Latest / Black Box Theory Podcast / Why Hard Work Alone Won't Get You Promoted
Transcript
- Malcolm: The people who get rewarded, it's not always who does the good work. It's who does the good work that gets noticed, right? Like, because I I know so many, there are there, and you will find this on any team that you're on, across any industry, right? No matter where you're at. There's gonna be someone who does really, really, really good work. like talking about like industry standard work, like like really good work. Super ambitious, really hard worker, always puts their bed foot foot forward. And there's going to be someone who who's on the project that that gets the attention from the VP, from the CVP, from the COO, from the partners, from the general managers, from the directors, right? From the principal level people. At the end of the day, people are going to reward you based on what they see. It's one thing for hearsay to to hear, hey, this guy's doing really good work. This per this young lady's doing really good work. They're doing good. They're doing good. He's doing this. I've seen it with my own eyes versus something that you can see. Because it at that point it becomes a a thing of like what's tangible and what's not, right? If I can see in front of my face as a VP, like, hey, put put these two guys up for motion, let's see, right? One guy has all these projects that have implications across the company, across different orgs, across different teams, across different partner, you know, partner teams, sister teams, whatever you want to call it. And it's it's it's it's it's hit hit hidden on all cylinders, right? Right? Like you y y you work with all these different software engineers, you work with these product people, you work with these product marketing people, you work with finance, you work with supply chain. You're you're like your work touches everyone versus someone who maybe on a more kind of like you know narrow, kind of like maybe single purposed project that still has, you know, is arguably just, you know, super impactful as well. But it's like what what whose whose work like goes further, reaches further, right? And goes goes further up that chain. That's something a lot of times what it comes down to, right? And it's like, you know, sometimes it may not always be the right decision, but it's the it's essentially a decision based off only the information that they have at hand, right? 'Cause like at the end of the day, like once again with circumstances, putting yourself in someone someone else's shoes. If if you're someone that's in charge of a promotion, in charge of, you know, putting someone on the next level, you want to see data. You want to see how how that impact has has become. You know, it's one thing, obviously, hey, if if I if I get two people and it's both of their managers telling me they did really good work, okay. All right. You guys are their managers, of course. Like, but show me something that that that kind of proves or kind of you know, if you're s the VP, you're you're the you're the person that's gonna like more than likely you'll go with the person that that Delivered really good impact. They execute it well, but their work just touched more teams and it made a larger impact for the business, right? Because at the end of day, it's what it comes down to. Like, how did you impact the business? How did you make us more money? How did you save us more money? Like, how did you make us more profitable? That's what it comes down to. And so it's like when evaluating that, that's a lot of the times what's coming down. So like make sure that that's like, you know, especially for early in career folks, a lot of the times it's easy to get caught up like Thomas said in that grunt work because it's like, hey, my manager gave me this. I'm gonna do this. I My teammate gave me this, I'm gonna do this. My, my, my dev gave me this, I'm gonna do this.