Accelerate Your Career #5: How to Get Promoted Faster

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. So this week on Founder's Journal, we've been doing things a little differently—dropping our very first miniseries all about helping you to accelerate your career. So, instead of just one episode coming out on Monday, Wednesday, and today, this week, it's two: a new episode you won't want to miss plus a classic show you may not have heard before.

Put it all together, and you've got a mini curriculum for taking your career to the next level. If you haven't heard parts one through four in the series, definitely go back and check those out, and once you've listened to all six parts, let me know what you think. Just shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM on Twitter @businessbarista.

Now let's hop into this episode. Today, I am talking about how to accelerate promotions and raises in your career. Basically how to climb the ladder faster. I want to start by saying the number one way to accelerate promotions and raises is by doing great work, and that does all the talking. I call these internal forces, which is the actual work that you do. Now, this episode isn't going to go into what it takes to be a top performer, because that's what Wednesday's episode was, but if you want to go deeper on that, listen to the episode, it's all about, "How do you become an exceptional professional?" or as a manager, "How do you hire for that?" But without doing a great job, all of what I'm going to talk about breaks down. So, that's the assumption for this episode, is that you've done a great job. 

But just to quickly share a few quotes about what does it mean to do good work and how that does all the talking, there was one great quote by the founder of Privy, where he just says, "Do great work, take ownership, hit numbers, make it so painful at the thought of you not being happy, that's your best negotiation." And similarly, Taylor's Sicard, who is one of the co-founders of Win Brands, he said, "It's about doing great work and making sure that people know you did great work without being boastful or annoying about it." 

But now let's focus on the external forces, the things around you that you can understand and control to amplify your trajectory after having that foundation of great performance. Now, I'm going to be honest. I had to outsource some research for this one, as I haven't had to ask for a promotion or a raise ever. I was only at Morgan Stanley for like a year after graduating from college, so I didn't get to the point of being in the promotion cycle, and then at Morning Brew, I was the co-founder, so didn't have to do that. But after conversations with dozens of people, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of how the best career climbers do it. 

So, very simply, fast escalation is about first, relationship building, second, information gathering, third, constant communication and early conversations, and forth, execution. So obviously, like I said, number four, execution, we're not talking about. So let's talk about the first three. 

Building Genuine Relationships 

The best way to set yourself up for success in your career conversations and to move fast up the ladder is to gather as much information as possible so that you know what you can expect in terms of the speed of your trajectory, the growth in your compensation, and so you can have a transparent conversation with your boss and anyone else who takes part in giving you a promotion early. But when you think about, "How do you acquire that info?" It's always through people, right? And a lot of times the information you're trying to gather. Isn't publicly marketed to the whole company. What that means is to get information, people are going to need to want to give you that information. Building genuine relationships is the way to do that. 

I think a lot of times people just want to be efficient, do great work, not spend time on anything else, and they just expect to escalate, but without genuine relationships and connection, without people advocating for you and giving you information, how are you going to have smart conversations with your boss? So today's other episode as part of the miniseries is actually the best place to go if you want to dive into this part of the equation.

Without true, authentic connection, good luck trying to arm yourself with the information you need to have informed conversations about your career. Listen, it can be an awkward question, just asking other people how much they make, like if you want to move, let's just say, from a director to senior director role, the best thing to understand is not just that it's a senior director role, but how much does that senior director get paid? It can be awkward to ask a senior director how much they're getting paid, but if they feel comfortable with you, if you're friends with them, if they're connected to you, it makes the conversation a whole lot easier. 

Information Gathering : What Does the Ladder Look Like? 

So that first step is building genuine relationships because that amplifies the second step, which is information gathering. So what is the information you want to gather to have smart conversations early with your boss or HR, whoever's deciding whether to promote you? The first is knowing what the ladder looks like in your company. Typically this is actually public if a company has reached any sort of scale where they have basically, banding, for you to know where you sit, kind of, what exact rung on the ladder you're on, and how far up the ladder goes. 

Something that's interesting to think about is based on the company you work at, your movement up the ladder can be faster or slower. Typically a bigger company is clear in terms of the rungs on the ladder and your visibility into those rungs. But you're a bit more constrained in how fast you can move because there's an expected timeline of trajectory that people have gone through before. Right?

Like, when I was at Morgan Stanley, it was understood. You spend two years as an analyst, then you spend a few years as an associate, then you go to VP, and there really isn't so much wiggle room, even if you're a top performer. Now with a smaller company, like a startup, it's less clear, but you can move faster, and oftentimes you are the one defining the ladder because the ladder isn't set yet. This is even something for startup founders and managers to think about, is, has your company reached the size yet, or is about to reach the size, where you should be defining these bands or these rungs in the ladder for employees to have visibility in how they grow in their career. That actually can be one of the best ways to retain employees is where they know exactly how they can move up in your company. So that's the first piece of information you want to gather. Oftentimes you can get it publicly and you don't have to have kind of behind closed doors conversations, is knowing what the latter looks like. 

Information Gathering: What is the Next Role?

The second is knowing what the next role is. So once you know the ladder, know are you going from director to senior director, are you going from analyst to associate, are you going from associate to VP? By knowing the next role, then you can find out more information about the next role so that you set yourself up in the best way, where it's a no brainer for you to move into that next role. 

Information Gathering: What is the Promotion Cycle? 

The third piece of information is, know what the promotion cycle looks like and the timeline to ask for that promotion. This is such an important one, right? Because basically the strategy for an employee should be: ask for promotions as fast and often as humanly possible without pissing off your boss and management.

I've had experiences within Morning Brew where our most career competitive employees, our most ambitious employees, were great at advocating for themselves, but sometimes because they didn't understand what was appropriate versus not because of their lack of career experience, they would ask for promotions every three months, and what we basically had to say is, "If you're going to ask at this cadence, you're going to run the company in 18 months." And so understanding what promotions look like and asking as often as possible, but within the realm of what's realistic, is super important to maintain your boss being an advocate for you versus an adversary.

Information Gathering: What is the New Role’s Market Rate?

So the next piece of information is to know what the market rate is for the role above you. Like I said, the first one was to know what the ladder looks like in your company. Typically that's public, sometimes it's not, if you're in a startup, and once you know exactly what your role is, what the ladder looks like, you can then know, what is the role right above you. Now getting the market rate is probably the hardest piece of information, because that is the piece of information that is most uncomfortable to ask for, it is the piece of information that is absolutely not going to be marketed by your boss or by management, but is the piece of information to know when you have conversations about a promotion, how to be both ambitious and realistic about it.

And like I said before, being well networked within your company, having advocates and having people who actually give a shit about you and you build good relationships with is the best way to comfortably get that information. You know, in the early days of Morning Brew, I was always astounded that employees were sharing compensation information, but more and more as I talk to founders, it appears we just live in a world where employees are sharing that information with one another, and so you need to understand that this is kind of the way of doing business now, so you can arm yourself with the right information to have conversations at the right time.

Information Gathering: What are the New Role’s Responsibilities? 

Now the fifth and final piece of information you want to have to have smart conversations is once you know what the ladder looks like once, you know your role, once you know the role above you, and you know how much to ask for, it is to know exactly what is expected of the role above you in terms of responsibilities. Say, you're a director and you will only go to senior director, knowing what the responsibilities of the senior director role are such that if your company was to write a job description for senior director today, what would appear on that job description, that is so important because you know, basically, how to make it a no brainer for you to be promoted if you're doing the job of a senior director before you actually receive the promotion. 

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Okay, let's take a brief pause to think through all of that information, and when we come back, we'll really dig into what to do with the information once you've gathered it. 

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Constant Communication, Early Conversations

Now once you've built these great relationships, once you have the right information, those five pieces I just gave you, there's a few things you should do with it to set yourself up for the growth you want. If done right, talking about a raise or a promotion should never lead to a surprise. It's a conversation that should start three to six months in advance and everyone involved in the conversation should be on the same page about you wanting the promotion and what you need to get there. So the most important thing you need to do is to not just set up the conversation early, but to speak very candidly with your boss. What you should say is something to the effect of, you want to be in a position six months from now where an X dollar raise or compensation or a Y title raise is a no-brainer. I want to go from a hundred thousand to 125,000, I want to go from analyst to associate.

By saying you want it to be a no-brainer, you can then ask, "What do I need to do to make this happen?" And by this point in the conversation, you will get all of the answers to the questions that you have. Your boss will tell you what is expected of the role above you, such that if you're doing it, it's a no-brainer, and if they don't give you that information, that is their job. They need to give that to you in order to be an effective manager. And so six months from now, when you have the actual promotion conversation, while you've obviously prepped a ton to show exactly how you're already doing the job of the title above you, such that it's a total no-brainer to give you the promotion, you hopefully aren't going to have to do much selling because you've aligned months earlier on exactly what needs to happen to be in the position you want to be in.

Champions from Every Direction

I want to finish with a few things. You also want to make sure you have champions from every direction. This goes back to being a great performer and forming authentic connections. Everywhere that your boss looks for feedback regarding your competence and your deservedness of getting a promotion, you want the answer to be "Yes." If you work in account management, you want the sellers you work with, you want the product people you work with, and you want your partners in HR to advocate for you 10 out of 10 times. Finally, something that I've noticed and people told me is that when they negotiate for their promotion or the raise, they get defensive and they end up positioning the conversation as a threat where if they aren't given this thing, they will leave.

I've never seen that actually work really well, unless you actually want to leave a company. What I would think about doing is spin it where everything is about making you more motivated in an escalated role, such that you can add value and make the company more valuable. Don't make it about yourself, make it about the company and how you can make it more valuable. So that's the toolkit. As I said, execution is the most important thing, but before that, build great relationships, gather the right information to have informed conversations, and start your conversations early, never coming from a place of defensiveness, but coming from a place of adding value to the company you work at.

Closed Mouths Don’t Get Fed

One last thought for you is that I have found the number one thing that stops people from accelerating themselves up the ladder is fear. The worst thing you can do for yourself is not asking and not having the conversation. And I love how Shaan Puri put it in a recent Twitter thread. He said, "Hey everyone, ask for a raise today. I'm telling you. Do it. Here's what can happen. First, they say yes. Second, they say not now, but it accelerates the planned timeline of getting a yes, or third, they say no, and you learn where you stand. Don't fear the awkward conversation, just ask. Closed mouths, don't get fed. I think it's such an important point because when you think about worst case scenarios, what is the worst case scenario of prompting a conversation early? The worst case scenario is you're not doing a good job and you're not on track for promotion, but at least you know it today, versus never hearing it and staying stagnant within your company far longer than you should. 

I Want to Hear From You

Now I'd love to hear from you. This is the toolkit that I have established after dozens of conversations with career climbers that have moved really fast, but whether you're a manager and you've promoted people very quickly, or you're an employee who's moved up the ladder in your company extremely quickly, what am I missing? What other things are really important beyond execution to move fast in your promotion and raise conversations.

Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with any thoughts you have. As always thank you so much for listening to Founder's Journal and if you enjoyed it, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next episode.