The Key Elements for Promotability are Rooted in Emotional Intelligence
What executives and upper management know that individual contributors often miss, is that being seen and heard are important to being promoted into leadership. Studies on promotability have confirmed what other studies have already established, that emotional intelligence—particularly emotional awareness—is essential for promotability and career advancement. The other three traits you need to demonstrate in a workplace to be seen as ripe for promotion are Strategic Thinking, Thought Leadership, and Executive Presence. All of these are leadership tools that act as indicators for advancing into higher ranks.
It is a myth to assume you will progress in your career if you are good at you job. Technical prowess is what we reward in school, and it’s natural to assume that technical expertise will continue to be the strongest indicator of performance. But it’s not.
In fact, if you are really good at your job and take pride in developing your expertise, you can make yourself too valuable to promote. If you just keep your head down and work hard to complete everything that is thrown your way, you’re probably so productive that no will want to lose you.
We have all seen people who don’t seem very productive get promoted. Often, they are the ones you see chatting in the halls, going out for lunches or after-work drinks, holding forth at meetings in areas where they don’t have any special expertise. For some people, it’s baffling.
Emotional Awareness
Career advancement depends on getting noticed for the right things. A high degree of awareness of your own emotions as well as others’ emotions is critical to being able to create the conditions for high performance. When your team is getting above average results, you will get noticed for the right things.
Emotional awareness helps you remain calm and confident, even in difficult situations. Awareness of others’ emotions helps you build the empathy, safety, and recognition necessary to create an environment to engage and inspire others.
Consider the following statistics:
- Among leaders with high emotional awareness, 92% have teams that are high performing.
- Among leaders with low emotional awareness, 78% have teams that report a negative work climate.
- Studies of priests, doctors, and IT professionals all show that that high emotional awareness and emotional intelligence predict leadership effectiveness.
Studies also find that people with high emotional awareness typically demonstrate high levels of other emotional intelligence skills like empathy, conflict resolution, and inspiration—all behaviors that are a factor in promotions.
Strategic Thinking and Thought Leadership Build Promotability
Beyond emotional awareness, you need to be able to think strategically to rise into leadership ranks. Strategic thinking is based on how your boss views your insightfulness, analytical skills, and ability to synthesize data from diverse sources.
Being good at your job is the starting point for being able to think strategically and propose thoughtful solutions or initiatives. Now you have to begin to communicate how your areas of expertise help the organization. Thought leadership requires insight and analytics, but also flexibility and innovation. To show you have these skills, others need to perceive you as someone who can solve problems, improve performance, and manage people as well as manage uncertain situations.
Once you have a good idea, whether it’s about how to handle a problem or how to grow the organization, strategic thinking and thought leadership both involve navigating a host of personalities. You need to be able to speak up in the right way at the right time in order to be heard. That involves, of course, emotional awareness of those around you. It also involves your own level of self-confidence.
Most importantly, it means getting assertiveness just right. Assertiveness is about valuing your own rights and opinions equally with others. The secret is finding that middle point between too strong and too weak. Come in too strong and others will find you socially insufferable. Come in too soft and everyone will see you as ineffectual and weak. Dialing assertiveness in just right is crucial as a promotability factor in being seen as an effective strategic partner.
Strategic thinking and thought leadership are leadership tools that demonstrate you have the ability to influence others and take on more responsibility. In other words, they are signs that you’re ready to be promoted.
Executive Presence
We all know the feeling that comes over a group when senior executives walk into a room. They bring an aura of importance, confidence, and gravitas that initiates an attentive hush in others. They seem to be able to communicate with a look. There’s usually no question as to whether they are silencing you, listening to you, or waiting patiently so they can move the conversation forward again.
Executive presence begins with self-confidence, a fundamental emotional intelligence skill that comes from understanding and accepting yourself, your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Confident leaders know what they are not good at, and so they build teams that supply the necessary talent for success and don’t get triggered when they come up against what they don’t know.
The body language of a leader is unmistakable. Leaders who are seen as important know how to dress and hold themselves in a way that commands respect. Each industry has its own standards and style for what a leader looks like. A Hollywood producer is going to look, speak, and dress differently than a New York banker. Leaders develop power cues like standing with square shoulders and open hands, taking the seat of power in a room, and making eye contact with the people around them to constantly gauge how others are reacting.
It’s a common assumption that a leader’s gravitas emanates from within, from taking themselves seriously, but actually, it is really based on a finely tuned awareness of others. Leaders listen intently to distill the best ideas coming from their team. They guide a conversation, pulling it back when it goes astray, digging deeper when important issues are raised. When they have gathered the wisdom of their team, they are decisive and communicate clearly the direction the team is to take. Good leaders listen more than they speak and get the last word. They show insight and sensitivity to the discussion that has gone before and point the way forward.
Three Steps to Make Yourself Promotable
If you are looking to build your promotability, start with these three steps:
- Start with building your emotional awareness. That means, being aware of how you feel throughout the day as well as being aware of what others are feeling around you. Can you identify what just made you feel happy, or important, or diminished? Can you figure out what made other people react? Being able to connect feelings to the events that gave rise to them is the basis for emotional awareness.
- Start speaking up more strategically. Whether it’s in meetings or in one-on-ones with your boss, think ahead to the issues that are likely to come up. What ideas can you bring that can contribute value to the conversation? You don’t have to solve every problem, and you shouldn’t try. Instead of telling people how you would do it, try to shed some light on the issue to influence how others think. Offer options. Find ways to demonstrate the value of your particular expertise, experience, or opinion helps others shift thinking around the problem so that the team can work together on finding a solution.
- Pay attention to body language. Watch the leaders in your organization. How do they dress? How do they walk? Where do they sit? How do they demonstrate that they are listening? After watching them carefully, consider what you learn from them and how you can find your own personal leadership body style. How you dress and how you walk into a room should be authentic to you. Figure out what makes you feel more confident and important by watching and learning from others.
Remember, learning emotional intelligence skills takes time. If you try something and it doesn’t work, try something else. If something does get you noticed, do more of it. Over time, if you dedicate yourself to emotional awareness, thinking strategically, asserting yourself appropriately, and developing more confident body language, you will see others begin to react to you differently.