The Real Reason You’re Not Getting Promoted (And How to Break Through)

Ever feel like you’re doing everything right, but your career just stopped moving?

In this episode, we talk through why that happens. We start with the Peter Principle—the idea that people get promoted until they reach a level where they’re no longer effective—but we don’t stop there. We get into what’s really behind stalled careers and why strong performers across every level can lose momentum.

Early on, it’s easy to stand out. You bring energy, say yes to everything, and pick things up quickly. But over time, that can turn into routine. The reality is, companies don’t just reward performance—they reward growth. When that growth slows down, so do the opportunities.

We also spend time on the people side of things—mentors, sponsors, and the relationships that actually help you move forward. Not in a forced or transactional way, but by building real trust and showing up consistently.

From there, we get practical. We talk about how to identify where you’re falling short, how to build new skills, and what it really means to step into a leadership role. As you move up, the job changes. It’s less about doing everything yourself and more about leading, delegating, and thinking bigger picture. If you stay too deep in the day-to-day, you can end up holding yourself—and your team—back.

If you’ve been feeling stuck or wondering why your results aren’t turning into growth, this episode will help you take a step back, reset, and move forward.

Hit play, subscribe, and share it with someone who’s ready to take the next step.

Transcript

The Peter Principle Explained

Promote Your Replacement To Advance

Why Careers Stall Over Time

Reignite Momentum Through Visibility

Rebuild Mentors And Trust

Close Skill Gaps With Learning

Unlearning And Delegation At New Levels

Leadership Duty And Competence Defined

Mindset Reset And Closing Advice

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of your motivational Gen Z and Millennial Expert Podcast. I am your host. My name is Dr. Jason Wiggins, and it is absolutely amazing to be here today. We have a great show that is going to focus on getting unstuck. Getting unstuck in your career, meaning, are you at a crossroads where either you're not going anywhere or you're just standing still? Well, this podcast today is going to help you visualize how you can get unstuck and get thriving again in your career. Today's episode is going to focus around a famous educator. His name was Lawrence Peter. And he had a principle called the Peter principle. And this principle was that employees tend to rise to promotion until they reach a role where they are no longer competent. For this reason, a structural can be an issue when it comes to either being personal or being something that you have to get over the hump in. Meaning you can be brilliant within what you're doing, but get up to the next level, and then maybe you're not competent. So what do you do in that case? So today we're going to talk about how you train and upgrade your employee to take over your position, but then you align your talents with the opportunity to continue to move on. If you're stuck, we're going to get unstuck together. So this episode is going to help significantly. I was talking to a gentleman quite a while back, but he's a real important thought leader in the community. And one of the things he said is, I would never promote somebody unless they have promoted the replacement. And it took me a second to understand that. So you're not going to get promoted until you promote your replacement. When I thought about it, it makes sense. Why? Because if you are not able to promote somebody that is working for you, help them increase their abilities to get to the next level. How can you be expected to continue to lead others and get promoted? So it made actually perfect sense. Meaning, if you cannot promote, you cannot be promoted. Meaning, being promotable is key. And that is by being able to rise above and find somebody else that can rise above. If you don't hire correctly, you don't promote correctly, then you will be at a standstill, according to this thought leader. So it does make sense when you think about it. Today I want to focus on the three steps of why it's going to be so imperative to get unstuck and then finding ways to get better at what you do. The first one is understanding your abilities. And the understanding your abilities really is from how careers get stuck. And the number one is the loss of momentum. Early on in your career, you're fired up, you're ready to go, you're an excited Gen Z and millennial. And the first stages of your professional life often seem to climb itself because you volunteer for projects, you ask questions, you work with the kind of visible energy that everybody wants to gravitate to. Managers then reward you for this gravity towards these projects and you grow quickly, which means your responsibility, your visibility, your learning increases as time goes on. As the environment changes, you begin to become stable. Maybe you start focusing on family, and your career takes sort of a back seat. Well, you may be thriving on what you're doing, but you're not increasing your overall learning process. So performance for many professionals becomes very reliable on the stages of their life. But that's where the growth seems to slow. Promotions rarely depend on just being the reliable person alone because organizations reward visible trajectory as much as competence. And once the learning curve begins to flatten, this signals that your upward mobility will begin to fade. That's the number one reason why you become stuck at where you're at. The other one is the erosion of support structures. The second pattern of this appears in the background of the most successful careers, and then it becomes visible once it disappears. Professional advancement rarely happens through performance alone. You have to have somebody that helps you navigate through the difficult times. These are mentors, they help guide you, and other colleagues help reinforce your ability to move forward. So if your support structure stays intact, you can likely continue to get promoted. But if people get promoted or you lose your momentum, you're not focusing, you're not getting fired up and getting excited about your career, you find yourself just kind of going through the motion. Yes, it happens. It happens to the best of us. There are times in our careers where we are motivated, we are going the extra mile, we are finding projects, we are doing everything we can to be better, bigger and better in everything we do. But then there becomes a period of time where we have a lull in the process. That lull means you become satisfied, you're not as hungry. Maybe you had a family, maybe you're focused on that. But the third one, besides the erosion of support structure and the loss of momentum, is very key. It's the capability gains at the next level. So the third pattern that is part of the PETA principle itself, many promotions reward excellence, which means that wherever you're at in your career, you're doing great. You're showing that you have the competency to continue to thrive at your level. But when you get to the next level, maybe your skills begin to slow down. And then you become topped out. You become where maybe a director after you were an analyst is your best opportunity and you won't get promoted again. Maybe that's the case unless you find new ways to continue to learn. Or you go to the next level, and then all of a sudden you can't get away from doing what you're doing. You're so good at doing what you did, you don't know how to unlearn and need to do what you need to do in the next level. So we typically promote to have leaders take bigger roles, oversee larger parts of the corporation. They go from overseeing a unit to overseeing a region. Overseeing a region to overseeing part of, you know, whatever country, west, east, north, or south, whatever it may be. But you're promotable because you continue to show that you have the ability to gain. But sometimes you have to identify why I am stuck here? Why can I not move to the next level? Well, this is how you unstick your career. You demonstrate why you are the person that can move to the next level. So your career has stalled. You have flatlined. You are at the point where I don't know what I'm going to do and I don't know how I'm going to get there. Am I going to get there with this company or am I going to have to do a lateral move with the opportunity to get promoted faster? Now, if you are at a place where you felt comfortable, you've done a great job, you have a good relationship with your direct report, then you might want to figure out how you can stay and work with them and figure out this is what I need to do to get to the next level. So the first one is the very first thing you need to do is get back to getting fired up, showing that passion. Let that passion burn. I can't tell you how many leaders that I've seen go through the process as they get long in the tooth in their career and they just stop getting excited. They just don't perform at the same level. Not because they don't have the same knowledge, they have more knowledge than they ever had. But what happens is they become satisfied. Satisfied with the amount of money making they're making, satisfied with the job, satisfied with the career, satisfied with their family. So what is the biggest kryptonite? It's satisfication. Satisfaction. That is part of the issue that we run into. When momentum begins to fade, the effective response is to create momentum that deliberately finds your ignition, turns on the key, starts the car, put the gas onto the floor, and let that car go. That'll help you gain the momentum. Get out of feeling like you're just in a routine. A routine is something that will not help you satisfy growth. Take on a new project. Get with the team and figure out how you can make yourself more visible. Find something that's going to help signal the that to your leadership team that I am ready. I am focused. I am ready to take my career to the next level. In some situations, the most practical way to restore momentum involves changing the context of work entirely while remaining at roughly the same level of seniority, meaning you are demonstrating that I am going to take on more. You reopen that learning curve, you introduce new responsibilities, you reinvent yourself. And sometimes you just have to reset, maybe move to another company. If your existing skill set puts you in a place where you don't have opportunities for advancing. And sometimes maybe they know you too well. And if they know you too well, maybe you burnt too many bridges along the way. But careers rarely move forward through individual performance alone because advancement opportunities emerge from people that have your back. These are mentors. They help you build your structures, rebuild your structures for intentional engagement. Seeking advice from others, find senior leaders, offer assistance to peers with nothing expected in return. If people see you wanting something and they see that you're only doing it because it's going to help you and not them, guess what happens? There's a trust factor that is lost. And then the third one is helping you with your competency, which is closing capability gaps. Closing capability gaps means challenging the status quo. Identify the underlying issue that involves a gap between the current capabilities and the expectations of the next level. This is the momentum of the PETA principle that becomes really important because it forces professionals to confront the responsibilities that the skills which once made them successful may not work any longer. Why? Because you might have plateaued. Maybe technologies have changed. Things now are different. So that's why progress at this stage requires an honest assessment of your abilities, of your tools. So take a look at your tool chest, open it up, and look at what you've been good at. Look what's helped you continue to get to the next level. And that's where you have to take that honest assessment and understand the gaps in what you do. And then find out how you can improve those gaps. How do you do it? Very simple. You find your sweet spot. Your sweet spot is being able to help yourself grow. Find tools, find online resources, help get help from a mentor, get help from a friend. Ask somebody that knows you well and ask them, what can I do to improve my leadership skills? What can I do to improve this? Over time, the habit of continuous learning becomes the central discipline of long careers. Sometimes you see people transferring from one job to another. They don't know why they can't keep a job. They think they're doing a good job, but then they get terminated. They get laid off. Well, sometimes it's because it's your own detriment, meaning you've got to figure out how you can beat the PETA principle. The Peter principle describes a structural tendency, yet it does not have to determine the outcome of every career. Beating it requires understanding the three forces that shape your professional career. The first force involves entering a new territory. Every promotion introduces unfamiliar expectations. You are now a global leader versus a national leader. Now you know that you have to look at the big picture, you have to be able to see that vision, articulate that vision, and move it forward with the mission statement of the company. Curiosity to improve becomes a big advantage because it shortens the time between the time you start the role and the overall competence. The second force requires the act of unlearning. What has got you to the point where you are today? Continuing to learn, continuing to get to the next level, finding gaps. These are key focal points to get to the next level. But what's a hindrance? When you get to the level where all of a sudden the tools in the tool chest just aren't gonna get it done any longer. They're not gonna get it done. Why? Because those tools were good for the previous position, but now that you are a global leader, you need to be able to look at all the different department heads. You need to determine what areas are successful, what aren't. You can't answer every single email from one or two positions below. You've got to let people do the work and get them fired up and be able to focus on the ability to succeed in that role while getting your team able to succeed for their current roles. And as we talked about earlier, and if you want to get promoted, you need to help them thrive in the next level. So, as we talk about unlearning, that habit works well in one role, may hold someone back in the next. A manager who continues doing the work personally instead of delegating will eventually become a bottleneck. And you know what happens to a bottleneck? They will never succeed. Why? Because your job you need to give a hundred percent and focusing on the big picture, not the day-to-day activities, not the activities that are mundane. We as career leaders and thought leaders, we have to determine what is going to be best for the organization. How can I help improve them? And that starts with the thought process alone. This is the role I'm in. What do I need to do to be successful in this role? How do I get people to work at a higher level? How do I manage budgets? How do I look at all the key points that require my attention? If you don't look at that and you focus on things that may not be important, then you are really going to struggle. One of the things I want to get through today is that as leaders, we have a guarantee. We have a reason of why our employees trust us. They expect us to be competent, they expect each one of us to help them get to the next step in their career. They are trusting their careers with us because if they didn't, they would stop working for us. Why? Because leadership thrives through the ability for connection, and success breeds the reality that we need to continue to move forward. We need to get educated and be better. When we do that, we are able to glue everything together before or after it breaks. So as leaders, keep in mind that you owe it to your employees to be better, to think harder, to lead them in the right direction, to promote growth, to align your priorities with the mission and vision statement of your career. Because every promotion introduces unfamiliar expectations and unfamiliar demands. And those who treat this transition as a learning phase rather than a performance test adapt more quickly. Curiosity becomes an advantage because it shortens the time between the arrival of the leader and the overall competence. Let's remind everybody what competence is. Competence is the ability to do a job that you have trained for, you have the tools for, you have the attitude for, and you're empathetic and you care about others, and that's going to drive your success. Small-minded people do not need to apply. What does that mean? It's not to be harsh, but we as leaders, as thought leaders, as managers, and career-oriented facilitators, we have the job to get our individuals to the next level. And if we don't do that, that falls on us. So today, we have focused on unsticking our careers. Meaning you unstuck your career. Meaning you know where to go from here moving forward. Why you stopped getting promoted? And what do you need to do about it? Well, the first step is you have to realize there's a problem. You have to identify that the same thing that I've been doing is not going to continue to work. As a millennial, a Gen Zer, and if you're a Generation X andor a baby boomer, it is not too late to unstick your career and find a resolution for you and your career to truly succeed. We've talked about this when it comes to career being mindful of it. We can have so much more for ourselves. We have to stop limiting what we can do. And when we believe in ourselves, then we believe that we have an opportunity. An opportunity that we can thrive in at the next level. So when you think that you can't get to the next level, take an assessment. Take a stop, a look, stop, and take a look back and realize I am going to be great at the next level. Why? Because I've been training this my whole life. I have the tools, I have the desire, I have the leadership qualities, and I know that when the lights turn on, I'm going to be ready to perform. So I want to thank everybody today. I want you to continue to stay motivated. Some of you aren't even concerned about getting promoted. Some of you are just looking for a job. So I want you to continue to focus on looking for a job, not get frustrated. And remember, when you when you submit your resumes, make sure they are accurate, make sure they make sense, and make sure you're not just putting a bunch of words there that look good. Because now hiring managers are cluing on really quickly. That substance is going to help your growth and your career opportunity advancements. So I want to thank everybody very much. Please continue to listen, subscribe either on YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform, and continue to look for us as you will enjoy our podcast. Or again, please feel free to share it with your friends, family, or co-workers. We are your motivational Gen Z and Millennial Expert Podcast. I am your host. My name is Dr. Jason Wiggins. Keep thriving, keep living, and keep driving with that hunger that you have to get to the next level. And when that fire starts to die, make sure you start it up again. You reignite it and you continue to follow your passion. So thank you, everyone. Take care, and again, I can't wait to see you next time. Bye bye.