Get Promoted Without Promoting Yourself

Myth: Get a five-star rating on your performance appraisal and you'll get the promotion.

Most HR people will tell you that your skills can be measured and used to predict how you'll perform. So it figures that performance appraisals would be used extensively in the promotion process.

In fact when it comes to getting promoted, appraisals are largely ignored. Hiring bosses rely mostly on their own intuition and on other people's opinions. The reason? Knowledge work is hard to define. One manager complained to Ruderman that it's difficult to measure performance when so much of it involves team effort, extended time frames, and complex business decisions.

The Lesson: Decision makers use their gut instincts and past relationships -- with you and people who know you -- to predict your chances for success.

Action to Take: Change how you think about your performance appraisals. Consider them to be opportunities to talk with your boss about potential roadblocks and how to overcome them. Getting and responding to feedback helps build your relationship and demonstrates that you can learn from experience and change.

Myth: Promotions are all alike -- the boss finds the best person for the job.

The more managers Ruderman interviewed, the more she heard this claim: promotions are all alike, except for mine. By the end of the survey, she concluded that there's no such thing as a typical promotion.

Ruderman found that there are, in fact, many different types of promotions, such as "promotions in place," when a person expands a job and gets a title that acknowledges the increased responsibilities; "developmental promotions," which groom a rising star for a top position; and "promotions resulting from a reorganization," when a restructuring creates new positions and there are many candidates for each.

Memo to academics: most of the literature on staffing decisions, which views promotions as if they were all alike, needs revising.

The Lesson: Promotions differ in terms of how the vacancy develops, the number of candidates considered, corporate objectives for the person or position, and whether the chosen candidate has been groomed for the job.

Action to Take: Study the lay of the land. Check out how people get promoted in your organization, and think about how to make the scenarios work for you. For example, if your company's been through a downsizing and there are fewer upper-management positions available, you can still get promoted in place.

Myth: Most bosses look for the same qualities when promoting people.

Work ethic. Preparation. Potential. Getting results. They all figure prominently in promotion decisions. But they're not the whole story. Don't ignore the role that politics plays.

True, hiring managers emphasize accomplishments and intelligence. But they also place a big premium on their own personal comfort with the candidates for the job. They look for people they can trust. "Both merit and politics play key roles," says Ruderman. "Promoted managers are talented and politically capable."

The Lesson: Your style -- the way you present yourself, your communication skills, your business smarts -- is just as important as your performance.

Action to Take: It's not just who you know that counts. It's who knows you. If you've come up with a creative marketing plan, if you've invented a breakthrough quality-improvement program, tell people about it -- particularly those who do the promoting.

Myth: When you're gunning for a promotion, you're competing against many other candidates.

The whole purpose of the selection process is to pick the best person from a pool of applicants. But most of the time the job is wired. Many managers know exactly whom they want to promote -- and only that person gets real consideration.

The reasons are varied. Often the person who gets promoted has worked with the hiring manager. It's unlikely that bosses will feel compelled to look elsewhere if they already know someone who can do the job.

So when the higher-ups organize a cattle call for a promotion, they're just going through the motions, right? Not quite. "Companies need to convince themselves that they've found the right person," says Ruderman.

The Lesson: It's rare that a promotion is a true contest among candidates.

Action to Take: Increase your visibility. In 81% of the cases surveyed, the people who were promoted had a mentoring relationship with someone higher in the company who spread the news about them.

Coordinates: To order "The Realities of Management Promotion," call 910-545-2805. $20. Marian Ruderman, rudermanm-@leaders.ccl.org .

"The Team Player"

"The Standout"

"Do-It-Yourself Mentoring"

"The Zig-Zag Career Path"