Getting the news that you've been passed over for a promotion can be dis-heartening and humiliating experience and leave you with a bruised ego. But understanding why you didn't get a promotion is the first step in getting the next one.
Below are some of the reasons given by executives and managers for not giving someone a promotion.
1. You lack the necessary skills needed for the role
Often people feel that they have the necessary skills to do the job above them. However, this may not always be the case. Do you actually know and understand what the next person in your chain of command does at work? Do you have the same professional skill set as them?
The best way to get ahead and win promotion is find out what this job fully entails. Ask questions, seek out answers, research the role and once you fully understand what is expected of someone in this role seek out your boss and ask them what you need to do to get promoted.
2. You lack the soft skills to do the job
Soft skills refer to those skills that everyone who manages people needs - people skills, communication skills, diplmacy and conflict negotiation. These skills will be needed time and time again at work as people are all different and so have different needs. Being able to managing people is perhaps the hardest part of the job and without those skills you will always failed to win the management promotion you want.
In order to win promotion you'll need to develop your soft skills and make them visible to your manager. This may mean mentoring a new member of staff, leading presentations on the value of communication and inter-personal skills in the workplace or simply empathising with your colleagues over a number of issues.
3. You lack professionalism
In order to be promoted you need to be professional. If you are constantly playing the fool, being negative about your job or company, gossiping and pontificating bad feelings to co-workers or simply not running your department well, a lack of professionalism is a sure fire way not to win promotion.
Managers and executives need to feel like you can run the shop in their absence, that you're positive, you're heavily invested in your role at work and you want the company to prosper. All these things require a professional air about yourself.
4. Not taking the initiative
It is important for your own career a well of the health of your company that you don't just see problems but that you can see the solution to fix them. Taking the initiative is one way to demonstrate that you can communicate issues, work with colleagues to fix the issues and have a real positive change in your organisation. And if the solution saves money or makes money or increases the productivity of the company this will be noticed by your organisation managers and leaders.
5. You don't take feedback on board
Constructive feedback is the cornerstone of elf-development. Someone telling you that you are good at this, but are weak at that may bruise your ego but highlighting it can enable you to reflect and improve your weaknesses to make them strengths.
In interviews people like to hear that you could top your weaknesses and that you worked hard to change. This shows you're a person who can take other people's opinions on board and that you're able to learn lessons from it in order to improve.
