
Of course, there is a downside to earning a promotion thisway: You’re doing 1.5 jobs for the same pay. That means you’re investing a lot of extra time and brainpower in tasks you aren’t being compensated for. You need to expect that you’ll be underpaid for a while.
This fact trips a lot of people up from taking this approach. They don’twant to be underpaid, and they simply don’twant towork that hard.
In fact, over the past 20 years or so, we’ve seen more and more people who aren’t willing to take this approach at all. Theywant to be promoted whether they’ve shown they can do the job or not. But this is a risky approach for managers to take. It requires a big leap of faith with little guarantee that it will end in success. In fact, frommy own anecdotal experience, I can say that promoting someone completely unproven generally doesn’t work out.
That’swhy when someone comes tome looking for a promotion, I’ll ask them to take on the extra responsibilities of the new job while continuing their current job.
I don’t do this to take advantage of them or to intentionally underpay them. It’s just the bestway for both of us to knowif the person is up to the job at hand and whether they’re ready for the next level.
It’s a trial by fire for everyone involved. If things don’twork out, we revert to the current situation. If they do, we start tracking towards the new position.
As I used to tell the people whoworked for me, no one is ever underpaid for long. If you prove yourself more and more valuable over time, your company will be forced to pay you or another firm will recognize your value and pay you instead.
Early inmy career, Iwasworking to increase sales on a product line. During one update, I shared withmy boss that I had increased profits for the company by $400,000 over the nine months, and he was payingme $35,000 so he should be happy (and yes, I had tracked it).
He stopped, shocked. No one else in the entire department thought about it like that. But for me, therewas no otherway to think about what Iwas doing. A few months later, Iwas promoted and given a solid raise.
I ampretty sure it came fromthat one conversation where I demonstrated a willingness to do thework first and get paid later.
The point is that money takes time to work itself out. You need to look at extra work and doing more than your job as an investment you’remaking today to land bigger and better paying jobs down the road.
So, if youwant to earn a promotion at work, don’twait for it to land in your lap. Take the first step at engineering your own promotion. If you play the part, you’ll eventually get the job.
Whenever I see someone who shows the aptitude and the ambition to take on greater responsibilities while simultaneously holding down their “day job,” I often make the call to promote them.