How Getting Promoted Changes at the Highest Levels of Your Career
There are no secrets to career advancement.
Moving forward in your career comes down to a pair of actions—doing the work, and making the right relationships.
But the higher you climb the corporate ladder, the more one of those actions matters… and it’s not doing the work.
When you reach upper management—with eyes on the top positions IT has to offer—your relationships become the primary factor dictating if you advance, or if you stay in place. Whether someone decides to promote you becomes less about your projects and goals, and more about whether they want to let you into their circle.
And it’s a small circle up there.
The higher you climb the ladder, the smaller the number of peers everyone has and the tighter-knit they become. To enter that club, the people waiting on top have to like you. There just aren’t enough positions to hand one out to someone they don’t really want to work closely with. Near the top, already scarce open positions for advancement come in even smaller supply, and you’ll be hard pressed to find many lateral moves in senior management.
Near the top, either you stay in place or you move up. It’s that simple.
No one knows this better than a senior IT leader who has been passed up for the big promotion a handful of times. If this senior IT leader wants to advance, she has two options.
1. She can better manage her relationships with her stakeholders.
At the top levels managing down isn’t the problem, managing up becomes your primary concern. Can you convince the small handful of people who choose your next internal step that you’re both the right person for the job, and someone they want in their club? If not, then…
2. She can leverage her external network.
If you do everything right and the handful of decisions makers ahead of you won’t pull the trigger and bring you up to work with them, then you sit in a clearly defined—but challenging—position. Should you stay or should you go? Tapping your external network and finding an advanced opportunity in another organization may be your best option.
No need to complicate the point. Like most important choices, the decision is simple but hard.
