Why Top Performers Aren’t Promoted (Beware of These 3 Traps)

You compare yourself to somebody who has the intelligence, who has greater intelligence. You compare yourself for someone who has greater experience or a different type of experience. Or you can compare yourself to somebody who has more power and more charisma or authority and so on. And the comparisons are endless. But the act of comparing yourself does not mean, does not necessarily lead you to get achieve those outcomes of more power, more influence, more skill, etc. It doesn't need to it. I'm Dr. Grace Lee and you're listening to the Career Revisionist podcast for executives, team leaders, people and managers and ambitious professionals from all backgrounds. It's for those among us who can't stay stagnant and admire anyone who demonstrates exponential growth. We challenge ourselves to step out of our comfort zone and into higher levels of leadership. And we are determined to rise confidently in our industry so that we can make our greatest contribution using our knowledge and expertise. We have worked hard to become great at what we do, but only so we can achieve the goals that give our lives meaning and purpose. And while we persevere through a college education to get us here with our technical skills, we understand that to get to the next level where we desire to be, it requires a different kind of skills. And we're not comfortable with failure because we experience satisfaction when we are advancing. And while some of us work well under pressure, all of us perform the best when we are part of a winning team. And instead of just hoping to achieve what's important to us, we choose to become a more optimized version of ourselves to make it happen. We're not just A players. We are A+ players, and we are the source of consistent output that makes positive advancements in the world around us. Do you have confirmation that you're a top performer in your domain? But there's still some unknown force that's holding you back from achieving the success that you want to have in your career. Well, in this video, I wanted to talk about our three traps to be aware of so that you can have the success that you desire in your career path. The first trap is the communication trap. I had a clan who I was working with and who was as top performer in his domain and in his company as well. And therefore, he was very reliable, dependable, and focused in that domain. And somewhere along the way, he worked really hard and became promoted into senior executive leadership at the VP level. But even in the VP level, at VP level, you have fiscal responsibilities, but there were a lot of people still coming to him for implementation, coming to him for a tactical execution. And so there was a lot of work that was still need to be done. And he was the only one that could do it. And as a result of that, he was still trapped in implementation or tactical execution at the VP level. And so then this becomes the communication trap. So this is what you think about when you communicate with your peers, when you communicate with your teams, when you communicate with your senior leadership, what are you communicating? Are you communicating your project updates? Are you communicating your achievements? Are you communicating data? All of these things are at the implementation level. Now, up until now, you've been communicating when you were individual contributor, when you were in junior management, when you started managing your first project, all along, you were communicating. But you were communicating at the level of implementation and tactical execution. At some point, there is a switch if in case you want to go your career and have more success at higher levels of leadership. There is a switch that takes place. And the communication that is important in hand is the type of communication that is visionary, which means a communication that sees further out in expanded time and space horizons. So this is where the switch is happening in terms of, instead of sharing with you what I've done, instead of sharing with you with the data that I have analyzed, let me share with you my deep insights, my thoroughly thought through insights. Let me share with you my visions for my department and for this business function. Let me share with you the strategic direction of how we can achieve our big picture mission. And that might be a five-year mission or a 10-year vision. So the communication is really important. The lens through which you communicate and the audience through which you are communicating to must match. So the first trap is the communication trap. And depending on how you navigate your communications and the content of your communications, this is where it can keep you stuck. Depending on what level you are comfortable in communicating and what level you tend to communicate around or at, this is where how people can perceive you. Just like my client communicating at the implementation level, then it is really difficult. It becomes very difficult to remove oneself from implementation. If your communications and the center is around, this is what I can do and I'm the only one that can do it. So that's the first trap, the communications trap. The second trap is the calibration trap. When you are working in an organization and you are growing, the organization is growing, then there's a progression, a progression that moves from tactical to strategic. And that is a journey, it's a continuous journey. The company is already moving more strategically. Your senior leaders are moving more strategically. The question is, are you? How are you calibrating your skills against your environment and against the growth of your industry? How are you calibrating the way you've been communicating and the way that you've been utilizing your insights with respect to that movement? Are you continuously in a journey moving yourself from tactical to strategic? This is the calibration trap. Most of the time, if we've been in implementation and that's usually how careers begin, where individual contributors, wouldn't have been hired to do something and we become subject matter expertise and then we become top performers in that domain. But at some point, you want to grow and you want to become more strategic, you want to become more high level, you want to become more of a decision maker. This is where the movement needs to happen. But if you have been trapped, hence the calibration trap, if you've been trapped in an area where this is only you can perform this and you've been trapped where I can't get out of implementation because nobody else around me and nobody else around me is able to take that on without me with my absence, then this is the calibration trap. So, do you have the processes in place to hand over the tactical implementation and to create document processes around what you've been doing well so that you can train someone else easily? Do you have a system where you can adjust and analyze your movement from tactical to strategic? Do you have clarity on what strategic level and what areas of strategy you want to be involved in and optimize in? Because let's face it, this movement from tactical to strategic means necessarily that you're going to be making more and more decisions with less and less information and that requires the calibration to be able to navigate ambiguity. So, as a result of that, you've been making decisions already as an individual contributor, as an implementer, you've already been making decisions. Now, it's about can you scale your decision making? This is calibration, can you scale your decision making over a larger population so that you can take on the higher level strategic decisions that you want to take on in this movement? Right? So, the first trap was the communication trap and the second trap is the calibration trap. If you've been noticing that you're stuck in implementation, if people keep coming to you for tactical things and you want to break out of that, you want to change your brand, you want to reinvent yourself, then I invite you to come into my mentorship. Every single week I provide training on processes and frameworks on how you can move yourself away from tactical and into a higher level strategic. I give you the systems, I give you the framework and I also show you how to implement it in your situation. And this is a journey and I also show you how to identify opportunities to free up your time so that you can successfully delegate those more tactical activities and then therefore have the ability to answer the call of opportunity for higher level strategic opportunities. So, that's you and you're serious about developing and being in that journey yourself. Then click the link below this video, talk to a member of my team and I look forward to seeing you on the inside. The third trap is the comparison trap. Comparisons mean we compare ourselves to other people and it's so interesting. Comparing is a pervasive social phenomenon. It doesn't matter where you grew up, it doesn't matter where you spend most of your adulthood. It's so pervasive. But have you ever wondered why do people compare? Why do I compare? Why do you compare? Have you ever wondered that? The essence of comparison comes from the programming and comes from the unknown teaching that you know you got to stand out but at the same time you better fit in. So, you can see there is a push and pull between fitting in, standing out. You got to be one of us, one of them, but you also be different. You got to set yourself apart. And because of that push and pull, that creates fertile soil for comparison. But when you compare yourself to other people, that comparison doesn't lead to desired outcomes. You compare yourself for someone who has greater experience or a different type of experience or you compare yourself to somebody who has more power and more charisma or authority and so on. But the act of comparing yourself does not mean does not necessarily lead you to get achieve those outcomes of more power, more influence, more skill, etc. But instead what it does need to is just Morphea. So here's what I mean by that. Let's say in the workplace, you have a peer or maybe a senior colleague that you look up to and you compare yourself to because they have a lot of power and charisma. As a result of that, you have dysmorphia over your own power. You have dysmorphia over your charisma and you therefore see in yourself a lack of it. They say you compare yourself to how much wealth someone has. They've been creating a lot of wealth and therefore they live in a nice big house. And in that moment, in that comparison, you have house dysmorphia. You also have financial dysmorphia. So comparison creates all these different types of dysmorphias, and as a result of that is very disempowering. Because the comparison game is so pervasive, oftentimes we choose the person subconsciously, we choose the person to compare to, and that person that we compare to is the epitome that represents what we desire to have. In other words, if we desire more finances and at larger house, we pick the person comparison unconsciously, the person who has a lot more finances compared to us, and a lot larger house compared to us. And so there is a greater differential every time we compare. And that could lead to differential and dysmorphia at the very least. So the comparison trap is one of the things that keeps us stuck. Because when we compare, it's not likely, unless we have a high degree of self-awareness and self-governance, but is not likely to be empowered in that moment and to be able to create an action plan with principles on what to do and how to get there. So these are the three traps. And the third trap is the comparison trap. So beware of these three traps as you are working towards your success. [Music]