Chris, a highly successful and well-loved Director with solid business results, was a great guy with a lot of bottled up frustration.  He rightly felt he was due for a promotion to VP, but it wasn’t happening.  He saw other Directors around him getting promoted which added to his dismay.

During a one-on-one with his boss, Chris let him know he would like to be promoted to VP. He said: “I think I’ve been doing a really good job for a long time as Director and I’m ready for the next step which would be a VP role.”

The boss agreed Chris had been doing stellar work and could at some point be promoted to VP. But the timing wasn’t right, the organization was going through another re-org, they should let the dust settle before initiating anything, etc., etc., etc.  

That particular re-org led to another, and to another and it was eight months later that Chris asked his boss again when the timing would be right. The boss said he, “hoped it would be soon but not right now.”

Chris was now looking outside the organization because he didn’t feel there were opportunities internally.  He was pretty unhappy being stuck in a role he had mastered with a boss he felt didn’t support his career development.

But Chris’s boss wasn’t the one stopping the promotion, Chris was.

The funny thing is that no one actually TOLD Chris to stop communicating.  He had been told to stop so many times in the past, that now he stopped himself.  He didn’t need to be told.

Chris was suffering from too much obedience.

Obeying this self-imposed injunction severely restricted his boss’s ability to understand what was really happening with Chris.  If your viewpoint is not understood, the chances of the other person doing what you want are severely limited.

Unfortunately, Chris is not alone.  People in large corporations obey unwritten laws about what they can say, how much to say and to whom.

They shut down too fast.

This communication obedience training starts way back in school.  I never did well with it. We were threatened with trouble if we talked to other students or voiced our opinions to teachers.  I always talked to other students and let teachers know what I was thinking.  Teachers tried to make me stop, but they didn’t get anywhere with me.  

The problem with obedience is it takes away your freedom.  And when you give away your freedom, you give away your choices.

I taught Chris how to speak up to his boss about his promotion to VP.  Not in a disobedient fashion, but politely, in a way that would be interesting and valuable to his boss.  Initially Chris had a million reasons why he shouldn’t bring up the subject again, but once he learned how, he did it with confidence.

In the next one-on-one with his boss, Chris spoke up and filled the vacuum of missing information the boss had about why and how much Chris deserved the promotion, what it meant to him and how it would benefit the organization.  The boss was leaning forward in his chair the whole time.  His reaction was, “Wow! We should really get on this! I don’t think we should wait any longer. We need to get that promotion now.”

Chris spoke up to several more key individuals and suddenly he had team of champions doing the work of getting him promoted.

And now he’s enjoying his VP role.

Your career is never up to “them”.  It is always and only up to you.

Never allow someone else to stop you from communicating.  You need to speak up to be understood.  The question is never whether or not to speak up, the question is how to do it so you are truly heard.

Where have you stopped your own forward progress? Are you ready to do something about it?

Be the cause!