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Get Promoted Faster And Earn More
Okay! everything feels and looks normal as you have gone past the job search phase, the interview phase, the onboarding phase and the first few months of probation where you had to prove your mettle. You probably were able to secure your firm’s trust and confidence in your ability to perform and deliver. But soon enough, life happens and you begin an unexplainable quest for an upgrade where you begin seeking ways to get promoted faster at work and paid some more.
While others find it difficult directly asking for a raise immediately but choose to take on more responsibilities to justify future request to get paid more and promoted faster; others may seek secondary avenues within the firm to make some extra income or establish a sort of entrepreneurial venture to boost this angle of things. From whichever lens we choose to see from, these are ideal craves for advancement and need to leave zones of comfort and sometimes boredom into that of productivity and growth.
This is only natural as it remains that as humans, we are wired to grow, advance, expand or gradually fade away once we stop applying ourselves and our inherent potentials. As humans (although activation is needed in certain instances), our system is preconfigured to set and hit targets, achieve set goals and set even tougher ones. The moment we slack, we initialize a sort of regressive dying process which is why some speak of depression, hopelessness and the likes. The question then is, considering contemporary issues and challenges around securing promotion at work, how do you effectively manoeuvre your way around this complex minefield? i.e the complexities of getting promoted faster and earning bigger salaries, bonuses and benefits.
Some of our favorite authors narrow the hows to one word which is ‘value’. Consistently adding value to the company’s bottom line, helping them expand along the lines of networks and connects, saving operational costs, reporting malpractices and abuses – sort of internal control measures, advancing as a person and as a brand ambassador representing your firm. These and an array of other contributions your boss or superiors may be observing could accumulate speedily towards forcing you up the corporate ladder.
On this piece, we did not plan on boring you with a lot of information which is why we have resolved to go with Brain Tracy’s most potent 21 steps to getting ahead in your career. Succinctly put, we will share nuggets which should help you as an employee exit your comfort zone into the fastlane where challenges and performance helps you get paid more and promoted faster. So, let’s jump right into exploring 21 best steps to advance speedily in your chosen career path.
Step 1: What Job Should You Choose Exactly To Get Promoted Faster?
If you could begin with a dream or wish list where you had no limitations and all things were possible – a world where you had all the experiences, expertise, connection, money, friends, support and absolutely every requirement needed to grow and advance speedily; what specific type of job would you choose.
While in this thought mode, prudency demands you remain practical and true to yourself as you have to take immediate measures to realizing that ideal dream or at least moving along that career pathway until you eventually land at the exact position you dream of. The secret is not to get stuck in this fantasy dream or wishlist mode but to glean your ideal future from here followed closely by immediate proactive steps towards achieving this dream as you are responsible for your successes or failures. So get started, do something, start somewhere once you have visualized your ideal answer. It will all come together at the end.
Step 2: Pick The Right Company
In an era where industries are declining in economic importance while others are booming and offering growth opportunities, you will have to be extra careful not to be stuck in a company or an industry with limited growth potentials and a declining economic relevance. This sort of anomaly negatively affects the take home packages of even the management staff and top performers. Do some research online, place some calls, see the papers or listen to the news, anything to catch a glimpse of the best and worst performing industries in your country over a time period, maybe a decade.
Once you have a good grasp of this area, pick and choose best performing companies/ industries and some good ones performing a bit over the moderate level. Then, pick the ones you are attracted to, the ones often with international connections and growth opportunities inclusive of a big fat paycheck. Identify people who are in the company you desire and connect with them. One of the best platforms to easily achieve this is on LinkedIn. There, you find employees and employers within specific companies and industries. Ask them what sort of skills and competencies are required to secure a perfect job with their firm. Once told, use this information to your advantage. Get the required skills and competencies, then pick and apply to a few firms you are passionate about.
Step 3: Go With The Right Boss
Choosing the right boss is one key decision that will greatly impact your career, catalyze your getting promoted faster and expedite improvement with your take home package. One easy way to get in the world of your potential boss is to ask questions, lots of questions. These questions will quickly offer clues on your boss’s temperament, work ethic, beliefs, discipline, expectations, passion, vision and everything needed to properly blend with your boss.
Once you are done visualizing your ideal boss maybe from bench-marking, comparing, contrasting and compiling the best qualities of bosses you have observed and experienced in the past, take the initiative to work on improving communication with your boss for a smoother work relationship. Here, you could have talks around what motivates you to work, work time agreements, feedback moments and other relevant ramifications of work needed to expedite productivity.
Step 4: Develop A Positive Attitude To Get Promoted Faster
Growing a positive attitude does not come easy and overnight. It takes a conscious effort to groom an optimistic personality at work and in life. The conscious effort stops you from complaining, condemning, finding faults, judging and destructively criticizing. If you have a thing for controlling, manipulating, studying people and observing their routines – then being bored and concerned with things outside your immediate scope of concern, you will have to redress your steps if your aim is to positively nurture yourself to be an optimistic and an attractive person.
Take a 28 days positive mental attitude diet at work where you consciously choose to stick to and practice being positive and constructive all day. At the end of 28 days, you will find that the cleansing exercise would have become a habit. A set of positive habits can become assets for success in life and in getting promoted faster at work.
Step 5: Create A Successful Image
Most people are highly visual; they therefore judge you by the way you look on the outside, the same way you judge them
The way you dress is the way you are addressed is not just a sentence, it is a system by which a lot of people are evaluated and nominated for either promotion or demotion. In society, the first impression you make of a person is often from his/her first appearance, followed by non-verbal communication cues. It is important that you look the part if you want to be successful, accepted and respected in your chosen career path. Appropriate official dress and proper body grooming are essential for getting promoted faster and receiving huge salary packs and other benefits.
Decide this moment that you are going to change your wardrobe and body appearance to reflect success and a CEO image you are probably gunning for. If you are clueless as to how you should look, copy high performers, thought leaders or successful people in your company or industry. You could dress for work everyday as though you were going for an interview or probably surf the web to get ideas you will need to switch your appearance up regularly.
Whatever approach you decide to stick with, ensure you are consistent with the success message you are trying to pass across. This will work in your favour as your superiors will notice the changes and nominate you in time for a promotion which comes with a pay raise.
Step 6: Arrive One Hour Early, Work Harder and Stay At Least One Hour Overtime
Nothing endears an employee to an employer more than hard work, seriousness, dedication, over performance and foresight. Grow a strict commitment to hard work and observe as you gain the attention of important people in your workplace. Once you gain a reputation as the hard worker, the sky is your steppingstone. A great way to get started at this is to arrive for work one hour earlier, work consistently and harder than anyone else, then stay an extra hour to fix some more things. You may find that in doing this, you unintentionally take on more responsibilities.
Don’t worry about this. Rather, focus on spurning results and see how you begin to make wave then nominated for a promotion. A little motivation to stay consistent at this is to see yourself as though you were in competition to win an award for the best and highest performing worker at your firm. Once you begin to see things from this angle, congratulations, you have just been fired up to perform at your peak.
Step 7: Push To The Front
Contrary to popular belief, life is really a contest. This is especially true for work life as everyone else is constantly grinding and finding possible ways to improve self to earn some more and be promoted faster than every other colleague. This is ideally the bitter truth motivational speakers avoid. The race is on and your duty and ideal aim is to be at the frontline, be the leader and the much-valued resource person.
To get here, you must always find ways to make yourself more valuable. From experience, people become more valuable by acquiring practical and highly sought skills and certifications, taking on more difficult tasks and delivering on time, helping others achieve team goals, volunteering to undertake tasks important to the boss and vital for the firm’s growth. Relieving your boss’s stress is one sure way to get ahead as you will be exposed to amazing opportunities to increase your value.
Doing these things will help you stand out because not a lot of colleagues will be interested in functioning in this capacity. Ensure you keep in the routine of requesting for a task, delivering on it as quickly as possible and reporting back to your boss then requesting for some more responsibilities. These add up to how you get promoted faster and paid quicker.
Step 8: Ask For A Promotion Or A Pay Raise
Requesting for the things you need is one success principle you cannot ignore if you must get ahead in your career. The secret to getting a positive response is to avoid directly requesting for a raise or to get promoted faster. Rather, you would ideally want to build a case in writing and probably develop it into a brief presentation.
The content of your write up must be developed to reflect clearly a list of jobs and tasks you are undertaking on a daily basis, additional skills and experiences you have garnered since your last increase, clearly explain the financial impact of your delivered tasks on the overall operations of the company and the contributions you are making as a top employee, include extra responsibilities you have been delivering on and the visions or prospects you see or other problems you require an advanced position in the firm to tackle.
Endeavor to be extremely clear in showing your boss on paper or on screen how you have contributed value and plan on contributing more if you are promoted. These values could also be shown along the lines of added revenues, decreased costs, increased outputs or greater efficiencies.
If there are no promotion templates in place clearly stating what benefits your new position should come with, you may need to do a bit of industry research, probably reach out to competition to try and balance out a comfortable work environment and packages fit for your new office. Include these important findings in your documents to the HR department to help the unit gain a clearer picture of standards in line with the industry.
“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them
Step 9: Protect Your Integrity As A Sacred Thing
As straight forward as this may seem, it has never been easy for certain people considering earlier cultivated habits and cultures. To put things in perspective and probably make this a bit more fundamental and clearer; do exactly what you said or promised to do, when you said you will do it, whether it is convenient or not. Be trustworthy and keep an undented reputation for something very positive around your personal and business life. Take a solid stance to be correct, dependable, punctual in issues of time and scheduling. Where you are unable to meet up expectations, ensure your team is aware of this in advance. Succinctly put, to get promoted faster, guarding your integrity must be one of your most important policies.
Step 10: Think About The Future
You become what you think about most of the time. Visualizing the future puts you in the right frame of mind to succeed and illuminates the pathways you need to follow to get there. Brain Tracy advises that you take out a sheet of paper and clearly write down as many details as possible that would describe your perfect job, life, and career sometime in the distant future. Allow your imaginations to roam freely as in step one. Imagine you were writing this list to give to a billionaire who will then grant everything you have on the list. Once done, compare your current situation, level of knowledge and skills with what you would ideally love to do in the future. Whatever changes you would need to effect to get a perfect future, begin effecting the changes today and now. Then watch as you begin making remarkable career advancements and getting promoted faster as compensation for your hardwork and efforts
Step 11: Focus On Your Goals
People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going
The single most important thing about setting, hitting targets and achieving success is clarity. Gaining a clear picture of your destination from start, clarity around who you are, what you believe, what you are or could be really good at and the goals you want to accomplish.
People who have clear written goals and who know exactly what they want to accomplish in each area of their lives achieve vastly more than people who are unsure or unclear about what they want. If you do not know how to arrive at clarity, here are a few steps to help you get there.
Step 1: Decide exactly what you want.
Step 2: Write it down
Step 3: Set a deadline
Step 4: Make a list of tasks you must complete to achieve the goal
Step 5: Organize your list into a time and sequence plan
Step 6: Act on your plan
Step 7: Do something everyday that moves you towards your major goal
Now you have the format. How about you get help immediately applying what you have just learnt. So here goes – Write out ten goals you will achieve in the next twelve months. Write these goals in present tense e.g I earn 500,000 Naira or Dollars per month; written as though the year has passed and your goals have already been achieved. Now pick one goal from your list of ten goals and write that out on another clean sheet of paper. Set a deadline for it and make a written plan to achieve same. Take stock of your plan and resolve to do something everyday to move you towards achieving your goal. This powerful goal setting exercise alone has the potential to change your life.
Step 12: Concentrate On Results To Get Promoted Faster
Results get you promoted faster. On certain commission-based jobs, results can get you paid a lot more than usual. Irrespective of where you are and what industry you are in, identify the things you are currently being paid to do. Be very precise and careful to differentiate between activities and accomplishments, between inputs and the required outputs of your job. Then organize your list by priority, by what is most important and what is less important.
Run this list by your boss and see if your priorities align with his/her perception of what your priorities should be. Stick with and work tirelessly towards delivering on those highest value added activities which is endowed with the potentials to propel your career exponentially forward.
Step 13: Be A Problem Solver
Develop an inert ability to identify problems, potential problems and strategically position yourself to solve problems on a recurrent basis. It could help to ask yourself certain questions which should get your creative and problem-solving wheels grinding. Questions such as:
- What am I trying to do?
- How am I trying to do it?
- Could there be a better way?
- What is the limiting factor or constraint that determines how fast I achieve my most important goals or get important results?
- What one problem if solved would help me the most to move ahead more rapidly in my career?
Pen down your key problems and some corporate problems you have noticed and can tackle. Discipline yourself to write a minimum of twenty answers to these questions. Select one of these answers and act on it immediately. Moving forward, think in terms of solutions for the rest of your career as these automatically place you as a valuable asset at work. This then results in getting promoted faster than any other colleague at work. This strategy on it own works and works even better when meshed with other processes highlighted so far.
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Step 14: Unlock Your Inborn Creativity
Creativity breeds invention and wealth which is why J. Paul Getty said “…the man who comes up with a means for doing or producing almost anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips”
Like step thirteen, living a creative life is living a life of continuously questioning how things can be done better, faster and easier. Occasionally you may go on thought quests in a bid to discover or draft something new and innovative as against the ordinary. Remember, the key in thinking creatively is clarity needed to stimulate more and better ideas around three areas being goals, problems and questions.
To be valued as an asset at work, you must find a way to unlock your most intensely desired career, business and personal goals – then pursue its solution relentlessly. Unlocking creativity around your work life and environment also serves to promote you as a person because you begin to offer innovative solutions, a keen eye for discovering and solving problems before it wreaks havoc in the workplace. Unlock this inner creativity and apply same. Then see how valued you become in the course of work and how fast you get promoted and paid.
Step 15: Put People First In Everything
In the corporate space, networking and connections matter a lot. Who you know, the number of people you know, how highly placed and connected the people you know are, how much they like you, where you know who you know, how you know who you know greatly influences your level of success, your rate of promotion and the size of your pay. Most importantly, the people you know must know you back and like you for doors to be opened for you. The key to becoming a people oriented person is to practice the golden rule in everything you do and this law is – Treat other people the way you would like them to treat you. Offer to help others whenever you find an opportunity. Put others first and be kind, gentle, humble and considerate when dealing with people.
Now take an action goal right away – make a list of all the important people in your work life, both inside and outside the company. Review this list and think about the kinds of results you would like to enjoy in your relationships with these people. Serving and prioritizing other people’s needs before yours is one key way to getting promoted faster as it tells others that you care for them so no matter the height they let you attend, you will never for a second stop being appreciative and kind to them and to humanity.
Step 16: Continuously Invest In Yourself
Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. Be unique and set yourself apart from others by continuously learning and growing at a faster pace than others. Considering the fact that most of the knowledge and skills you have acquired has a shelf life of between two and a half years and five years after which it becomes obsolete and invalid, it is pertinent that you continually upgrade your knowledge and skills at a faster pace to survive and thrive in your career space. Reading books written with your industry or specific knowledge and skill in focus, at least an hour per day will as well help you stay ahead of your competition and away from becoming invalid. Other key ways to learn are audio books, taking seminars and courses wherever you can find them, video tutorials and just about any updated material relevant in your work sphere. The key is to remain hungry for new knowledge. Once you have found it, soak it up like a sponge and then find some more and repeat the process.
Step 17: To Get Promoted Faster, Commit to Excellence
Resolve to give it your best and to be a highly sought-after top performer. Being a top performer is being in the top 10 percent of professionals in your field. At this height in your career, you become hot in demand and top firms definitely begin pestering you and offering mouth watering and juicy offers to win you over to their firm, Here, your life gets better because you had and are putting in the work to be excellent at what you do. Once here you become a better person and feel much better and more comfortable. To commit to excellence is to be determined to deliver on your high impact targets and eventually delivering same on a consistent basis. Set key performance indicators for yourself, milestones and how you measure progress when compared with your past performances. Compare your performance with your standards regularly to track your progress and ultimately strive to improve everyday.
Step 18: Concentrate On The Customer
Before you ask why should I focus on the customer, remember we shared a mindset that you are not employed. You are rather working for yourself and are your own boss which means you must drive productivity and sales which ever way you can. With this in mind, now picture the customer as a god. Anything they say, is right. Remember your boss, your co-workers, colleagues and staff members are all customers as well. You are there or in business to serve them. Once you flout their suggestions and contributions irrespective of the manner of approach, you begin to loose patronage. To achieve any level of success in business, customers must be the central focus. Profits come as a result of retaining satisfied customers who are willing to be upsold because your services are awesome. Begin by identifying your most valued and important customers both inside and outside your business – Draw up a plan to improve on the quality and quantity of your service to them so that they will be more willing to help and support you doing your job and achieving your goals. Once done, take action right away
Step 19: Focus On The Bottom Line To Get Promoted Faster
The lifeblood of any business borders around sales and cash flow. Think deeply on how you could increase sales and cash flow. Securing a consistent source of cash inflow for your firm makes you a valued employee and marks you for a possible promotion once an opening avails itself. Being profit oriented is not being materialistic. It is securing the future of your business. Intensively focusing on the firm’s bottom-line is the key to growth, success and rapid promotion. The very best people in every organization are constantly searching for ways to increase the profitability of their companies. The more direct impact your efforts have on the bottom-line figures of the firm, the more money you make as an asset to the firm.
Begin today to treat your company as if it belongs to you and every single currency either came out of your pocket or went into your pocket. Once in this frame of mind, you ignite the drive and become motivated to find ways to make sales and improve on cash flow.
Step 20: Develop Positive Personal Power
Be a leader and exude positive motivational vibes which tends to attract others to follow you. A natural leader is subtle, caring, attractive, influential, organized and goal oriented. Use the law of indirect effort to develop power and influence in your organization by always looking for ways to help the company achieve its most important goals. Look for ways to help other people succeed in their jobs. Develop positive power: when you use your influence and ability for the good of the company and of the people who work there, others will want you to get promoted faster so you succeed and pull them in that direction as well.
Step 21: Get The Job Done Fast
Action orientation is the most outwardly identifiable quality of a high performing man or woman. Such a person takes initiative and develops a sense of urgency. He/she is constantly in motion, doing things that keep the company moving towards the achievement of its most important goals.
Let’s bear in mind that getting this job done fast enough is one sure way of getting promoted faster than usual. The key to securing a promotion and getting paid faster as well is not really far from applying speed in spurning results. Decide what must be done per day and then get on with finishing it as fast as possible. Avoid procrastination and delays. Once you develop and sustain a fast work pace and tempo, your boss’s gradually groom admiration for what you do and how you do it. Keep at it and you will soon be paid more and promoted faster.
Conclusion
We have briefly brushed through 21 steps to getting promoted faster and becoming a high earner as you progress along your career path. It takes a conscious and consistent effort to be in the fast lane. It takes an even more committed and consistent dedication to stay in the fast lane applying these steps and actively learning on the go. For further reading, please see Forbes, Monster, Glassdoor and Youexec.
Judiciously or consistently deploying the above listed strategies at work will consistently vindicate your efforts and push you into the limelight for promotion. Doing what you do and sticking to your job description has not really gotten a lot of talents to their destination and facilitated their ideal expectation which is to get promoted faster and paid more. But sticking with these steps and building a consistent work life and pattern geared in a positive direction such as the one stated here will get you to your desired goal.