On Promotions

I’m dialing up the regularity of posts to the blog because, well, there are a couple of books to write. This means you’ll be hearing from me every Tuesday. It’s Tuesday.

You are supposed to be reading a piece called The Wanderer, which I think you’ll be reading in a couple of weeks. It’s 80% done, which in my writing world is really close to done. Problem is, I can never tell what is going to interest me — writing-wise. 

This current piece started with the title, which, as of the writing of this newsletter, is “So, You Want to Get Promoted.” My usual style is to bury the theme of the piece in a poetic title, where you are required to read the piece to understand the point. I do this because people skim too damned much. For an instructive and directive piece, I keep the title obvious.

In my defense, I had no intention of writing the promotion piece then and there; it went like this:

• Oh, there’s a straightforward way to write about promotions. It’s just two things. How digestible.
• But I am writing another piece that has nothing to do with promotions, I’ll just plop a title down in Bear to remember what I need to write.
• But wait, there are these core questions. You have to start with the core questions, so I’ll capture those now.

I was writing this piece from the middle out. No introduction, just straight to the point, except I keep finding interesting thoughts about the beginning of the middle. Then, I asked the #perf-management channel on the Rands Leadership Slack if they had any burning questions about promotions, and that was a gold mine. Now, my middle is huge, and I haven’t even gotten to the two things.

One thousand three hundred twelve words later, we have the piece I published today. It’s going to be a two-parter because I want to get the first piece out to gauge the reaction that I believe will affect the shape of the second part. I initially thought this would be a good chapter for the Senior Leadership book, but after trying to shove this in a leadership direction, I decided this goes in the 5th edition of Managing Humans, which shows up next year.

Happy Tuesday.