Figuring out how to get a promotion was tough. With some help from Marshall Goldsmith, and a lot of experimentation, I eventually nailed it. Here’s how I did it.
S1E6: Getting Promoted
Tyler Small: So as you probably know, I'm really big on impact. I want to always be increasing the number of people that I can help and the degree to which I can help them. And so getting a promotion was really important to me.
[00:00:15]This is Tyler Small with hacking emotional intelligence.
[00:00:19] So getting a promotion is not always an easy thing. The reason that you haven't been promoted is because you haven't triggered the right people with the right check boxes in your organization. There also sometimes is not an organizational need for promotion. So sometimes your promotion will need to be up and out, instead of up and in.
[00:00:43] So for me, there was an opportunity on my team. At the time my boss was the director of learning and talent development, and I was brought in as a learning and talent development specialist.
[00:00:57] And for those of you outside of. HR, they use the word specialist a lot. So there's specialists senior specialist. And then there's often in an associate partner in a partner above that. S
[00:01:09] o there was lots of room for me to grow before going into a leadership role. And so my goal was to go from specialist to senior specialist and I, in order to do that, I had to do really well in my performance reviews and I had to work on my leadership principles, which I had launched earlier. And I had to of course get along really well with my teammates. And sometimes that was rough with one or two. And it was actually, I think it felt like a very long road to get there.
[00:01:41]In the beginning of my experience at WGU, I honestly had very little emotional intelligence when it comes to the corporate workplace. I had developed some in terms of working with clients. And as far as working with the day-to-day team and sharing objectives and having a lot of handoffs and touch points that was a lot tighter working circumstances than I was used to.
[00:02:06] I also had an experience where we grew out of our space and we were a very collaborative team, which was somewhat unique within our organization. And so we talked a lot and we were always popping up out of our cubes and Hey, What do you think about this?
[00:02:23]Or Hey, can you look at my deliverable? Can you come over and look at my screen and or, meeting together. So we we were banished from the area where we were too loud. And we liked that. We were very proud of that fact, so we moved into a different space and it was very exciting.
[00:02:38]However, what ended up happening is we had six people in a room that was nine and a half by 13 feet which is smaller than many of the. Offices that like for one person, many of the executives had of course larger offices than that. And this was six people in one room.
[00:02:57] So it was a little bit ridiculous. Already the added benefit was I say benefit loosely, but there were no windows in this room and the walls were painted dark gray. So it was literally this this little cave. There were all sorts of nicknames for it. The dungeon the cave, the what was the other one? The dorm, a lot of people called it the dorm. And it was about as big as a dorm room, I think. But anyway, there were six of us in there nearly on top of each other.
[00:03:30] And so whenever you work with somebody in that kind of. Foxhole like situation. I there wasn't a, any kind of life and death going on but it was very close quarters and it was like, you could literally hear the people around you breathing. You could hear every mouse click, every keyboard tap anytime someone received a text message, everyone knew that they received a text message. So it was a, it was a very intimate space and , Most of us, you could see what was going on our machine. So it was like an open office environment without the open part.
[00:04:03]But just open between us. So very tight. And what that does is it creates a situation where in order to survive and co-exist, and not kill each other, you have to develop your relationships to a really advanced point. If there's any kind of tension in the room, then everybody knows about it and everybody can feel it and it just drives people nuts. It just really wears everybody down really fast.
[00:04:32] What we had to do is figure out how to improve our relationships very quickly. And one of the things that I tried doing is actually an early iteration of a program I'm currently running. And I tried asking people for feedback about my own, teamwork and my own relationships with them.
[00:04:51] The way that I asked, the way that I introduced it. The way that I collected the feedback was all just terrible. It was anonymous. I had no idea who to apply, which feedback to some people gave me really low scores, other, it was like half really low scores, half really high scores.
[00:05:06] It was really difficult to be actionable with the feedback. I wasn't sure Oh, who's super happy with my relationship. Who can I trust, to talk about this stuff with and who am I walking on eggshells with? Who do I need to be super sensitive with and had no idea because all the feedback was anonymous.
[00:05:23] However I eventually figured out how to apply the feedback better. There was there's this guy named Marshall Goldsmith, super cool guy. Marshall Goldsmith is a world famous executive coach. And he's coached a huge number of the CEOs within the fortune 500. He's retiring at this point, but he wrote this book a while back called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And super interesting book, very, actionable. I'm very biased toward actionable books. So I highly recommend this book.
[00:05:59] And he gives this method for soliciting receiving and applying feedback. And there's there's a lot that goes into it, but basically what he says there it's not quite enough to have success in every circumstance. I would say. There is a little more, that has to go into it in order to connect the dots just from what's in the book. But all in all, I've figured out the missing links in between. And I've built that into a program that I currently use but the seed of this, I was figuring out at that time.
[00:06:30] And so I figured out these things and what to do and how to do it. And I used this process. To gather very frequent feedback. And one of the things I did I'll share is instead of calling it feedback, I often called it advice because some people hate giving feedback.
[00:06:50] Feedback is difficult to receive. Feedback can be very awkward, but advice. Now everyone likes to give honest advice, right? Just periodic solicited, honest advice. And and so I got to the point where I was asking for advice so often and applying it so well that no one was afraid to just tell me like, Hey Tyler when you did this, it just, it bothered me.
[00:07:18] Or when you did this, it seemed like so-and-so, had this look on their face and it seemed like you were eroding trust with that person. Just a little bit. And so people were fearless about giving me feedback and advice because I was so good at receiving it. And I was always asking for it and I was so good at applying it.
[00:07:39] So that was that was the rocket, I would say that eventually led me to the moon, to the promotion and. I worked with some really good people, really respectable, really impressive people, very friendly, very kind. And it was really just me. I just really had to learn how to be a trustworthy, reliable, emotionally intelligent teammate and I eventually got there and I think that, using a very specific systematic feedback process for yourself, not just one of these 360 reviews where people are giving you anonymous feedback once every six to 12 months, but something where you can get feedback every week, I think is really important. Sometimes the relationship doesn't have enough exposure to warrant feedback every week, and of course in those situations, you can get it less often.
[00:08:31] But as I've coached hundreds of people actually using this model, it is funny because I was experimenting with it and then I was creating programs at WGU to help leaders do these things. That it eventually turned into what the programs I'm using now. But now that I've coached hundreds of people. In using these methods it's just spectacularly more helpful than just trying to struggle through and and do it without a really clean, really easy system and a highly encourage you to find your own system.
[00:09:06] Mine's not the only one out there. Of course I'm biased towards mine because I believe it's the easiest way to improve work relationships. But this is the way that I got my promotion and I'd love to help you get yours.
[00:09:19] I will put a link in the description with more information.
[00:09:23] This is Tyler Small with hacking emotional intelligence.