Why Just Doing a Great Job Will Not Be Enough to Get Promoted

I was a junior cheese buyer, and a new boss came in. From Bejam (Yep, remember them? If you don’t, you’re too young, leave now 😊). He was a trader. Very different to the stiff upper lip of Sir John Sainsbury’s Head Office employees. We got on well. Largely because he was lazy, a good buyer, but lazy, and I did everything for him, whilst learning the alternative ropes of his type of Wild West trading. Symbiotic, if you consider that I fed, he took, and never even promoted me, despite me doing a great job. Some you win…I digress…

One thing did stick with me. My appraisal of 1993 with Jeff, in which he asked me where I wanted to be in five years. I didn’t really listen to the question, as I didn’t back then, and responded with, ‘If people notice me doing a great job, I’ll get promoted anyway. I just need to continue doing a great job’. I was doing a great job. Really great.

 

There is a but…Jeff forgot the question he had asked (the sambuca hangover didn’t help) and was amazed by my naivety and said, ‘You truly believe that don’t you’. I vehemently explained why I did for the next 10 minutes. After, he said that he needed the toilet, went for a smoke or 3, came back about 45 minutes later, and asked me why the daily reports hadn’t been done and what had I been doing. I sensed the answer of waiting in the meeting room to finish my appraisal was not it.  I cracked on with the reports. I never did forget it, though. In that brief exchange, I realised far too many years later that, whilst he was probably the worst line manager I have ever had, apart from Christmas dos, where he would dress up as a woman (Don’t ask). I never forgot what he had unintentionally taught me…

Just doing a great job won’t get you promoted, and it’s because most senior people just expect you to do a great job, do it silently and don’t bother them. It was years later when I realised that I had to do more than ‘just’ a great job. People had to know when I was doing a great job, what I had done, and what I could do. I started looking for more. Yes, more. Even though I was working a long day, I would look for projects and opportunities to show what I could do.

One such project was coupons. In frozen foods, someone had forgotten about charging suppliers for multi-buys where the retailer got back, say 50p, for every Buy 3 for £5 family-type deals. It took me six weeks to pull together the data using Excel version 0.67, but pull it together I did, and found we hadn’t charged suppliers £1.4m over the last 18 months. When I invoiced it, most suppliers said, “We kept that by just in case you guys found it.” We…I mean…I did.

My point?

As one entrepreneur said, pointing to a poster on his wall of an African woman carrying a huge bunch of bananas on her head, if all you needed to be successful was hard work, she’d be a millionaire.