I'm better than everyone at work so why can't I get promoted?
Technical overconfidence™, self awareness and bragging and giving up
Technical Overconfidence
This topic is quite dear to me as I, like many others, suffered from technical overconfidence™. This term (which I just made up) means the state of believing that you’re better than your peers because your peers are less technically skilled (or have less hard skills than you).
Technical overconfidence happens because hard skills (knowledge of tools or processes) are easy to measure compared to soft skills (communication, leadership, etc.). When individuals have better hard skills, they assume it also means they’re more valuable to their employers.
In certain cases, this is actually true - an engineer who ships critical infrastructure and builds high impact product features does have more impact on the company. Likewise, a data scientist who creates a fraud model to bring down servicing costs by 25% is also extremely valuable to the company.
Unfortunately impact does not correlate to success in most organizations (as strange as that sounds). Soft skills are an underrated and, often, better indicator of success.
Soft skills are an underrated and, often, better indicator of success.
This isn’t to say that technically skilled people are doomed to failure. In fact, you could go a long way by just being extremely technically skilled while being the most awkward person in the room. But chances are quite low that this applies to the average individual.
What I mean is that most technically skilled people that climb the corporate ladder really fast do so due to additional reasons…
Self Awareness
It’s a humbling experience when you see some of your (supposedly inferior) peers climb up the corporate ladder much faster than you. This has happened to me (as vain as I was) and I’ve wondered what I was doing wrong.
I took soft skills for granted since I thought a business degree taught me everything in that area. I assumed that I mastered communication skills, people skills, emotional intelligence, and a few more relevant soft skills.
This couldn’t be further from the truth - it takes years to master these skills and it’s so hard to measure rate of learning in these areas as well. How do you even measure leadership skill? How do you measure emotional intelligence?
It’s important to be humble and understand you’re not perfect. The fact that you’re reading this article means you acknowledge this already.
You can already start working on your soft skills by:
Taking some time every week to talk to colleagues you rarely talk to (social skills)
Learning from Ted talks (presentation skills)
Really listening to your subordinates or peers and trying to understand their motivations and fears at work (empathy)
I also recommend business publications such as HBR for more on this topic.
Bragging and Advocacy
For something so important in the modern workplace, being a braggart sure does have negative connotations. I think past generations of corporate employees tended to think bragging (on social media, or internally) was the biggest sin anyone could do in the workplace. Everyone would keep their heads down, do good work, and hope top management would flip a dice and notice them.
I think past generations of corporate employees tended to think bragging (on social media, or internally) was the biggest sin you could do in the workplace.
You need to brag to succeed in the modern workplace- you need to write about your accomplishments on LinkedIn, start a newsletter (😉), take the lead for presentations at work, speak up during meetings, and be present in everyone’s minds.
It’s not enough these days to do good work, you need to do good work and speak up for it. You need to be your own advocate. You need to find every possible avenue to show off your work and make people know your value.
This all may seem a bit extreme and at times, really counterintuitive. Do you want to be the person that does mediocre work but talks a lot about it? No, absolutely not.
James does good work and talks about it enough so that people in his team and in the industry know about his work. Matt does amazing work (better than James) but his manager only knows about some of it. James will always climb the corporate ladder faster.
Work on your hard skills and then work even harder on your soft skills. Then brag about it. Don’t leak company secrets though.
Work on your hard skills and then work even harder on your soft skills. Then brag about it.
Giving Up
Certain organisations may just have messed up reward systems. Some leaders may be incapable of measuring value. In other cases, company politics may tear you down. There are so many factors outside your control.
The reason I’m saying this is because sometimes it makes sense to leave organisations that don’t understand your value. It’s hard to say when the problem is the organization and not you, but a rule of thumb would be two to three consecutive organizations where you feel undervalued i.e. you feel undervalued at company A, leave to company B where you feel the same and then leave to company C where you still feel the same; in this case, the problem might be you. In all other cases, you’ve done the right thing leaving.
The idea for this post came from The Woke Salaryman - an educational website that talks about practical work-life related topics that not a lot of content creators cover. I highly recommend their content and you should give them a follow if this type of topic interests you.