How to Manage Your Promotion Process
Don’t leave promotions up to luck
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I blundered through my promotion to Director at Amazon.
By the time I was working to become a VP, I had learned the promotion process and did a much better job. In today’s newsletter, I will give you a step-by-step walkthrough on understanding your promotion process, confirming that you meet the executive bar, and growing your scope enough to merit a new executive position.
When I pushed to become a Director at Amazon, I had done key work creating Amazon Prime Video, seeing it through its first launch, and then inventing an iteration that put us on a higher growth trajectory. So, in terms of work achievements and performance, I had done enough to get promoted.
What I had not done, however, was actively work to understand the promotion process and standards, work with my manager to meet them, and intentionally line up my stakeholder feedback. Like many people, I thought my job was to do good, high-impact work and then to ask firmly for advancement. But, as I learned, securing a promotion requires more than this.
To be clear, hard work, strong results and a firm discussion about wanting to move up are necessary steps to be promoted, but there are other elements at play. In my case, this extra element was luck. I was working in a fast-moving company and had a recent innovation under my belt, so I was promoted without doing the right work to really ensure success. If I had not been lucky enough to be in a rapidly expanding company, I may not have secured that promotion.
I know this because six years later, I had an 800-person global organization, a good platform from which to become a Vice President. But, I had also seen many promotions and knew the entire process. So, in addition to the “work achievements” being sufficient, I also knew how to navigate the situation.
Below, I will walk you through understanding and managing the promotion process, rising to the challenge, and expanding your scope so that you can push your promotion through on more than just luck and hard work. In my live online course, Stuck at Senior Manager: Breaking Through to Executive, I go into far more detail about managing your promotion process and cover what great executive performance looks like at the individual, team, and company-wide level.
You get 11+ hours of content with 6 hours of live lecture followed by 5 hours of live Q&A and peer networking (includes 4 weeks of dedicated implementation follow-up workshops). This is the first time I am teaching the course live in over a year and it will include new updated content to match the 2025 environment and challenges.
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Now, here’s the newsletter.
Understand Your Promotion Process
Having the skills to move up or be a successful executive is only half the battle. Once you have them, you must be either hired or promoted into an executive role.
Because executives have so much impact on their division or company, the selection process is long, complex, and full of pitfalls. The higher you go, the more drawn out and complex the process becomes.
To maximize your chances of promotion, you must manage your own promotion process.
Manage Your Promotion Process
To manage the process well, you must first learn how your company handles executive promotions. Most medium and large companies consider promotions on a schedule, only one or a few times a year. A common promotion process will involve your manager initiating consideration and gathering feedback from peers and stakeholders, and then ending in an evaluation meeting where a group of more senior leaders will consider the feedback and decide on your promotion.
Some companies actively welcome your participation in this process, while others do the opposite, going so far as to keep the possibility of your promotion secret from you. Whatever kind of company you are in, you want to work to have as much involvement in the process as possible, even if this means bending the rules.
The reason for this is twofold:
No one knows the details of your career accomplishments better than you.
No one is as motivated to create a well-documented promotion case as you are.
The first step towards being involved in your promotion process is actively talking to your manager about a promotion. It is almost impossible to be promoted without your manager’s strong support, so the first step in any promotion is to convince your manager to get behind you.
A good manager will realize that your successful promotion will also reflect well on them because it indicates that they have selected a good leader for the company, helped you develop your skills, and grown their team such that it needs a new executive role. Thus, you should be able to enlist your manager to work with you, not against you. Earning an executive promotion is a win/win.
After you have your manager onboard, the two of you can collaborate to create the right documentation of your accomplishments, identify a list of the best peers to support you, and make a case to your skip-level manager, who likely has a strong or final say in approving the promotion (use this framework).
Often, the right peers to provide feedback are at your manager’s level. Rather than people at your current level, decision-makers want to hear from more senior people who have experience doing the job you are seeking.
In order to get support from these more senior peers, it is important to approach them well in advance (six months to a year) and discuss your career aspirations.
You want to both ask them to provide feedback when the time comes and ask them if they have any concerns about your work that you can address and improve. If a peer has reservations about your performance or is waiting to see you deliver a big project, you want to know about this in advance. If you wait until too close to your promotion time, you may be unable to address any issues that they identify. Sometimes, important peers will also decline to provide feedback, saying that they have not worked with you enough to have an opinion.
By giving them notice months in advance, you reduce this risk.
Confirm the Challenge Level
A company only needs a limited number of executives. And, most companies actually prefer to have as few as possible in order to reduce the number of people who must coordinate and agree on key initiatives.
This means that for you to get an executive role, the work you are doing must combine enough difficulty, scale, and business impact for the company to believe that they need another executive leader for that work.
There are 3 common ways that this is measured:
1. Headcount
Because the number of people on a team is highly visible and easy to count, headcount is often a primary measure of the scope or challenge of your area.
However, an over-focus on headcount by either you or your company can encourage “empire building,” which is an intentional attempt to grow your team in order to justify promotion. While this does happen, it is usually important not to be perceived as an “empire builder,” or someone who seeks to add people to their team only to look more influential rather than for genuine business needs.