Why Promotions Often Go to the Wrong People

You watch a colleague get promoted. You know they’re less competent than you. You’ve seen them miss deadlines, produce mediocre work, and avoid difficult problems. Meanwhile, you’ve been delivering consistently excellent results, solving complex issues, and going above and beyond. Yet they’re moving up and you’re not. It feels arbitrary and unfair. But it’s not random. They’re doing something you’re not—and it has almost nothing to do with the quality of their work.

Promotions don’t go to the best workers. They go to people who look promotable to the people who make promotion decisions.

The Problem

You’ve been operating under a meritocratic assumption: do good work, and you’ll be rewarded. Solve problems, deliver results, be reliable, and advancement will follow. This seems logical. Organizations should promote their best performers because that’s how you build effective teams and companies.

But organizations don’t promote based on performance in your current role. They promote based on perceived potential for the next role. And the signals of “potential” that decision-makers look for are often completely disconnected from actual job performance. Someone can be mediocre at their current job but excellent at looking like they’re ready for the next one.

The person who got promoted probably wasn’t doing better work than you. But they were doing something that made their work more visible. They were in meetings with senior leaders. They were working on high-profile projects, even if their contribution was minor. They were talking about strategy and vision, even if their execution was sloppy. They were signaling “leadership potential” in ways that decision-makers noticed and valued.

Meanwhile, you were doing the actual work. Solving the hard problems. Keeping things running. Delivering results. But much of this work was invisible to the people making promotion decisions. You were excellent at your current job, which paradoxically made you look less ready for promotion than someone who was mediocre at the current job but performed “next level” behaviors.

This pattern is structural, not accidental. Most organizations promote based on a set of signals and behaviors that correlate poorly with actual effectiveness. The people who get promoted are often those who’ve learned to optimize for those signals, regardless of whether they’re actually doing good work.

Why this happens to knowledge workers

In knowledge work, the quality and impact of your work is often invisible or difficult to measure. Unlike physical work where output is tangible—you built the thing, you shipped the product—knowledge work outputs are abstract and spread across many people. Your contribution to a successful project might be substantial, but if you’re not the one presenting it to leadership, you don’t get credit.

Research suggests that promotion decisions are heavily influenced by availability bias and recency bias. Decision-makers promote people who are salient to them—people they’ve seen, interacted with, and heard about recently. If you’re quietly doing excellent work but you’re not in the rooms where decisions are made, you’re not available to be considered. Meanwhile, someone who’s in those rooms regularly, even if their actual contributions are minimal, is top of mind when promotion conversations happen.

Many people find that the skills required to get promoted are almost opposite to the skills required to do their current job well. To excel in your current role, you need to focus deeply, execute thoroughly, and solve problems independently. To get promoted, you need to be visible, vocal about your work, and connected to decision-makers. You can’t do both optimally, so you have to choose which to prioritize.

For knowledge workers especially, there’s often a disconnect between who creates value and who gets credit for it. You might do the analytical work that underlies an important decision, but if someone else presents that work to executives, they get perceived as the strategic thinker. You might solve a critical technical problem, but if you do it quietly without broadcasting the achievement, no one above your immediate manager knows it happened.

The promotion system also tends to favor people who look and sound like existing leaders, regardless of competence. There’s a pattern-matching that happens: “successful leaders in our organization tend to be confident, articulate, and comfortable in high-stakes meetings, so people who display those traits must be ready for leadership.” This systematically advantages people who are good at performance over people who are good at actual work.

What Most People Try

The typical response is to work even harder and deliver even better results. If you just perform at an even higher level, surely someone will notice and promote you. So you take on more responsibility, solve harder problems, put in longer hours. You make yourself indispensable by being excellent at your job.

This often backfires. You become too valuable in your current role to promote. Your manager doesn’t want to lose you because you’re the one keeping everything running. And the harder you work, the less time you have for the visibility-building activities that actually lead to promotion. You’re too busy doing the work to talk about the work.

Some people try to make their achievements more visible by documenting everything—sending update emails, creating reports, presenting at team meetings. This can help if done strategically, but it often comes across as self-promotional or annoying if overdone. And if you’re just highlighting execution work rather than strategic thinking, you’re making yourself more visible as a great executor, not as a future leader.

Others attempt to build relationships with decision-makers, hoping that personal connection will lead to recognition. They try to get facetime with senior leaders, join committees, or volunteer for high-visibility projects. This is closer to what works, but if you’re doing it without understanding what signals you need to send, you’re just getting visibility without changing the perception of your promotability.

Many people also wait for their manager to advocate for them. They assume that if they do good work, their manager will recognize it and push for their promotion. Sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t. Your manager might not have influence in promotion decisions, might not know how to advocate effectively, or might actively want to keep you in your current role because replacing you would be difficult.

The limitation of all these approaches is that they’re still operating within the “good work equals promotion” framework. You’re trying to make your good work more visible, but the fundamental problem is that good work isn’t what gets rewarded. The signals that drive promotion decisions are often orthogonal to actual performance.

What Actually Helps

1. Understand what the next level actually looks like

Most people don’t have a clear picture of what’s different between their current level and the next level. They assume it’s just “doing the current job better” or “having more experience.” But typically, the next level requires different behaviors and different types of contribution.

Research what people at the next level actually do. Not their job descriptions—their actual day-to-day activities and how they’re perceived. Talk to people who recently got promoted. Ask them what changed. What are they doing now that they weren’t doing before? What behaviors did they start demonstrating before the promotion that signaled they were ready?

Research suggests that most promotions happen when someone is already operating partially at the next level. You don’t get promoted and then learn the new role—you start doing parts of the new role and then get promoted as recognition. This means you need to identify what “next level” behaviors look like and start demonstrating them before you’re formally promoted.

Many people find that the differences are less about competence and more about scope and visibility. The next level might mean working on problems that affect multiple teams instead of just your team. Or presenting to senior leadership instead of just to your manager. Or thinking about strategic direction instead of just tactical execution. These aren’t necessarily harder than what you’re doing now—they’re just different.

Once you understand what the next level looks like, you can start selectively demonstrating those behaviors while still doing your current job. You’re creating evidence that you’re ready for promotion rather than waiting to be promoted and then rising to the challenge.

2. Make strategic work visible, not just execution work

When you document your achievements or talk about your work, what are you highlighting? If you’re talking about how well you executed tasks, how reliably you delivered, how many problems you solved—you’re reinforcing that you’re great at your current level, not that you’re ready for the next one.

Instead, make your strategic thinking visible. When you solve a problem, don’t just say “I fixed it.” Talk about the underlying pattern you noticed, the broader implications, the systemic improvement you’re recommending. When you complete a project, don’t just report completion. Discuss what you learned, what it means for future projects, what trade-offs you considered.

This doesn’t mean you stop doing execution work—you still need to deliver. But when you communicate about your work, emphasize the strategic dimensions. You’re training decision-makers to see you as someone who thinks strategically, not just someone who executes well.

Research suggests that people are promoted based on how they’re perceived, not what they actually do. Two people can do identical work, but the person who frames their work in strategic terms gets perceived as more promotable than the person who frames it in execution terms.

Many people resist this because it feels like spin or like taking credit for thinking that should be obvious. But decision-makers don’t have time to infer your strategic thinking from your execution. If you don’t make it explicit, they’ll assume you’re just a good executor. Making your strategic thinking visible isn’t dishonest—it’s making sure you get credit for the full scope of your contribution.

3. Build visibility with decision-makers, not just your immediate team

Your team might know you’re excellent. Your manager might appreciate your work. But if the people who make promotion decisions have never seen you in action, you’re not in the consideration set. Promotion decisions often happen in rooms you’re not in, and if you’re not salient to the people in those rooms, you won’t be considered.

Find ways to interact with people two or three levels above you. This doesn’t mean randomly approaching executives—it means positioning yourself in contexts where those interactions happen naturally. Volunteer to present your team’s work to leadership. Join cross-functional projects where you’ll work with senior people. Attend or speak at internal events where decision-makers are present.

The goal isn’t to network aggressively or to self-promote. It’s to ensure that when promotion conversations happen, decision-makers have direct experience with you rather than just hearing about you second-hand from your manager. People promote people they know and have seen operate, not people who are just names on a list.

Research suggests that “sponsorship” matters more than “mentorship” for career advancement. A sponsor is someone senior who actively advocates for you in rooms where decisions are made. You can’t get a sponsor if senior people don’t know you exist. Building visibility is how you become known enough to be sponsored.

Many people find that this is uncomfortable because it requires putting yourself forward in ways that feel presumptuous. But consider: the person who got promoted instead of you probably didn’t wait to be invited. They found ways to be visible. You can do the same without being obnoxious about it.

4. Talk about future problems, not just current problems

When you’re in meetings or discussions, what are you contributing? If you’re mostly focused on solving immediate tactical problems—debugging the issue, clarifying the requirement, optimizing the process—you’re demonstrating current-level competence. This is valuable, but it doesn’t signal readiness for the next level.

Start contributing to conversations about future-oriented and strategic problems. What are the challenges the team will face in six months? What patterns are emerging that will become issues if not addressed? What opportunities exist that aren’t being pursued? You don’t need perfect answers—you need to demonstrate that you’re thinking beyond the immediate tactical work.

This shifts how you’re perceived. Instead of “someone who solves problems we assign them,” you become “someone who identifies problems before they’re obvious and thinks about where we should be going.” That’s a leadership signal, and leadership signals drive promotion decisions.

Research suggests that people perceived as leaders are those who orient toward the future and toward systemic issues. You can be excellent at current problems, but if you only ever talk about current problems, you’ll be perceived as a current-level contributor. Talking about future problems signals that you’re thinking at a higher level.

Many people avoid this because they feel like they don’t have the authority or expertise to comment on strategic issues. But expertise at the strategic level is different from expertise at the tactical level. You don’t need to know all the answers—you need to demonstrate that you’re asking the right questions and thinking beyond your immediate scope.

5. Document your impact in terms decision-makers care about

When you talk about your work, how do you frame the impact? If you’re describing it in terms of technical excellence, process improvement, or task completion, you might be missing what decision-makers actually value. They care about impact on business outcomes, team effectiveness, or organizational capability.

Translate your work into the language and metrics that decision-makers use. Instead of “I optimized the database queries,” say “I reduced system response time by 40%, which improved customer satisfaction scores.” Instead of “I mentored junior team members,” say “I developed three team members who are now capable of handling complex projects independently, increasing our team’s capacity.”

This isn’t exaggeration or spin—it’s making explicit the connection between what you did and why it matters to the organization. Decision-makers operate at a different level of abstraction than individual contributors. If you only describe your work at the IC level of detail, they can’t easily translate it to the level where they’re making decisions.

Research suggests that being able to articulate your impact in business terms is one of the strongest predictors of promotion. It signals that you understand what matters at a higher level of the organization, not just in your specific role.

Many people struggle with this because they feel like they’re overclaiming impact or taking credit for team success. But if you contributed significantly to an outcome, accurately describing that contribution isn’t overclaiming—it’s ensuring you get appropriate credit. The person who got promoted instead of you is probably comfortable making these connections explicit.

6. Recognize when the system won’t promote you no matter what you do

Sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re not demonstrating promotability—it’s that the promotion system is fundamentally broken or biased against you. Maybe your organization promotes based on seniority or tenure rather than merit. Maybe there are unconscious biases based on gender, race, or other factors. Maybe the organization is in decline and there are no real promotion opportunities.

If you’ve been demonstrating next-level behaviors, building visibility, framing your impact appropriately, and you’re still not getting promoted while less capable people are, that’s data. The system might not be solvable through individual action. You might need to change organizations rather than trying to work within a system that won’t reward you.

This is a difficult conclusion because it feels like giving up. But staying in a system that won’t promote you, hoping that if you just work hard enough someone will eventually notice, is often a worse choice than moving to an organization with more functional promotion criteria.

Research suggests that some of the strongest career advancement happens through job changes rather than internal promotion. If you’re undervalued in your current organization, other organizations might recognize your value immediately and bring you in at a higher level.

Many people resist leaving because they’ve invested years in their current organization and hope that investment will pay off. But sunk cost is a fallacy. The question isn’t whether you’ve invested time—it’s whether future investment will be rewarded. If the answer is no, the rational choice is to invest your effort somewhere it will be valued.

The Takeaway

Promotions often go to people who look promotable rather than people who perform best. This isn’t fair, but it’s predictable. The people getting promoted aren’t necessarily better at the work—they’re better at signaling readiness for the next level. They make their strategic thinking visible. They build relationships with decision-makers. They talk about future problems and organizational impact. They demonstrate next-level behaviors before being promoted. You can do these things too without compromising your actual work quality. But you have to understand that excellent execution alone won’t get you promoted. You need to make your work visible in ways decision-makers value, demonstrate that you’re thinking at the next level, and ensure the right people see you operate. If you do all this and still don’t get promoted, that’s not a personal failure—it’s information that the promotion system in your organization is broken or biased. The answer might not be working harder within that system. It might be finding a system that actually rewards the work you’re doing.