How to Quickly Get Promoted

Now, before the holiday season shifts into high gear, is a great time to start thinking about your goals for the New Year. For many people, these goals include earning a promotion. If you want to get promoted soon after 2020 begins, here are five tips to follow.

1. Ask a lot of questions.

The first thing you need to do if you want to get promoted is know the path you need to take to earn a promotion. The way to find clarity around that is to start identifying the big wins that need to happen. And to do that, you need to ask a lot of questions.

First, you need to ask your manager questions like these:

• What does your dream come true look like for the role I'm in?
• What are the top three goals/priorities for us as a team to accomplish this quarter?
• What would be the most mind blowing thing we could achieve?

Then, after you get the answers to those questions, you need to ask yourself questions like these:

• What could I be doing more? 
• What could I be doing better? 
• What am I doing now that isn’t working?
• Which questions am I not asking that I need to be asking? 
• If I were being honest with myself, why am I not where I want to be?

2. Focus on you, not others. 

Knowing that you’re in full control of achieving your goal is the key here. Whether that be a promotion, a new title, or higher salary, you’re in full control; no one else is. When I hear clients blame their managers or company cultures for their not being able to reach their goals, I know they’re focusing their energy on the wrong things—things they can’t control. Focusing on those things makes you feel disempowered. Which makes you less likely to take the necessary action to reach your goals.

3. Don’t put blinders on.

A lot of people have blinders on. This means they’re stuck in the notion of one promotion, at one company, happening in a specific way. Which is great if that’s what you want and it happens that way. But what often happens is that a promotion doesn’t go the way you wanted, and then you block yourself off from seeing other opportunities because you’re too focused on that one specific way.

So keep in mind that maybe earning a promotion means working on another project at your company first, or even moving companies—earning that promotion elsewhere. Be open to these possibilities and others. You never know where your chance to move up might come up.

4. Be aware of your behavior.

A lot of people want security and safety in a job, and that security and safety ends up keeping them from reaching their goals. Often, people will stay in a job for years while being promised a promotion—a promotion they never get. Instead of deciding to look elsewhere, they stay put and remain unhappy about their current situation.

Not reaching your full potential because you choose security and safety is okay; it’s completely fine. But it’s important to be aware that that’s your behavior, that that’s what you’re deciding. Awareness is the first step to change (if what you want is to push yourself beyond that clinging to security and safety). 

5. Start to identify as the person who already earned the promotion. 

It can help you reach your goals if you start to imagine the following:

• What the person who’s been promoted would wake up thinking about.
• What that person would be thinking about and feeling throughout the day. 
• What that person would be doing every day.
• Where that person would be focusing their mental brain power.

This is your future self. If you starting to identify as that person now, it can help you ultimately become that person—sooner than you might think. 

Natalie Fisher is best known for helping professionals land their dream jobs and achieve explosive salary growth (even with little experience). If your goal is to advance your career, then you’ll want to check out The Ultimate Guide to Situational Based Interviewing. The example interview stories collected in this guide will help increase your credibility and effectively communicate your value in interviews. It includes fill-in-the-blank templates for you to fill in your own stories, as well as 25 questions to ask yourself to help you find the stories you want to tell in your next interview. You can get a copy of the guide here.