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Short and sweet this week as I feel the newsletter ends up being too long and therefore people don’t read it, or maybe it’s just me
Anyhow, in this part I want to talk about proving you’re ready for promotion or proving the value you provide
Part 3 – Prove it
Make Notes
When you get to the end of the year it can be hard to remember all the great work you’ve done, and in the past I’ve actually taken to going through my calendar week by week to remember the projects I’ve worked on. This provides some context, however it will miss some items – like a major outage you managed or a big presentation – additionally you will only have a vague recollection of it with not much detail and may even have forgotten the good side and see it only as a small win. The best way to overcome this is to make weekly notes on what you did and the value. This is great for end of year but even better it’s a source of inspiration when you’re demotivated or feel you’re not making progress
Metrics!
I never understood the true value of a good metric until a few years back when a colleague really drilled it into me. A metric can reinforce your statement as it’s a clear number with justification around it. For example, SLA compliance, customer satisfaction etc. Even better if you can align your metric to a market comparison e.g. industry NPS is 65 and we are at 75 is a great story to tell
Think long term for growth
You don’t have to have everything done by end of year if the goal is big enough. If you’re goal is to transform your team to enable faster application development and release cycles, which in turn allows the business to increase revenue, however it will take 18 months, then don’t think this isn’t a good goal to be discussing. This shows long term commitment to the company, commitment to a corporate goal (likely they want to increase revenue) and that you can strategize long term initiatives for the greater good of the company. Traditionally individuals work day by day, team leads week by week, managers month by month or quarters, however great leaders, functional heads, CEO’s are thinking years, decades and centuries. Take Elon Musk who has the goal of colonies in Mar which is beyond his life span
Align to business value
Touching on the above regarding business value, you need to show your alignment to business values and it’s especially great when you can align your goals to them. This can be revenue, patient focus, compliance, ethics, sustainability. Aligning to the business value is fundamental and great when senior support for promotion is required
Well, there was the whistle stop tour on providing it. Go check out some industry metrics as there are so many great ones like cost per contact or cost per employee spent on IT, customer satisfaction, % of change induced incidents, also on the people side like retention and turn over if you have a large team
I hope that was helpful and is getting your mind flowing for you push to a well-deserved promotion
If you liked this newsletter, please share and let you friends and colleagues know about it as I’d love to help more people!