Seven reasons why you did not get promoted - 2

By : Adetayo Okusanya

3.You are not visible enough

You get to work at seven in the morning and leave at seven at night. You do your best to get your job done and your work day is ruled by your job description. You are not inclined to seek responsibilities, or extend your influence, outside your team. You never volunteer to lead or support high visibility cross-group committees set up to tackle important business challenges. You believe in flying under the radar, blending into the environment and doing no harm to your team members and the organization. Your motto is "Don’t rock the boat!" and you refuse to engage in what you perceive as "office politics". Networking at work is a concept that is foreign to you, so you do not actively seek to meet and engage corporate executives or colleagues that work in other parts of the business.

Here is the challenge. You have become an expert in making yourself forgettable. You spend fifty hours of your week doing work which is not visible to or appreciated by key influencers and decision makers in your organization. No one outside of your team knows or cares about who you are and no one outside your team talks about the work that you do for the organization. More specifically, no one on the executive leadership team knows your name and the value you contribute to the organization that they lead.

It is no surprise therefore, that when leaders meet to discuss promotion and talent development opportunities, you are never top of mind. Every time your manager brings up your name, all he elicits are blank stares. Kehinde who? Okon what? The room becomes quiet because no one has anything positive or negative to say about you and the work that you do. You have no name recognition or goodwill in the room full of executives. If truth be told, besides your manager, no one in the room can remember ever meeting or working with you. He soon gives up, and is silently relieved when another name is raised and energy and conversation return to the room. Congratulations! You have mastered the fine art of being a wallflower.

You must invest in standing out from the crowd and being valuably different, if you want to be considered for limited promotion opportunities. The more people, especially influencers and decision makers, are aware of your abilities, competencies, track record, potential and value to the organisation, the higher your chances of being promoted and asked to take on more responsibilities.

4. You are not promotion material

You do your current job very well and your manager constantly assesses you as "meeting performance expectations". Your work outputs are always detailed, accurate and on time, and you have a good working relationship with your colleagues. When your boss receives routine requests from stakeholders, you are the first person he calls. You surround yourself with your peers, helping and supporting them, and you take full advantage of your organization’s informal dress code.

Here is the challenge. What got you here will not get you there. Your skills are a perfect match for your current position but they fall short when compared with the required skills for success at the next level. You never take on stretch responsibilities and your job scope remains the same, year after year. In essence, you have invested so much in making and keeping yourself great at your current job, instead of outgrowing it. You dress for your current level and not the next. Your network is homogeneously made up of your peers and you have not developed the ability to hobnob and learn from colleagues at job levels that you aspire to.

Consequently, all your manager has is a 20:20 vision of you at your current level because you constantly feed him with mental entrees of you in your current capacity. He is unable to visualize you at the next level since you have never given him a mental dessert of what you are capable of doing at that level. Congratulations! You have mastered the fine art of maintaining status quo.

You must invest in taking your knowledge, skills, capabilities and job experiences to higher levels if you desire to be promoted to the next level. Put differently, if you wear size eight shoes and want to fit into size ten shoes, you must of necessity outgrow your current shoe size.