Ella was surprised by how fast she made it to Senior Director of a gigantic multinational corporation. From there, however, Ella discovered how hard it is to get promoted from Senior Director to VP. So now she was stuck at that level…and had been for far too long. She wanted to make that leap and contacted me for help.
The day Martin stopped giving his power away
How to tell a VP they’re arrogant
The January antidote to reality
When looking at the outcome you want, don’t let reality poison your dreams. Let your imagination fly limitlessly, independent of what the world tells you is possible.
Causative communication is about being able to make whatever outcome you want happen.
How to sabotage your own promotion
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!
The magic of moving beyond effective communication
Someone I highly respect asked me last week what I stand for. I realized it was an exceedingly good question and something I had never written about before.
I stand for something you don’t hear talked about in large corporations.
Yet it’s actually what makes me valuable to the people I serve.
I stand for beautiful communication. In large corporations, where I mostly work, professionals and executives are always talking to me about being effective, compelling, inspiring. Mostly about being effective.
The truth is that I find being effective rather easy and quite boring. Someone I coach struggles to get promoted. Then, after coaching, communicates effectively and makes it from Senior Director to VP. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting.
That’s the reason why, when I’m coaching someone, I won’t stop after helping them be effective. Being effective is a level they do need to hit, but I don’t stop there. And it turns out they are always happy I don’t.
Let me give you an example. This past week I was coaching a woman who is responsible for billions of dollars for her organization. Brilliant woman. She’s new to the role and struggles with the leadership team she’s a part of. I’m reluctant to mention that it’s a male-dominated team because the fact they’re men is not really the issue. Her communication skills are. But you get the picture.
I coached her until she was effective in getting her point across and persuading. She was quite happy.
But I continued to coach her until her communication reached a level where it became beautiful. When she communicates at this level, she takes your breath away. Yes, she’s effective. But she is also extraordinarily beautiful, graceful and elegant. Not just physically, but in her presence.
Her very being, and in the incredible quality of her communication is a demonstration of beauty.
I coached another executive on giving presentations to difficult audiences. He went from being overly defensive and somewhat forceful to being effective. It was good.
But I didn’t stop there. I continued to coach him until he tapped into something inside him that made his communication extraordinary. It’s funny to use the word beautiful when you’re describing a man, but his communication was beautiful in the way that Martin Luther King‘s I have a dream speech was beautiful.
It wasn’t the words that became beautiful. It was his arresting connection with the audience and HOW the words were spoken.
And, yes, he became handsome.
To me causative communication is about a whole lot more than just being effective.
Inside each person resides an ability to communicate at a level that is WAY beyond effective.
Yes, being effective is a milestone. But for me it’s not an end goal. It’s not enough. I coach until the natural artistry and aesthetic within each person emerges.
Their communication becomes spontaneous. They’re not thinking about it. It’s just coming out of them. It’s pure. They’re in a zone where they can’t help but be amazing.
They’re now capable of creating an extraordinary relationship, whether it’s with one person or 10,000.
If a person is willing to do the work, that level of aesthetic is always there to be found.
Beautiful communication is inspiring. It is compelling. It is persuasive. It creates extraordinary leadership.
So here’s the message:
Everything you want is a byproduct of the ability to communicate beautifully.
If you want to persuade, create an effective team, get promoted, lead, inspire, give a great presentation, get a raise, negotiate a good deal, transform your organization or get your teenager to talk to you…
They’re all byproducts of extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful communication.
It creates the kind of conversation or presentation where you say, “Wow! That was beautiful!”
If this is the type of communication that you want to experience, then you are in the right place to discover how to do it.
This is what I stand for: serving as a guide for you to transform your communication into something extraordinarily beautiful.
Be the cause!
The “glance” with a seven-figure price tag
Marcus had been talking to his boss about a promotion to VP for quite a while without getting any closer. Marcus found the discussions stressful and the endless waiting frustrating, which is why he came to my workshop on Causative Communication.
The mistake Marcus was making is the same one I’ve seen MANY people make: He thought the decision (if and when to promote him) was not in his hands. He thought it was up to the people doing the promoting.
Most people in Marcus’ situation believe they can present their case, but that after that, they’re powerless. They have to sit back and wait while the “powers that be” decide.
What they don’t realize is that those making the decision are just reflecting you back to yourself.
It’s very much like an ice-skating competition. If you skate perfectly, the judges HAVE to give you a 10. If you stumble at the beginning or if you are less than flawless, they’re forced to give you a lesser score.
All the judges are doing is reflecting back the skater.
It’s actually entirely up to you what happens. Can you believe that?
Most people experience stress when talking about why they should get promoted. They’re uncomfortable. Their minds are full of doubt. Their communication is full of strain.
The decision that comes back is simply a reflection of this.
This is true in all your communication, not just situations where you want a promotion. The reaction you see from the other person is a reflection of how well you’re dealing with the situation.
When your communication is flawless, there’s a transformation that happens in the other person, even if they’re a “judge” of you. They can’t help but give you a “10” and decide accordingly.
It’s the same thing when communicating about a promotion.
If you feel powerless about the outcome, that will be reflected back to you. The reflection will show powerlessness.
If you feel the outcome is in “their” hands, you will come across as someone who does not deserve a promotion. Especially if you’re trying to get promoted to the higher levels like VP and above.
The decision you receive will be a reflection of your own powerlessness.
You don’t have to work hard to get the outcome you want. You simply have to communicate with clarity, certainty and intention.
Many people confuse these three things with conviction. Conviction is how much you believe in something.
Your promotion does not at all depend on how much you believe you deserve it. If it did, there would be no issue, you’d have it.
Many people go into these conversations with the idea they need to convince the other person to achieve the outcome they want. But the harder you try to convince someone that you deserve something, the more powerless you seem. In terms of getting a promotion, this “convincing” approach is the kiss of death.
It’s the difference between communicating for the purpose of getting them to agree with you (which will always make you seem UNcausative), and communicating for the purpose of real understanding (which will always make you powerful.)
One of the biggest mistakes people make when wanting a promotion is talking about why they deserve the promotion. This makes you come across as imploring, anxious, in need.
It’s not a question of what you deserve. It’s a question of where you belong.
When you communicate that you belong at the VP level with complete clarity, complete intention to be understood, and complete certainty that you will be fully understood, you come across like the promotion is the only right course of action, no question about it.
The decision that comes back will reflect that.
Marcus ended months of circular conversations by doing just what I described to you. And wouldn’t you know it, “they” made the decision to promote him to VP within hours, not weeks or months.
Be the cause!
Mirror, mirror on the wall, will I get promoted today, at all?
Marcus had been talking to his boss about a promotion to VP for quite a while without getting any closer. Marcus found the discussions stressful and the endless waiting frustrating, which is why he came to my workshop on Causative Communication.
The mistake Marcus was making is the same one I’ve seen MANY people make: He thought the decision (if and when to promote him) was not in his hands. He thought it was up to the people doing the promoting.
Most people in Marcus’ situation believe they can present their case, but that after that, they’re powerless. They have to sit back and wait while the “powers that be” decide.
What they don’t realize is that those making the decision are just reflecting you back to yourself.
It’s very much like an ice-skating competition. If you skate perfectly, the judges HAVE to give you a 10. If you stumble at the beginning or if you are less than flawless, they’re forced to give you a lesser score.
All the judges are doing is reflecting back the skater.
It’s actually entirely up to you what happens. Can you believe that?
Most people experience stress when talking about why they should get promoted. They’re uncomfortable. Their minds are full of doubt. Their communication is full of strain.
The decision that comes back is simply a reflection of this.
This is true in all your communication, not just situations where you want a promotion. The reaction you see from the other person is a reflection of how well you’re dealing with the situation.
When your communication is flawless, there’s a transformation that happens in the other person, even if they’re a “judge” of you. They can’t help but give you a “10” and decide accordingly.
It’s the same thing when communicating about a promotion.
If you feel powerless about the outcome, that will be reflected back to you. The reflection will show powerlessness.
If you feel the outcome is in “their” hands, you will come across as someone who does not deserve a promotion. Especially if you’re trying to get promoted to the higher levels like VP and above.
The decision you receive will be a reflection of your own powerlessness.
You don’t have to work hard to get the outcome you want. You simply have to communicate with clarity, certainty and intention.
Many people confuse these three things with conviction. Conviction is how much you believe in something.
Your promotion does not at all depend on how much you believe you deserve it. If it did, there would be no issue, you’d have it.
Many people go into these conversations with the idea they need to convince the other person to achieve the outcome they want. But the harder you try to convince someone that you deserve something, the more powerless you seem. In terms of getting a promotion, this “convincing” approach is the kiss of death.
It’s the difference between communicating for the purpose of getting them to agree with you (which will always make you seem UNcausative), and communicating for the purpose of real understanding (which will always make you powerful.)
One of the biggest mistakes people make when wanting a promotion is talking about why they deserve the promotion. This makes you come across as imploring, anxious, in need.
It’s not a question of what you deserve. It’s a question of where you belong.
When you communicate that you belong at the VP level with complete clarity, complete intention to be understood, and complete certainty that you will be fully understood, you come across like the promotion is the only right course of action, no question about it.
The decision that comes back will reflect that.
Marcus ended months of circular conversations by doing just what I described to you. And wouldn’t you know it, “they” made the decision to promote him to VP within hours, not weeks or months.
Be the cause!
How communicating like an Entrepreneur will get you promoted
I’ve worked with and have friends who are successful entrepreneurs. They’ve started from scratch and made millions. What they have in common is, they know from experience that how far they get and how fast they get there depends on 2 things. The 1st is contributing something of great value that other people want. The 2nd is communicating about it so it’s widely known.
They believe their destiny is in their hands. They have tremendous initiative when it comes to creating value and letting the whole world know about it.
When you ask them what it is they’ve created and why it’s good, they don’t shut up. They’ll tell you AND everyone else about it, including total strangers.
The other thing they have in common is they don’t wait. For anything. For anyone. They’re always looking for what they can do to move things forward. They’re always looking for the next person to talk to.
And so, they talk to MANY people about the value they create. They know this high level of communication keeps them alive.
I recently gave a talk at a conference on the power of truly effective communication. A woman who works in a large corporation came up to me and said, “I may want to come to you for coaching. I want to get promoted to VP.”
I asked her what she was doing to make that happen and she said, “I’m waiting for my boss to talk to his boss.”
I ran into her about a week later and asked how it was going. She said, “My boss talked to his boss. I'm waiting to hear, they haven't made a decision yet.”
I asked her what was happening during this time and she said she didn’t know. I asked her what she was doing to move it forward and she said, “I’m focusing on doing a great job on my regular job, and periodically I ask my boss about it. But I don’t want to bug him too much.”
About 2 weeks later she told me, “They were supposed to get back to me last week but I haven't heard anything yet. I don’t really know what’s happening.”
The difference between her and the successful entrepreneurs I know is, she’s waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
The dictionary defines “waiting” as “to halt progress, stay in place, and remain inactive until something happens”.
As far as I know, I haven't run into anyone who LIKES waiting. It drains your spirit, drains your morale, drains your optimism.
What she was doing is what I’ve seen many people who work in large corporations do that holds them back. They think they’ve done all they can, said all they can say, and now their initiative is REPLACED by waiting. They communicate once or twice about what they want to 1 or 2 people and then “leave the decision up to them”. They put their destiny in the hands of others. They stop communicating about it. And they wait. And hope.
This is the opposite of being causative and will very likely make you feel demoralized if you do it.
Communicating with the mindset of an entrepreneur, even if you work in a large corporation, can lift you out of this crazy waiting and give you the broad visibility and recognition you need to take your career to the next level.
It takes this mindset and also skill to keep the conversation going, to continue to create interest, to build enthusiasm from scratch for what you want. It takes intention, it takes knowing what to say and how to say it, it takes finesse.
One of my clients happens to also be one of my favorite entrepreneurs. Mary Clark Bartlett (picture above) is the CEO and Founder of The Epicurean Group, which provides fresh, local, organic, seasonal, socially responsible meals to corporations and private school campuses. This woman knows food, she knows how to run an outstanding business and how to make customers happy. She’s won many business and culinary awards, has over 400 employees and $30+ million in managed revenue. She started from scratch.
By the time Mary is done talking to you about their barbecued grass-fed beef brisket with sweet red onions served with old-fashioned potato salad, baked Mayacoba beans and homemade dill pickles, you are dizzy with hunger. She makes it sound irresistibly delicious, you simply feel you must have some, and immediately, please.
I very rarely hear anyone in large corporations talk about their own creations or their value that way. I've prepared many people for successful promotions and job interviews. When they first talk about themselves, it's unbelievably dry, uninspiring and corporate-sounding.
This isn't true about them as people or about their work, they are NOT dry or uninspiring. Quite the opposite! It's only true about how they DESCRIBE their work and themselves. And so their potential value isn’t effectively communicated.
If you really want your career to move fast, create the same level of enthusiasm for yourself and your work that Mary creates for her gorgeous Strawberry Dream Cake with creamy mascarpone cheese frosting, which is even more amazing when you slice into it, revealing rows of perfect strawberries.
I’ve often seen people in large corporations who don't feel they have the same freedom to communicate that an entrepreneur has. This belief is not true, it's an extremely limiting idea and it’s a career-killer.
Entrepreneurs know if they wait for permission to speak, they’ll be bankrupt in no time.
You can speak up as often as you like, provided you do it in a way that makes your communication always welcome. So when you show up, you are welcomed, not endured or tolerated.
It also helps you when you communicate effectively, in a way that makes your value real, creates enthusiasm about you, and inspires others about your vision of the future.
When you do that, don't be surprised if your career takes off like a rocket. I won’t be!
Just as I wasn’t surprised when the woman at the beginning of this newsletter changed her strategy, from waiting to Causative Communication. After watching her communicate her vision and value broadly and effectively, I wasn’t surprised when she received support for her promotion from MANY sources, nor when she went out to celebrate her big promotion and new future with her husband.
And, even if you don’t get the promotion or new job right away, at least you’ll see progress. You can even apply this to email. Here’s an example from someone I helped. He wrote me: “I’ve been emailing my boss (that I never see) more frequently with even my small accomplishments. After only doing this for 3 weeks, my boss is already talking about my work with her boss!”
The power to transform any situation or any person begins with your ability to assume a causative role in your communications.
Be the cause!
How to Get Promoted from Director to VP - Executive Insight
If you're looking to get promoted from Director to VP, this powerful checklist will help you prepare to achieve that goal. Inside the checklist, you'll find a strategic yet practical "roadmap" for making sure the way you communicate with others demonstrates your capacity to step into a VP role. If you're looking to develop that "executive presence" aura that successful leaders have, this free checklist will help you do it.
I’ve been helping people get promoted for 30 years. Not to mention land big raises too. It's one of the things I most like about my work - helping people achieve their aspirations and dreams.
Recently I’ve had a wave of Directors and Senior Directors I’ve helped become VPs and I thought I'd share 7 key ingredients with you as, for some reason, getting the VP offer seems to be particularly tricky. These ingredients are necessary for ALL leadership roles, yet it seems it’s too easy to get stuck at Director level.
What do you do when you find yourself hitting an invisible wall you can't seem to get through as you're seeking that next step in your career? You come with your innate strategic abilities, you're able to span your attention and efforts across the organization, and you know you can impact key metrics in a meaningful way. Yet, there's that illusive something that seems to be missing.
But the thing I've seen hold people back more than anything is not these items. It's their ability to communicate.
Let's look at why.
As you progress up the organization, your communication skills increasingly go under a microscope.
By the time you’re CEO, you're not only living with this fact of life, you get used to having the magnification turned up to 400X.
What this means is every flaw you have is magnified. So flaws that you get away with as Manager, or as Director, are the kiss of death once you start looking at VP and above.
The reason for this is obvious. Your communication is now going to impact a lot of people. They’re going to read into everything you say and how you say it. There are consequences to even the slightest attitudes you have. Every communication from you matters. It's your main tool for making things happen.
And, most importantly, at these higher levels, it's your communication, and ability to communicate extremely well even under adverse circumstances, that's going to make or break the success of the organization.
What I've seen with my clients is, one for one, when they dramatically improved some very specific leadership type communication skills needed at the higher levels, the promotions not only happened, they happened ahead of schedule.
This is actually true at all levels of the organization, but especially dramatic for the leap between Director and VP.
So what specific skills cause you to rise above and be chosen? The sooner you start manifesting these skills, the sooner your organization organically selects you to be its next leader. It's inevitable. I've seen too much success with these specific skills to think otherwise.
Let me start with a broad statement about the feedback that many of my clients were given prior to coming to me.
I found it interesting that most of my clients were told they needed to develop “executive presence”.
It's true they did need to develop it, but what was fascinating was they had no clue what it was. To them it was some magical aura that’s invisible but somehow communicates to everyone that you're a leader. It was a total enigma how to do it. They helplessly thought “Some people have it naturally and some (like me) don’t.” They had no idea of the anatomy of this utterly mysterious but vital necessity, which of course put them in a position where there's no hope they’ll ever develop it.
It’s sad that the people giving this feedback don’t themselves know what “executive presence” is. This term is so wildly open to interpretation, it means radically different things to different people. Fortunately, I’ve been helping people develop it for years and can explain, simplify and teach it.
By the way, I love seeing "executive presence" manifest. I feel lucky I get to see it manifest in a very rapid and dramatic fashion in a matter of 3 days because I do “before” and “after” videos of my clients. I just saw it yesterday with my most recent Senior Director. In his first video he looked like a Director. In his final video he looked like an Executive VP and he even had what most people would call an “aura”.
So, let's look at the anatomy of this aura.
And how you can start manifesting these skills now yourself to accelerate your next promotion.
#1. Don't be frazzled.
Frazzled means you come across as overly stressed and somewhat overwhelmed. Being frazzled is an "executive presence" killer. Directors and below are frequently frazzled, with good reason of course. However, while you shouldn’t even do it at the lower levels, you really can’t afford to do it at the upper levels.
When you're a Vice President, if you get frazzled it freaks people out. A Vice President needs to communicate with poise, calm, be in the moment, not have his/her attention ping-ponging all over the place. The best Executives stop all their mental noise and are calm and in the moment. People walk in to meetings with this kind of Executive full of mental noise themselves and find their own noise calms down and vaporizes in the presence of real self-command. It gets calm.
#2. Senior executives have a strong sense of dignity.
This is a big component of “executive presence”. The last 100+ clients that I asked what the word “dignity” means gave me woefully inadequate or incorrect definitions for it. This is a very important word to know. “Dignity” is the sense of being worthy of esteem and honor. Many of my clients try hard to please others, look to others for approval, let others determine their value, they lose their own sense of worth. Some of them have been hammered by bad feedback and coaching and don’t have a strong sense of their own value. They will say, "I do good work", but that is a far cry from a robust sense of dignity. Dignity radiates from within. It’s not the same as confidence. It’s definitely not arrogance which rubs everyone the wrong way. Dignity is your own sense of being worthy. It's a skill to be able to communicate with dignity. It can be developed. It gives you an aura. It’s vital in the skill set of a senior executive.
#3. Every successful senior executive I’ve seen or worked with communicates with a superior level of intention.
Intention is not effort, it’s not putting energy into it, it's not trying hard. Intention is senior to effort. It commands attention and understanding. Many people communicate with intent. Executives do it at a superior level. It's the difference between watching someone play tennis on weekends or a champion professional. The amateur doesn’t have the skills to win at the same level, no matter how hard they try or how positive their attitude. This level of communication penetrates, inspires, makes things happen. It is true leadership level communication.
#4. Give your undivided attention to the person who's talking to you.
Look into their eyes, both when you're speaking as well as listening. When you’re on the phone, make the world go away, tune in and feel the presence of the other person fully.
Directors and below have so much going on, they’re frequently trying to multitask. With those executives who I would say are very noteworthy, I hear the people around them say, “Wow, when you talk with him/her you feel like you're the only person in the world.” Why is this important? Because people want to be led by someone who makes them feel that way. How you make people feel has everything to do with whether not they want you to lead them.
I recently had someone email me this about his new VP: “I love him! I get 100% of his focus. I feel fantastic talking to him. He’s not rushed. I feel like an eternity has gone by, I hang up the phone and realize it was a 12 minute conversation. That kind of impact in 12 minutes! WOW!”
#5. You need the ability to make deep human connections, to build a warm rapport with anyone.
Your ability to make a deep and real human connection determines how much trust you will enjoy. There's a world of difference between "talking" and making a deep connection, and the difference will have a big impact on your career: Getting others to open up and your ability to listen play a big part in this. I have worked with many people who are trustworthy, but they didn’t know how to make deep connections and people didn't trust them. Once they learned how to make that deep connection, trust grew rapidly. Trust is the basis of the real, solid cooperation you’ll need.
#6. You need to communicate so well that you have the ability to make resistance and conflict evaporate.
The reason for this is because unhandled conflict in the organization will escalate to your level. By the time it gets to you, no one below you has been able to handle it - it will be up to you to make conflict go away.
Of course, the best thing you can do is prevent conflict in the first place. Conflict can almost always be prevented with outstanding communication. Disagreement is a natural part of life when you’re dealing with many viewpoints, but there’s absolutely no reason it needs to turn into conflict. I have seen over and over with clients that conflict is never a result of the issues, it is always a result of communication and understanding breaking down.
While we experience a lot of successful communication, there is nothing in this world that breaks down faster, or with more frequency, than communication …. nothing. As advanced as we are as a civilization, as much communication technology as we have at our fingertips, as breathtaking are our opportunities to communicate to each other and to the world, we still experience communication breakdowns daily, both at work and at home, on a personal, organizational and even international level. You need to be able to rapidly repair it when it breaks.
And when you’re high up in the organization, you’re dealing with so many people, so many multiple viewpoints, so many realities, it becomes important that you can manage all of them simultaneously. It kills your organization if you don't.
Start to demonstrate that conflict and resistance do not happen around you, and that when they do, you confront it head on and make them evaporate and get everything rapidly moving forward, and the people in power will naturally put you in a leadership role very quickly because managing communication, other people's perceptions, realities, expectations, frustrations is an enormous part of a leader's job.
#7. An unspoken question they’ll ask about you before they decide to promote you is, “Will the organization be happy under him/her?” This is another way of asking, “How good are your communication skills? Are they at a leadership and executive level?”
It takes outrageously great communication skill to not only communicate well with the person in front of you, but to do it so well that it carries through the rest of the organization.
If you start demonstrating these skills now, I see a promotion in your future regardless of where you are in the organization.
These skills are rare. They will accelerate and raise the trajectory of your career and your income. You’ll feel like this client who recently emailed me:
“I am convinced that the skills I learned have been the biggest factors in changing the trajectory of my career. There is no doubt about it. It makes me smile to compare conversations I had before, where they labeled me as a “strong practitioner” to the daily interactions I have now with senior executives who promoted me 3X in 2 years and treat me like a “high level leader”. I was the only person out of the 500+ of us to receive this many promotions and this particular level of promotion. It is heady stuff and very exciting.”
Get the "Becoming a VP" Checklist
If you're looking to get promoted from Director to VP, this powerful checklist will help you prepare to achieve that goal. Inside the checklist, you'll find a strategic yet practical "roadmap" for making sure the way you communicate with others demonstrates your capacity to step into a VP role. If you're looking to develop that "executive presence" aura that successful leaders have, this free checklist will help you do it.