Getting Promoted: Follow before you can lead

The road to quick promotions in the beginning of a career may come from good smarts and being in the right place at the right time, but that will only go so far within a team or a small department. The real leadership promotions come from the ability to become ingrained within the organization and not stand out from it. 

As promotions go, we managers need to know we can trust someone; not only to do a good job but equally communicate the same management message with the same tone. This means we want to see that a high potential employee can follow, learn, observe and check in to ensure his or her actions are aligned with the greater vision of the group. 

The art of following isn’t so much following orders as it is following a mindset.

At one point in my career within a Fortune 100 company, I reported up to an executive that didn’t trust me from the very beginning. He liked my personality and the ideas I presented, but I was seen as the young go-getter of the group, constantly transforming areas, teams, mentoring people and otherwise making a strong name for myself. That constant change was too maverick in the eyes of my older boss who preferred to keep things steady and unchanging.

Of course I had my detractors, as anyone working in large corporations will affirm when people are not accustomed to change, and as a result they leveraged the mistrust of my boss to their advantage by informing him of their concerns while I had to constantly defend my plans and decisions.

Since the day I started reporting up to my steady-as-it-goes boss, it took about 18 months to fully earn his trust through small, incremental ticks along the way. Little by little he would give me assignments to see how I would carry them until bigger and broader responsibilities were made part of my job description.

Eventually I was promoted to Vice President (Senior Manager or Senior Director in most other organizations), and that process took 6 months to get final approval. During that time, I had to prove that I could work with everyone in the department, including some senior managers that were none-too-happy to have me around, where I was always changing things up to help the workflow run smoother.

My boss knew that for me to get promoted it would require a peer buy-in, and he made it a point to put me in front of people who were making the loudest noise about my work so I can listen, respond, follow along, and where applicable? Propose change as a part of collective problem-solving.

In the end, my leadership and peers needed to see that I was not self-serving, or trying to make anyone look bad in the shadow of my introduced improvements.

The Road To Leadership

The workplace is often more vast and complex than seen on the surface. Most of the time, you are working within several bubbles of peers and knowledge. There can be bubbles within bubbles, where industry standards, technologies and practices combine into a bigger paradigm within the small world of your department.

There will be senior leaders who will seem out of touch, out of practice and otherwise taking up space and getting paid very well for it. The key is to understand there are reasons why they continue to persist in their role because they bring value to the organization in ways that may not be fully understood from your or your peers’ points of view. But you will want their support if looking to take on more in your career, which may be an all-important nod of approval that pays huge dividends down the line. 

Step back and follow along. Understand how they got to where they are, how they think, who is listening, and what you can do in support of it. In many cases, it will be selfless support. 

Many times in my career, I have been brought into meetings with these supposedly out-of-touch senior leaders, where I was given an incredible view of their world and how they thought on a more strategic level. It was from those interactions I took the opportunity to research and learn completely new perspectives.

The ability to follow along and get aligned with the rest of the organization is a practice in leadership that creates tremendous value. Short-sightedness is not rewarded in these bigger bubbles, because it takes discipline and several work cycles to build up a new language and approach to work, much like the same discipline of working through several university course levels to get a degree. 

As you may understand from reading this article, my clever point is: in order to really lead? It is important to follow at the same time. Management wants to see this before allowing for more responsibility that leads to a promotion into the role you've already been working for quite some time!  

So follow as a peer. Step up when opportunities come along. Check in to ensure you have buy-in and support, because that is leadership worth promoting! Get exposure through selfless service to the people that will quietly guide your way and open up doors to more opportunity.