Why Talented People Stop Getting Promoted.
Why managing your time, capacity and priorities becomes more important as your responsibilities grow
People don't get promoted to senior positions if they can’t do their job. They get promoted because they can do their job. They stop getting promoted because, as the scope of their work widens, they become less and less effective at managing their time.
A new recruit to the sales team is given one focus: to sell the company’s products. That’s it. Of course, there will be a little admin and some emails and messages to respond to. But their main focus for the day will be to sell as many products as possible.
Then our new recruit performs brilliantly, their results are outstanding, and they get promoted to sales manager. Their focus is no longer just on sales; it’s now managing a team of salespeople, setting budgets, working with the marketing department, and reporting their team’s sales figures to the higher-ups.
Is it any wonder why their performance starts to drop? They are now struggling to keep up with the multitude of demands coming at them.
It’s not that suddenly they’ve become lazy or unproductive. What’s happened is their focus is so diluted they’re trying to work beyond their capacity.
Most productivity issues are almost always due to capacity and a lack of available time. As we get promoted, we start saying yes to far more work than our capacity will allow, and that leaves us with no time for doing anything else.
And then we get swamped, and for many mid-level managers, their careers come to a screeching halt.
I remember working with a group of managers at Hyundai/Kia in the early 2000s. They were hardworking, super-talented people. Yet the managers who ultimately broke through to the director level were not the most capable or talented.
It was the ones who were better able to manage their time.
In the early 2000s, the Korean work culture was dominated by the “yes-men” culture (it was largely men in managerial positions back then). This had been drilled into these managers when they went through their compulsory military service, as well as through the Confucian culture of East Asian countries.
To stand out in such a culture, you had to deliver your commitments on time, when your bosses were constantly asking you for updates and giving you more tasks; that was a real challenge.
There comes a point in your career where your experience and abilities won’t take you any further. Everyone knows you are fantastic at delivering individual projects. That’s never been in question. What will hold you back, though, is whether you can manage multiple projects at once.
And your talent and ability won’t help you there. How you manage your work, whether you can quickly identify what matters and what doesn’t, and your ability to say no so you can focus on the right things is what will elevate you to the next level.
So, how do you manage your time?
The first step would be to take complete control of your calendar. This is one constant issue I find when working with clients. At some point in their career, they lost control of their calendar and now find themselves stuck in meetings they don’t belong in.
When I ask a client why they are always attending their software developer’s team meeting, I often get the answer, “Well, I need to know what’s going on, and they may have a question for me.”
When asked when they were last asked a question in one of these meetings, they often cannot remember.
Do you think Craig Federighi attends all of Apple’s software engineers’ meetings?
In most cases, an executive doesn’t need to be in these meetings. They are team-level meetings, and if you want to know what’s going on, you can ask for a summary of what was discussed in those meetings. (A great use of AI if you make sure someone edits down the summary.)
To get control of your time, do a regular meeting audit. Identify which of your regular meetings your presence is helpful and which ones you are simply decoration. Remove the decoration ones.
The second is to get clear about what your core work is; What are you actually responsible for?
I’m constantly surprised by how few people can distil their core work into one or two sentences.
Your core work is the work you are employed to do. A simple example would be a salesperson. Their core work is to sell the company’s products. Anything that doesn’t contribute to sales is never going to be a core work task.
Core work can become more complicated in executive positions. But even at this level, there will be something you are measured on.
One client I worked with was the Director of Plant Management for a large chemicals company, and when I asked him to describe his responsibilities, he replied:
“I am overall in charge of plant management, which consists of the safety of factory personnel, plant production and plant maintenance. I am responsible for meeting production targets and the annual budget.”
Brilliant! When you are this clear about your responsibilities, you will find it easy to identify what your core work is.
In this client’s case, he was able to set up a reporting system that meant each day he was able to see the important numbers and could therefore see very quickly where he needed to place his focus.
If there had been an increase in the number of accidents in the factories, he would have focused his attention on finding out the cause, deciding if better protection measures needed to be installed or safety training overhauled.
It is a key part of getting control of your time: knowing what your priorities really are.
And finally, make sure you protect time for the important work.
If you begin the week with an important piece of work to get completed that week, and you “hope” you’ll have time to do the work, good luck.
Hoping you’ll find the time is not a great strategy. Not only will that be practically impossible to do, but it also leaves you lacking the intention needed to sit down and do the work.
Instead, make the time. Find an hour or two in your calendar and block it now. Then write out what it is you will use that time for. This way, when you look at the day ahead, you will see what you need to do and at what time you will do it. That gives you the intentionality and helps prepare you mentally for getting on with the work.
Now, with the inevitable rise of AI in our work, the ability to manage our time, make good strategic decisions on what we will work on and when, is a skill more needed today than ever before.
If you want help developing your time management skills, you may wish to consider my Productivity Academy.
The Academy gives you somewhere to continue learning and get help when you need it.
Membership gives you access to all my courses, live monthly training, and a private community where you can ask questions. The courses let you explore areas where you need it most in your own time, and the live training gives you a place where you can continue learning.