I spent nearly a decade on the other side of this.
I’ve written the competency models. I’ve sat in the calibration meetings — the ones where a handful of leaders talk about you for about four minutes and then move on to the next name. And the thing that surprised me every single time was how rarely the outcome had anything to do with how hard someone was working.
It came down to something much less romantic. It came down to whether the people in that room could describe what you had done.
Not whether you had done it. Whether they could describe it.
Excellent work is not self-explanatory
There is a story a lot of us were told, somewhere around our first real job, that goes: keep your head down, do outstanding work, and someone will notice.
Here is what I actually watched happen. The person who kept their head down had a manager who liked them very much and could say, with total sincerity, “she’s great, she’s so reliable.” Four minutes. No specifics. Next name.
Meanwhile someone else’s manager said, “he took the onboarding backlog from eleven weeks to four, and he did it while covering a vacancy.”
Same effort. Same year. Wildly different four minutes.
I want to be clear that this is not fair, and I am not going to pretend it is. But it is knowable, and knowable is something you can work with.
Three things that actually move the needle
Know the criteria — the real ones. Most companies have a written definition of what the next level looks like. Most people have never read it. Ask for it. If nobody can produce one, that is its own answer, and it tells you the decision is being made on impressions, which means impressions are what you manage.
Keep the receipts, and keep them current. Not a vague sense that this was a good year. A dated list, with numbers attached, that you update while the details are still fresh. You are not building it for your ego. You are building it so your manager has something to say in those four minutes.
Make sure one other person has seen your work. Decisions get made in rooms your manager is in and you are not. If nobody else in that room can vouch for you, your manager is arguing alone. One cross-team project a year fixes this more reliably than another year of quiet excellence.
The question worth asking this week
Ask your manager: what would have to be true for me to be ready?
Then be quiet and write down the answer in their words, not yours. If the answer is vague, ask again in a different way. Vague is not a no. Vague usually means nobody has thought about it yet — and now they have to.
That question has changed more careers of the people I work with than any resume rewrite ever has.
If you want to see where you actually stand before you have that conversation, I built a promotion-readiness scorecard from the same criteria I used to see on the inside. It takes about two minutes, and nobody sees the answers but you.
And if what comes back is uncomfortable, that is worth talking about. Book a free 1:1 call and let’s look at it together.