5 Effective Ways That Will Help You Land A Promotion
The goal of landing a promotion is top of mind for many professionals. Promotion means more prestige, new challenges, and a higher salary. Your employer may not clearly mark the roadway to land the promotion, but there are some things you can do that will position you in a positive light for your superiors. Try these five effective tips that will help you land a promotion.
The goal of landing a promotion is top of mind for many professionals. Promotion means more prestige, new challenges, and a higher salary.
Your employer may not clearly mark the roadway to land the promotion, but there are some things you can do that will position you in a positive light for your superiors.
Try these five effective tips that will help you land a promotion.
1. Stay Positive
Work produces stressful situations that can result in embarrassing outbursts or critical mistakes if you don’t have tools to manage the stress.
Staying positive, calm, and collected in the face of adversity is an important part of being a leader. Your superiors will recognize this key quality come promotion time.
Strategists suggest the following tactics for staying positive and calm in a high-stress work situation:
Take a pause
Distance and time from the trigger are always the best first steps to avoid escalating a negative situation. Before letting emotions cause you to say or do something you’ll regret, politely excuse yourself from the situation first.
Wait to send the email
Just like excusing yourself from a face-to-face confrontation, take a break before sending an email that could be confrontational. Written communication offers more opportunities for miscommunication and conflict. Cool down before addressing a sticky situation.
Find the solution
Instead of worrying about how a problem happened or who caused it, maintain focus on the solution. Fixing the problem is the important component, not who is at fault.
Organize your time
Tight deadlines and ballooned to-do lists create a recipe for stress. Setting boundaries for your time can reduce some of that stress. This is often easier said than done, but in the long run, it will improve your mood and help maintain a positive outlook.
2. Help Your Teammates
It can be easy to fall into a trap of worrying about your performance and letting all your coworkers alone to handle their business, but keep in mind that you are all working towards the same goal of running a successful business.
Lending a helping hand and collaborating effectively on projects can help you land a promotion for several reasons:
- It will help you be more likeable. People enjoy a person who is willing to help them.
- Your helping hand could be reciprocated as a promotion. For example, you helped a coworker on a project they were struggling with. When it is time to review your contract, your manager talks with your team members to get a holistic picture of your performance. That coworker you helped remembers what you did to help them in time of need and gives you a glowing review.
- Projects will yield better results. If you are collaborating effectively with your teammates, your projects and end results will benefit. If you are part of a high performing team, a promotion could be in your future.
3. Continue Your Education
Continuing education is one of the best things you can do to have forward progress in your career and improve your chances of landing a promotion.
Continuing education has a variety of benefits for your career, including:
- Studies have shown that a higher education equates with a higher salary.
- Better marketability. Higher education improves your chances in the marketplace of landing an interview or a job.
- Improve skills. You will find that continuing education can teach you to be better at your current job, and that is a direct line to a promotion.
- Sharpen your image. Superiors view professionals that are dedicated to continual learning in a positive life. It shows dedication to your career and your ability to work hard for what you want. These are all great qualities for landing a promotion.
4. Identify Opportunities for Improvement
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, as much as 80% of the average workday is dedicated to tasks that produce little to no real business value. If you have your sights on a promotion to a leadership position, show your supervisors that you can identify opportunities for improvement in time management, processes, procedures, and policy.
As the old adage says, time is money. How you and your teammates spend their time at work matters in the long term because it affects business performance and revenue.
Focus on the following to improve time management of your team:
- Perform an audit. The key to finding opportunities for improvement is knowing how you and your team utilize their time.
- Get clear on goals. You can’t get to a destination if you don’t know where you are going.
- Form a daily schedule. What are the things that need to happen every day to move you towards your goal?
- Simplify your to-do list. Identify what is truly important and accomplish that.
- Delegate. A key indicator of an effective leader, and a surefire way to prove you’re ready for a promotion, is to effectively delegate tasks among the team.
- Avoid perfectionism and procrastination. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Anticipate errors and learn to fix them along the way.
- Quit multitasking. It is a misconception that multitasking saves time. The human brain is only capable of focusing on one task at a time, so set yourself up for success by focusing on just one thing at a time.
- Eliminate or reduce distractions. You may not be able to stop coworkers from interrupting you completely, but you can control email alerts, texts, and social media distractions.
5. Show Initiative
A promotion is a reward for showing that you can tackle responsibilities beyond your job description.
If you want to impress your leadership team, volunteer to take on new and challenging projects. This shows initiative and will prove to the decision-makers that you deserve to take on more responsibility.
Conclusion
If you’re passionate about your job, you’ll likely reach a point where you decide that you can contribute more than what you already do for your organization.
However, to advance your career to the next level, you need to clearly show your manager you’re ready for the next step.
Following the tips in this article, you can establish yourself as a valuable candidate that your managers won’t be able to overlook next time there’s a promotion opportunity.
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