Bernadette Boas advises Candice P. on being overlooked for promotions. Document your goals and development plan, align expectations with your manager, ask about advancement timelines, and schedule regular check-ins to track progress. Use the written plan as evidence if promises aren't kept.
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Hi, welcome back to Rich Tips. I'm Bernadette Boas, where I give you tips, advice, and tough love in regards to your career, business, or life questions or challenges that you might be having. And this one's coming from Candice P. She's in corporate, has been for a very long time, didn't want to share for how long, but she's been there for a long time and is being overlooked for promotions and new projects. What could she do? All right, well, first off, you need to take a hard look in the mirror before you go talking to anybody, before you start getting stressed and freaked out and, and anxious, and maybe you even like, you know, decide that you're going to do something about it as far as leaving the job. Before you take any kind of actions that you're going to regret somewhere down the line, what I want you to do is I want you to sit down and on a piece of paper kind of write out your explanation as to why you're being overlooked or why, um, you are just never qualifying and getting the job or the project. Because you first need to be very well aware, and then you need to make everyone else well aware. Okay, but you first need to do that first, because what's gonna happen if you don't do that is you might land up sitting in front of your boss or HR having a conversation, being emotional about it and being upset about it with no clue as to your role, your participation or lack thereof in what's going on. And the next thing you know, they tell you and you're caught off guard. Now that should never happen, but guess what? It does. So make sure at least you're in control of the result you're expecting and therefore the outcome that you're desiring. So after that, what you should do is make sure that whether they're in place right now or they've never been put in place, you have your goals, measurements, objectives, things to do, challenges, personal development opportunities, anything that pertains to your advancement. Because you might be sitting back expecting that the company comes to you with all of that, and yet they don't. And even when they do, they never follow through, or they don't do it on a timely basis, or there's always surprises. That's because you're allowing them to control the process. What you need to do is take control of the process and define those goals, those measurements, those expectations, those things that you'll work on, things that you'll change, um, things that you want them to help you with, whatever the case might be. And then you need to sit down with your boss and maybe even HR, and go through it and make sure it aligns and makes sense to what their goals and expectations are. And if it doesn't, then you need to ask questions such as, "Alright, what's missing? What more can I do? What less do I— should I be doing? What will— what results should I expect if I were to do all these things? What can I be expecting down the road as far as advancement, promotion, assignment, salary, whatever the case might be?" And because then you have a roadmap that should you do all the things that were outlined, should you meet all the expectations, should you achieve the goals and the measurements that were laid out, and you continue to be overlooked and not assigned, then you have a tool, you have ammunition to go back to them and go, okay, I need some further explanation about this because I'm doing what you're telling me I should be doing. Now lastly is you might get all these things in place and then your company is one that only kind of addresses them on a yearly basis, or maybe your, your boss doesn't like confrontation, doesn't like hard discussion, doesn't like even doing good positive performance reviews, and therefore they don't. It is up to you to then take that, that document and ask and schedule an appointment with them, and I kind of recommend to people on a quarterly basis to sit down and go through that performance review. However, in between that, if there's some major achievement milestone you've achieved, I would certainly expect for you to go to them and ask them to sit down and get kind of a debrief. What worked, what didn't, where were you successful, where were you not, so forth and so on. How does this impact the direction that you're taking and you're working toward? But keep in mind, you're responsible for initiating that. Should they be? Certainly. So many of you You know, people out there might be going, "Wait a minute, my job, my boss should be doing that, my company should be doing that, that's the expectation I have of them." Fine, you can sit around and have that expectation and it never getting done, or you can have that expectation and you're making sure it gets done. Which one would you rather have? Alright, so that is your Rich Tip regarding how, if you're being overlooked, if you're not getting the assignments, if you're not qualifying, so to speak, what steps can you take to get that addressed. Alright, this is Bernadette Boas with Rich Tips, your tips, advice, and tough love sometimes regarding your career, business, and life challenges.
