3 confessions from a manager about your promotion

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Day Day Up, the weekly podcast for Chinese professionals navigating the Western workplace. I'm Jonathan. Let's get into it. As a manager, I have three confessions to make about the real reason you aren't getting promoted. And I could never say them to your face. Because saying them out loud would make both our lives harder. But today I'm going to share the ugly truth and what you can do about it to finally land the promotion you deserve. Confession one. So much of this is out of my hands. I've worked at five companies in my career. All five had a different promotion process. Some even had no real process at all. People talk about working hard and visibility a lot, but the truth that nobody seems to recognize is that a promotion is usually a black box. Not just for you, but often for your manager too. Confession two. This conversation makes me really uncomfortable. So many times someone on my team is performing well, but they're just missing the skills they need for the next level. They're not ready. And they're definitely not ready to hear that they're not ready. So I'm stuck. If I tell you the truth, I'm putting our relationship at risk. If I don't, I'm avoiding you. And the truth is, many managers pick avoidance. It's simply easier to delay the conversation than to face it. Confession three. Your career is not the thing I think about most. When I was leading a team of twenty, I was carrying that team on top of my own day to day. As you can imagine, I didn't have time to sit down and think about each person's career. In a session last week, one of my career coaching clients said it better than I can. I'm the biggest advocate for my own career, because promoting me is simply too much work for my manager. The truth is, even the best boss has limited time and limited bandwidth, which is exactly why your promotion can't be their job. It has to be yours. Here's how in three steps. There are usually three kinds of decision makers. Your manager a committee, a senior leader, for example, your plus one. The problem is often you don't know which one it is. This is why clients tell me, my boss keeps telling me the promotion is coming, but keeps pushing it back. Why? Well, a lot of the time your manager isn't the decision maker, and they don't want to do the extra work of chasing down the person who is. So get specific and ask them straight, who actually makes the call on this promotion? If they don't know, find out yourself by asking around and observing instead of drowning in ambiguity. Once you know who decides, you need to know how they decide. Is it structured or is it opinion-based? A structure like a progression rubric lets you point to a box and track your progress. But if it's unstructured, you have to go deeper and understand how this person makes up their mind. The two most reliable angles to read a person are simple. What do they want? And what are they most afraid of? For example, there's one client complaint I hear constantly. My org is capped on headcount, there's no room for a promotion, should I give up? Nope. That tells you the decision maker is a senior leader, not your manager. So go find out who that leader is. Then gather intel on three things. What do they want? Maybe to look cost effective in front of their boss, or to keep performance standards high across a small team. What are they afraid of? Maybe they worry that if they promote one person, everyone else will want one too. Who have they promoted before? And what did those people have in common? This intel often sits with your coworkers, especially those who have successfully grown in the org. Once you figure it out, your job is simple. Help them see that promoting you gives them more of what they want and less of what they fear. Maybe that means splitting your work into its own function, a new head of X, keeps the org lean, raises performance standards, and avoids a wave of promotion requests from your peers. Step three, do the work. Step three is the unglamorous one. Do more of what the promotion actually requires. Let me tell you about Bella, one of my star direct reports, who wanted a promotion, and I wasn't even the decision maker for her promotion case. Everything was decided by my manager, the senior director of operations. She was old school, meaning she decided if you were ready based purely on her own gut, which meant one skill mattered above all, the ability to sell up and be visible. I told Bella exactly that, and she ran with it. She booked recurring time with me to get coached on her executive communication. She delivered a kick ass outcome for a high profile project. And after that she told me, John, the one thing I would deeply appreciate is if you could start inviting me to present my work with the senior director. I know I'm ready. So I invited her to our leadership sinks, and the senior director started seeing her more. Eventually she even started praising Bella's work. And one day, after one such compliment, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to mention casually. You're right, Bella is a star. I'm thinking we should be proactive in our retention. Give her a reason to commit here. The senior director agreed on the spot. I think she's earned a promotion. Tell Maddie and HR she'll know how to run the process. Just like that. All because Bella advocated for herself and supported me in supporting her. I started this letter with three confessions. Let me end with one last one from the heart. In all my years as a manager, I never worried about the ambitious ones. The people who asked directly, they were always going to be fine. The ones who kept me up at night were the quiet ones, the hardest workers on my team waiting patiently to be noticed. In them I saw my younger self, and I knew that just like myself, the only way they could truly learn was through disappointment. But I know you're going to be different. Alright, that's your growth tip for this week. Now let's take a melon break. Neil the Seal would like his privacy back somewhere in Tasmania right now. A one-ton elephant seal named Neil is flopping through a quiet beach town, bending poles, flattening fences, crushing cars, and generally treating public infrastructure like it personally owes him money. Twice a year he hauls himself out of the ocean to shed his skin, and this year he came back more famous than the whole island. Like literally, his Instagram following is more than double the entire human population of Tasmania. As he became 2026's most recent unsuspecting animal influencer, fans have started crowding Neil for photos, and officials had to issue a very serious public plea. Please give the SEAL some space. When I hear about people carrying their babies right up to a marine predator the size of a small car just to get the shot, it really worries me. Because obviously Neil is a serious badass and respects nothing and no one, which is a vibe that I think more of us need heading into next week. Here is how you can use this topic in small talk next week. Here's how you can bring this up naturally during small talk. With coworkers. Have you heard the latest about Neil the Seal? There's a one-ton seal in Tasmania with more followers than the whole island. And officials are literally begging people to leave him alone. I can't stop watching the videos. With your boss. Neil the Seal is a funny little example of the attention economy at its weirdest. An animal with no idea, it's famous, now has a bigger following than the island it lives on, and it's becoming a tourist attraction to manage. It's a strange example of how online attention spills into the physical world. Day Up is written, produced, and hosted with love by me, Jonathan Lee. To learn more, check out my free weekly newsletter for communicating in the Western Workplace, read by over 2,000 Chinese professionals. Just search Daily Up Jonathan and you will find me. That's all for today. See you next Sunday with the Chisang Shao Hopen.