August 25, 2025 • 24 mins
Most of us give our boss way too much credit — for the raise we didn’t get, the promotion we hoped for, or the recognition we thought was overdue. Kendall Berg pulls back the curtain to reveal the truth: your career outcomes are rarely decided by one person. Promotions, raises, and opportunities happen by committee, and your boss can’t advocate for you if they don’t even know what you’re doing.
This episode digs into the four pillars of career growth: education, self-advocacy, networking, and communication. Kendall explains why reframing self-advocacy as “educating leadership” changes everything, how high performers accidentally sabotage themselves by saying yes to everything, and why building relationships with directors and VPs is just as critical as doing the work itself. With sharp insights and practical stories (including her own three-year promotion delay), Kendall shows how to communicate impact, manage expectations, and protect your career trajectory.
In this episode of Secrets of the Career Game, we discuss:
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How do you educate your boss and leadership team about your impact without sounding pushy?
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Why do high performers often burn out before reaching senior leadership?
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What’s the role of networking with directors and VPs in career advancement?
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How do you communicate trade-offs and risks in a positive, strategic way?
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Why can’t you rely on your boss alone for promotions and raises?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kendall Berg (00:00):
When you think of your career, a lot of us put a lot of credit on our boss, positive or negative, right?
If we don't get promoted, it's our boss's fault.
If we do get promoted, it's because our boss advocated for us.
If we don't get a raise, it's our boss's fault.
If we do get a raise because our boss got it for us and we see them as the single point of contention in our career when the reality is most of these decisions are made by committee.
(00:26):
So, so assume we omit for the sake of right this second, the committee and we focus just on the boss.
Your boss cannot advocate for you if they don't know what you're doing.
Your boss cannot get you promoted if they don't know why you deserve it.
Your boss cannot get you a raise if they don't understand that's your expectation.
And so a lot of your job as the employee, regardless of seniority level, you could be a VP listening to this episode, you could be fresh out of college.
(00:50):
Your job is to educate your leadership on what you do, the impact or value of what you do, and the effort it takes to do what you do.
Those three things are your responsibility.
Welcome back to this episode of Secrets of the Career Game.
So many people are trying to navigate a corporate world that is laden with secrets, cleverly hidden and unspoken rules to a game that most employees don't even know that they're playing.
(01:17):
On this podcast, we try to give you a peek behind the curtains and some tips and tricks to ultimately make you successful in your career and help you progress a little bit faster.
Hello, lovelies.
Welcome back to another fabulous episode.
Today we are talking about the fact that your boss has no idea what you're doing.
I wish they did.
(01:38):
I wish it was possible for them to hold everything they have to do in their brains and everything that you're doing in your brain and be able to advocate for you.
But the reality is we are all limited by the amount of capacity that we have.
So today's episode is a lot about what preconceived notions are there when it comes to leaning on our manager and having relationships with our manager.
How can we optimize our career by networking and expanding our connections?
(02:01):
And what does self advocacy really look like when it comes to our boss?
So a lot of the time I have clients come to me and they're like, well, I've spent a lot of time building a great relationship with my boss.
He really loves me.
Or she thinks I'M great, and she totally knows what I'm working on.
I'm like, yeah, no, they don't.
Okay.
And it's not because your boss isn't great.
(02:23):
I have a great boss.
He has no idea all the things I do because it's not his job.
Okay.
The reality is that if you step back and you think about yourself at work, I want you to talk through everything that you think another co worker does or everything that you think somebody who works for you does or.
(02:44):
Or everything that you think your boss does.
And odds are you have assumptions about what they do.
You can name the big things, right?
The things that are either really visible or take a lot of their time and effort or interact with your specific job.
But odds are there's tons of stuff they're doing that are outside of that scope that you have no idea about because it's just not relevant to what you are specifically responsible for.
(03:09):
And this happens to our bosses, too.
All right, let's say you run a team that oversees finance.
Your boss probably knows about the reporting you produce.
They probably know about the forecasting and budgeting process that you manage.
And they probably know at least one problem that you're trying to solve.
What they don't see is the hundred of manual accruals that you have to make or the 5,500 invoice validations that you do, or the people management required.
(03:34):
And the reason is they're just not close enough to your job to know those things.
Unless they are.
Super micromanager.
Now, if you work for a super micromanager, assume that this entire episode is about your boss's boss, okay?
Because micromanagers do tend to know every single thing that you're working on because they don't know how to delegate effectively, and they don't know how to manage their time effectively.
(03:56):
They don't know how to manage you effectively.
And so they're too in the weeds and they know too much about what you're doing.
Now at a high level.
Can I tell you all the things that people on my team are working on?
Sure.
A pretty engaged manager.
We have bi weekly touch points.
They track their tasks in a specific format so that I'm able to ingest it easily and share it out with my leadership.
Do I know everything they're doing every day?
(04:17):
Absolutely not.
That would be insane.
Okay.
And so when you think of your career, a lot of us put a lot of credit on our boss, positive or negative.
If we don't get promoted, it's our boss's Fault.
If we do get promoted, it's because our boss advocated for us.
(04:38):
If we don't get a raise, it's our boss's fault if we do get a raise because our boss got it for us and we see them as the single point of contention in our career when the reality is most of these decisions are made by committee.
So assume we omit, for the sake of right this second, the committee and we focus just on the boss.
Your boss cannot advocate for you if they don't know what you're doing.
(04:59):
Your boss cannot get you promoted if they don't know why you deserve it.
Your boss cannot get you a raise if they don't understand that's your expectation.
And so a lot of your job as the employee, regardless of seniority level, you could be a VP listening to this episode, you could be fresh out of college.
Your job is to educate your leadership on what you do, the impact or value of what you do, and the effort it takes to do what you do.
(05:27):
Those three things are your responsibility.
They are not your boss's responsibility to come to you and go, hey, how's it going?
How's the value on this?
Can you articulate the impact?
No.
Your boss has a job.
Maybe part of their job is managing you, but it's not managing you at that level or shouldn't be.
Okay?
Your job is to educate upward and flashback.
(05:48):
Early in my career, I did an interview and the hiring manager wanted to know why I was looking for a job.
And I had a really toxic boss at the time, and I didn't have any of the skills that I have today.
So I basically was like, my boss is super toxic and I can't work for them anymore.
And I remember that this hiring manager said, well, how are you managing up to that?
Like, what are you doing to help change their mind?
(06:09):
And I remember saying, like, you can't change their mind.
Like, they just don't listen.
And I look back on that, and it's no surprise that I didn't get that job for a million different reasons.
But what that interview told me was like, I should be managing up.
I should be providing feedback up.
I should be educating up.
And I wasn't because I assumed it was my boss's job to extract that information for me, not my job to push that information to them.
(06:40):
So lesson numero uno on how to advocate for yourself is one, stop thinking about it as advocacy and start thinking about it as education.
A lot of people feel uncomfortable advocating for themselves because they're like, well, I don't want to seem pushy.
I don't want to ask for a bunch of stuff.
I don't want them to be mad at me.
I don't want them to blah, blah, blah.
(07:00):
But if you think of it as educating them, like, hey, I want to make sure you're aware that this project we just launched went really well.
And here's the impact of that project.
I just want to make sure that you're informed that in order to deliver this, the team did have to work a lot of overtime and I want to make sure they get credit for that.
How do you feel about me giving them Friday off at.
No, you are educating your leadership on what is happening.
(07:24):
That is self advocacy.
Right?
There's more tactical self advocacy when you're specifically looking for a promotion or a raise.
We'll kind of talk about that later in the episode.
But you have to educate them on what's happening.
I made a Instagram video about this recently where I talked about the mistake people are making when they take on too much work is when we're asked to do something new.
A lot of the time our knee jerk reaction is like, yeah, I can do it.
(07:47):
I can solve that problem for you.
Yes, absolutely.
And then we end up burning ourselves out and working a bajillion hours and it becomes a really unhealthy long term situation for us.
And a lot of high performers will come to me and those high performers will say, hey, I'm doing all this great work, I'm solving my boss's problems.
I'm working on all these things, but I keep not getting promoted.
(08:07):
Okay?
I hear it all the time.
We want to get away from that mentality.
At some point in your career, especially as you start to get to upper middle management and executive levels, it is more important to you to start to educate them on, hey, I'm happy to do that, but it requires this trade off or it requires this amount of time or it requires me hiring more people or using a new system or blah, blah.
(08:31):
You have to educate them on the cost of the things that they are asking.
And if you get to the director, senior director level, at some point they stop thinking of you saying yes is a good thing.
And they start wondering, why isn't this person a leader?
Why isn't this person articulating the cost?
Why isn't this person articulating the strategy?
(08:52):
Why isn't this person pushing back?
It becomes a negative thing.
I see it happen all the time.
High performers move up really quickly because they take on all this work, they do all this great stuff, they solve all these problems, and then they hit the director, senior director level.
And their boss is like, you're doing too much.
And they're like, what do you mean?
Of course I'm doing too much.
You asked me to.
You don't want to end up in that position.
So you want to educate.
(09:13):
Hey, I'm happy to take on this work, but the cost of it is X. I do this a lot of time with my leadership while they'll bring me a new problem they want me to solve.
And like, hey, I can absolutely solve that problem.
But right now, the team is heads down working on these big things.
Is it more important than those things?
The answer is yes.
Sweet.
Let's shift some resources.
That's an easy fix.
But then they're not surprised when I don't deliver something else because I deprioritized it in order to deliver this.
(09:38):
My team, their capacity is managed in an effective way.
And my leadership sees that I'm thinking holistically about the things I'm working on, not just solving individual problems.
So you have to educate up.
And part of that education is cost.
Part of that education is what you're doing in the first place.
And a big part of that education is what is the impact?
(10:02):
If I'm spending 80 hours of my life working on something, what's the value to the company?
Does it drive the bottom line?
Does it make us more efficient?
Does it solve a problem?
Sometimes these can be binary.
They can be a yes, no of like, hey, we need this thing and I built it, and it's a yes now, and it was a no.
Right.
But what is the impact to the firm?
(10:22):
If you cannot articulate the impact of something you're doing in terms of how it helps the company, odds are you shouldn't be doing it.
Yeah, I'm letting that sit for a minute.
All right?
I have people come to me all the time and they're like, well, I'm working on this project, super high profile, but there's no impact to the company.
I'm like, cool, who asked you to do it?
And they're like, oh, my boss.
I'm like, great.
Do they know that it's not adding value to the company?
(10:45):
Well, we never talked about it.
Well, do they know that this other project you could have been doing with this time did have a big value to the company?
Well, we never exactly talked about it.
Great.
So you just traded helping your company for answering something that your boss asked for that doesn't add value without educating them on that trade off.
If you're that boss, are you going to be happy later when you figure out, oh, I sent you on this wild goose chase didn't add any value.
(11:08):
You could have been doing this other thing, but you didn't.
No, you're going to be like, why didn't you do the other thing all the time?
Bosses will come back and they'll be like, yeah, I asked you to do that but it was dumb.
Why didn't you say no?
I see it all the time.
A leader being like, well you should have known better.
You're like, but you asked me to do it.
But we didn't educate up front our concerns, we didn't educate up front the trade offs that were making.
(11:29):
And so you have to educate.
Education is the first step in self advocacy.
Now as you move down that journey, the second step in self advocacy is making sure your boss knows what you want.
Hey, I have expectations of promotion in the next 12 to 18 months or hey, I'm looking to get a raise in order to be more in line with market values.
We do want to communicate those things to our boss because if our boss doesn't know, odds are they're not trying to do them.
(11:52):
And I'm a firm believer.
Don't get me wrong, I love to job hoping.
I've job hopped.
You guys can check my LinkedIn.
It's happened.
But I'm a big fan of giving your company the opportunity to do the right thing for you.
Before you hop.
Don't just quit and jump ship like I didn't get promoted in the last four years.
And I'm like, okay, well what did your boss say when you talked to him about it?
And they're like, oh, I never brought it up.
(12:12):
They should have just known.
They don't know.
They are fielding requests from everybody.
And if say you're on a team of 10 people, say three of those people are asking for a promotion and you're not, it doesn't matter if you're the most qualified for the promotion.
Your boss is likely going to give the promotion to one of those three that are the loudest because they don't want to lose them and they want to retain them.
(12:33):
And they're probably good performers too.
If you don't advocate for yourself, your boss doesn't know.
They're not able to prioritize you effectively.
So you need to be clear with your leadership.
Hey, here's what I'm looking For here's my timeline expectation, here's what I want in the future.
And be able to have that conversation and have it in advance.
Don't wait till you're ready for promotion and then be like, too late.
Okay, I've talked about this in a lot of episodes.
(12:55):
I'm not gonna spend a ton of time on promotion.
But like, make sure that you are advocating for yourself.
You are asking for the things that you need because your boss isn't going to give them to you otherwise.
Generally.
Now, there are times in my career where I've gotten promoted and I was like, oh, that's nifty.
Wasn't expecting that.
But for the most part they came because I took on a very clear scope of work.
I advocated for myself, I talked to people.
And to give a quick example, in my career, there was a time frame where I was passed over for promotion for three years, which was six cycles, all right?
(13:24):
And at the time I had absorbed the job of a director and I was a manager.
So two levels more junior.
And cycle goes by, and cycle goes by.
And finally I go to my VP and I'm like, listen, I haven't been promoted in five years.
And the last six cycles I thought it would happen and it never happened.
And they're like, no, we promoted you last year.
(13:45):
And I'm like, no you didn't.
Turns out my boss thought I had gotten promoted on the cycle before he became my boss.
Never happened.
But everybody in leadership was under the perception that I had just gotten promoted to senior manager.
I waited three years to say something and when I did, they thought it had happened three cycles ago.
(14:06):
My fault.
Yes, you could say, well, they should have been paying better attention.
They should have caught it.
Na na na.
In reality, that's my Ms.
I did not say anything to anybody that I was expecting a promotion, that I didn't get one, that I was disappointed, nothing.
I got promoted on the very next cycle.
But I could have been promoted three cycles earlier had I advocated for myself.
(14:28):
So ask for what you want.
So first you have to educate, which means you have to understand your impact, your trade offs.
Then you have to advocate for yourself and then you have to have a network.
Your boss is not making this decision by themselves.
I wish they were.
I wish if they really liked you could get promoted.
But the problem with that is it also works in reverse.
If your boss doesn't like you never get promoted again.
(14:50):
So generally these decisions are made by committee, meaning maybe you're a Manager and everybody who's reviewing your performance is around the director level or you're a manager, and everybody who's reviewing your performance is a VP level.
Depends on your company size, et cetera.
I used to work for a company that was really cool in the way they did performance reviews, in that anybody who managed people sat in the performance review for their people and then they left as the group got more seniors.
(15:15):
So, for example, all the leads would be there as they were discussing associates and senior associates.
Then the leads would leave.
Then it would be managers and up.
Then when they were done discussing the leads, the managers would leave and the senior managers and up would discuss the managers, and then the senior managers would leave.
They discuss senior managers.
You get how it goes.
I worked for a company that did it once that way, and I thought that was so cool because you get so much exposure to how performance reviews work, so much insights into, like, what kind of deliberations are taking place.
(15:41):
But that was one company that I've worked at.
Every other company I've ever worked for did directors and above.
At a minimum, my current company does VPs and above, I think.
So the conversations are going to take place.
You're not going to be there.
There's a chance your manager is not even going to be there, depending on their seniority level.
And you need other people in that room who think you're awesome, because if they don't, who is talking about you?
(16:06):
Your boss's boss who's never had a meeting with you.
That's not good.
So you have to have a network, and that network needs to include the senior people who do performance evaluations.
Recently, an individual on my team was up for a promotion.
We had a conversation about it.
I didn't even say two words.
And my boss's boss was like, oh, no, that's no brainer.
Let's do it.
I didn't have to do anything and advocate it all for him because my boss's boss was like, oh, that's a clear yes.
(16:32):
Why would we even discuss that?
That individual had such a strong network that everybody else in that call was like, oh, yeah, let's do that.
Makes my job as a boss way easier, right?
So what you need to do as the individuals, you need to take responsibility for building that network, for getting that exposure, for sitting in those meetings.
Now, quick caveat here is I know that some managers will not let you present.
(16:55):
I know this.
I see it all the time.
I hate it for you.
I hate it for me.
When your Boss is like, nope, you can't present.
You can't be in front of this audience.
I don't want you talking to them.
I see it.
I know that it happens.
Those are the worst bosses to work for.
My advice to you is build your network anyways.
You can do it outside of your boss's organization.
So meet with directors who work in a totally different division, hiring managers in a different division, because one, you're eventually going to need an internal transfer out of your team.
(17:22):
You're not going to stay there long term, and two, you still want voices in that room.
So if your boss goes in and goes, kendall sucks.
She's terrible.
And Susie in marketing has been meeting with you every month and is like, well, actually, didn't she just deliver that huge presentation you gave last month?
I thought she did a really good job on that.
Now you have protection.
Now you have other voices.
Now it's not going to improve your relationship with your boss.
(17:43):
You're still going to need to move out.
But it keeps you from getting low performance reviews in the interim.
It keeps you from getting demoted in the interim or fired or laid off or whatever it might be.
So you need to have a networking.
You need to build those relationships strategically.
I'm not going to go into the how of that too much today because I have so many podcast episodes that are completely dedicated to how to build your network, how to nurture relationships, what to talk about on those calls.
(18:08):
Again, we will link in the show notes.
But the important thing to get out of today's episode is that your boss is not aware of the ins and outs of the complexity.
And I don't just mean, like, your boss doesn't know how hard it is to do your job.
Oh, it's hard.
It is probably right.
I'm not devalidating that, invalidating that.
I'm not invalidating that.
(18:28):
But I think I do feel like devalidated should be a word.
Share in the comments if devalidated is a word and should be a word anyhow.
But what I'm saying is that you don't want to complain to your boss.
You don't want to be that person that's like, oh, this is so hard.
Oh, this doesn't work.
You should be educating, hey, I understand this thing that you want me to do.
It makes perfect sense.
I can see why it would be valuable.
(18:50):
Unfortunately, the data we're working with isn't set up to be ingested that way.
So in order to get it into what you're describing, it's going to take us four or five weeks of work to clean the infrastructure data first before we're able to build on top.
Are you comfortable with a six to eight week turnaround time for this?
You have educated on what the problem is, the effort to fix it, and when you could expect a delivery.
(19:15):
Then we have to weigh that against the impact to decide if that's even worth it.
Right?
Especially if you work for any company right now, who's talking about AI, which is probably every company, probably even if you work for a company that's talking about AI.
I saw an image.
We'll have to find it.
I'll put it in.
I'll put it right here.
It's like a bar of soap and somebody has put a nozzle from a soap dispenser stuck into the bar of soap.
(19:37):
And it says, when my boss tells me to fix a problem with AI, it's so true.
So much of what leaders are doing right now is like, oh, you have this super bad data and this super complicated process and it doesn't work well at all.
Like, have AI do it.
And I'm like, do you understand how complicated it is to build an AI model that can do what you're describing?
That would be cray.
So if you work in a company in AI, again, we have to describe the effort and the complexity.
(20:01):
One of the conversations I'm having a lot right now is, hey, I understand the need for AI.
I think it's super valuable.
We need to be intentional with where we apply it because it's not going to solve every problem.
And I don't want the team wasting effort trying to solve a particular problem with AI when we could have gotten so much more leverage and efficiency somewhere else.
That's where I want us to do it again.
(20:22):
Comes back to impact.
And you, as a leader, as a growing leader, as an emerging leader, as a strategic leader, want to be able to articulate these things.
Quick caveat here.
A huge part of self advocacy and education and awareness comes down to communication.
In all of the examples I've given you today on how to communicate, at no point did I ever say no.
At no point did I ever say that's a dumb idea.
(20:44):
At no point did I ever say it won't work.
No point did I say that's super hard.
And Steve sucks at data.
If you want to be effective in your job and in your leadership, you cannot be negative.
You need to educate in a positive way.
And this comes down to communication, right?
(21:04):
Hey, I'm happy to use AI in my space, but I want to make sure we get the impact and the lift that you're looking for.
Spending a ton of time building a prompt engineering system on this particular issue is only going to save us about 15 minutes a month.
But if I take a little more time, I could deliver something in this space and that has the potential of saving us six to eight hours.
I think that would be a better use of our time.
(21:25):
But I wanted to validate with you first.
That is a positive.
I'm not saying no, it won't work on process A or no, that doesn't save us any time.
I'm communicating the cost and trade offs.
If you want to get better at your career, if you want to develop as a leader, if you want potential growth opportunities, you must under all circumstances improve your communication.
(21:47):
I know I talk about this every episode.
I'm sorry I sucked at it.
All right?
I was terrible at communication.
I am living proof that your communication can get better over time.
The biggest tips for improving your communication are Take self ownership.
When I make a mistake, I'm the first to say I made a mistake.
I'm also going to tell you how I'm never going to make that mistake again, what processes I've put in place to prevent it, and how we're going to get through it this time positive.
(22:12):
But I'm the first to admit that I made a mistake.
If I need you to do something or if I feel you're not doing something, I'm the first to take ownership for my part in that.
Hey, you know, I'm realizing in hindsight that my expectations were not very clearly set at the start of this project.
What I really need from you is to deliver on xyz.
In return, I'm able to do ABC which benefits all of us for the project.
(22:35):
But I wanted to level set those expectations because I feel it was a miss at the start on my part that is so much more palatable to the other person than dude, why aren't you doing your job?
Take self ownership.
When you communicate concerns, negativity, risks, you do it in a positive way.
This is a trade off conversation.
I can do anything.
I tell my boss all the time.
(22:56):
I can do anything you want to.
You want the moon?
I can get you the moon.
It's going to cost a lot, but I could do it.
You want me to create AI models on all this?
I can absolutely do it.
Here's the cost.
You must have a cost.
You must have a trade off.
You must have what?
Something needs to be done.
But if you're communicating in a negative way, hey, I'm not doing this thing because I don't want to or no, I don't want to take that on or no, I already worked 80 hours this week.
(23:21):
If you're always negative, you're not going to grow because people don't want to come to you with what they need, which means you're not going to be put on high impact projects, which means you're not going to be able to drive your impact higher, which means you're not going to be able to be seen as a leader.
You have to work on your communication first.
So educate your leadership.
Advocate for yourself, build a network, improve your communication.
(23:43):
Literally, if you only ever do those four things, you will see such a change in your perception at work and in your career growth.
If you want more tactical tips on how to do this, there are a bunch of podcast episodes.
Again, we'll link some things in the comments below.
But also check out my book, Secrets of the Career Game.
It is a very tactical way to improve in all four of these areas.
(24:04):
It was written as a textbook and a guide to help you.
Don't sit back and wait for your boss to tell you need to get better at something.
Don't sit back and wait for your boss to give you an opportunity.
Go for it.
Make an effort.
Be the CEO of your own career.
That's when you're going to start to see things change.
Hopefully you guys like today's episode.
If you do have any questions, please leave them below in the comments.
(24:25):
Otherwise, if you liked it, go ahead and give us five stars and check back in next week for another great episode.
When you think of your career, a lot of us put a lot of credit on our boss, positive or negative, right?
If we don't get promoted, it's our boss's fault.
If we do get promoted, it's because our boss advocated for us.
If we don't get a raise, it's our boss's fault.
If we do get a raise because our boss got it for us and we see them as the single point of contention in our career when the reality is most of these decisions are made by committee.
(00:26):
So, so assume we omit for the sake of right this second, the committee and we focus just on the boss.
Your boss cannot advocate for you if they don't know what you're doing.
Your boss cannot get you promoted if they don't know why you deserve it.
Your boss cannot get you a raise if they don't understand that's your expectation.
And so a lot of your job as the employee, regardless of seniority level, you could be a VP listening to this episode, you could be fresh out of college.
(00:50):
Your job is to educate your leadership on what you do, the impact or value of what you do, and the effort it takes to do what you do.
Those three things are your responsibility.
Welcome back to this episode of Secrets of the Career Game.
So many people are trying to navigate a corporate world that is laden with secrets, cleverly hidden and unspoken rules to a game that most employees don't even know that they're playing.
(01:17):
On this podcast, we try to give you a peek behind the curtains and some tips and tricks to ultimately make you successful in your career and help you progress a little bit faster.
Hello, lovelies.
Welcome back to another fabulous episode.
Today we are talking about the fact that your boss has no idea what you're doing.
I wish they did.
(01:38):
I wish it was possible for them to hold everything they have to do in their brains and everything that you're doing in your brain and be able to advocate for you.
But the reality is we are all limited by the amount of capacity that we have.
So today's episode is a lot about what preconceived notions are there when it comes to leaning on our manager and having relationships with our manager.
How can we optimize our career by networking and expanding our connections?
(02:01):
And what does self advocacy really look like when it comes to our boss?
So a lot of the time I have clients come to me and they're like, well, I've spent a lot of time building a great relationship with my boss.
He really loves me.
Or she thinks I'M great, and she totally knows what I'm working on.
I'm like, yeah, no, they don't.
Okay.
And it's not because your boss isn't great.
(02:23):
I have a great boss.
He has no idea all the things I do because it's not his job.
Okay.
The reality is that if you step back and you think about yourself at work, I want you to talk through everything that you think another co worker does or everything that you think somebody who works for you does or.
(02:44):
Or everything that you think your boss does.
And odds are you have assumptions about what they do.
You can name the big things, right?
The things that are either really visible or take a lot of their time and effort or interact with your specific job.
But odds are there's tons of stuff they're doing that are outside of that scope that you have no idea about because it's just not relevant to what you are specifically responsible for.
(03:09):
And this happens to our bosses, too.
All right, let's say you run a team that oversees finance.
Your boss probably knows about the reporting you produce.
They probably know about the forecasting and budgeting process that you manage.
And they probably know at least one problem that you're trying to solve.
What they don't see is the hundred of manual accruals that you have to make or the 5,500 invoice validations that you do, or the people management required.
(03:34):
And the reason is they're just not close enough to your job to know those things.
Unless they are.
Super micromanager.
Now, if you work for a super micromanager, assume that this entire episode is about your boss's boss, okay?
Because micromanagers do tend to know every single thing that you're working on because they don't know how to delegate effectively, and they don't know how to manage their time effectively.
(03:56):
They don't know how to manage you effectively.
And so they're too in the weeds and they know too much about what you're doing.
Now at a high level.
Can I tell you all the things that people on my team are working on?
Sure.
A pretty engaged manager.
We have bi weekly touch points.
They track their tasks in a specific format so that I'm able to ingest it easily and share it out with my leadership.
Do I know everything they're doing every day?
(04:17):
Absolutely not.
That would be insane.
Okay.
And so when you think of your career, a lot of us put a lot of credit on our boss, positive or negative.
If we don't get promoted, it's our boss's Fault.
If we do get promoted, it's because our boss advocated for us.
(04:38):
If we don't get a raise, it's our boss's fault if we do get a raise because our boss got it for us and we see them as the single point of contention in our career when the reality is most of these decisions are made by committee.
So assume we omit, for the sake of right this second, the committee and we focus just on the boss.
Your boss cannot advocate for you if they don't know what you're doing.
(04:59):
Your boss cannot get you promoted if they don't know why you deserve it.
Your boss cannot get you a raise if they don't understand that's your expectation.
And so a lot of your job as the employee, regardless of seniority level, you could be a VP listening to this episode, you could be fresh out of college.
Your job is to educate your leadership on what you do, the impact or value of what you do, and the effort it takes to do what you do.
(05:27):
Those three things are your responsibility.
They are not your boss's responsibility to come to you and go, hey, how's it going?
How's the value on this?
Can you articulate the impact?
No.
Your boss has a job.
Maybe part of their job is managing you, but it's not managing you at that level or shouldn't be.
Okay?
Your job is to educate upward and flashback.
(05:48):
Early in my career, I did an interview and the hiring manager wanted to know why I was looking for a job.
And I had a really toxic boss at the time, and I didn't have any of the skills that I have today.
So I basically was like, my boss is super toxic and I can't work for them anymore.
And I remember that this hiring manager said, well, how are you managing up to that?
Like, what are you doing to help change their mind?
(06:09):
And I remember saying, like, you can't change their mind.
Like, they just don't listen.
And I look back on that, and it's no surprise that I didn't get that job for a million different reasons.
But what that interview told me was like, I should be managing up.
I should be providing feedback up.
I should be educating up.
And I wasn't because I assumed it was my boss's job to extract that information for me, not my job to push that information to them.
(06:40):
So lesson numero uno on how to advocate for yourself is one, stop thinking about it as advocacy and start thinking about it as education.
A lot of people feel uncomfortable advocating for themselves because they're like, well, I don't want to seem pushy.
I don't want to ask for a bunch of stuff.
I don't want them to be mad at me.
I don't want them to blah, blah, blah.
(07:00):
But if you think of it as educating them, like, hey, I want to make sure you're aware that this project we just launched went really well.
And here's the impact of that project.
I just want to make sure that you're informed that in order to deliver this, the team did have to work a lot of overtime and I want to make sure they get credit for that.
How do you feel about me giving them Friday off at.
No, you are educating your leadership on what is happening.
(07:24):
That is self advocacy.
Right?
There's more tactical self advocacy when you're specifically looking for a promotion or a raise.
We'll kind of talk about that later in the episode.
But you have to educate them on what's happening.
I made a Instagram video about this recently where I talked about the mistake people are making when they take on too much work is when we're asked to do something new.
A lot of the time our knee jerk reaction is like, yeah, I can do it.
(07:47):
I can solve that problem for you.
Yes, absolutely.
And then we end up burning ourselves out and working a bajillion hours and it becomes a really unhealthy long term situation for us.
And a lot of high performers will come to me and those high performers will say, hey, I'm doing all this great work, I'm solving my boss's problems.
I'm working on all these things, but I keep not getting promoted.
(08:07):
Okay?
I hear it all the time.
We want to get away from that mentality.
At some point in your career, especially as you start to get to upper middle management and executive levels, it is more important to you to start to educate them on, hey, I'm happy to do that, but it requires this trade off or it requires this amount of time or it requires me hiring more people or using a new system or blah, blah.
(08:31):
You have to educate them on the cost of the things that they are asking.
And if you get to the director, senior director level, at some point they stop thinking of you saying yes is a good thing.
And they start wondering, why isn't this person a leader?
Why isn't this person articulating the cost?
Why isn't this person articulating the strategy?
(08:52):
Why isn't this person pushing back?
It becomes a negative thing.
I see it happen all the time.
High performers move up really quickly because they take on all this work, they do all this great stuff, they solve all these problems, and then they hit the director, senior director level.
And their boss is like, you're doing too much.
And they're like, what do you mean?
Of course I'm doing too much.
You asked me to.
You don't want to end up in that position.
So you want to educate.
(09:13):
Hey, I'm happy to take on this work, but the cost of it is X. I do this a lot of time with my leadership while they'll bring me a new problem they want me to solve.
And like, hey, I can absolutely solve that problem.
But right now, the team is heads down working on these big things.
Is it more important than those things?
The answer is yes.
Sweet.
Let's shift some resources.
That's an easy fix.
But then they're not surprised when I don't deliver something else because I deprioritized it in order to deliver this.
(09:38):
My team, their capacity is managed in an effective way.
And my leadership sees that I'm thinking holistically about the things I'm working on, not just solving individual problems.
So you have to educate up.
And part of that education is cost.
Part of that education is what you're doing in the first place.
And a big part of that education is what is the impact?
(10:02):
If I'm spending 80 hours of my life working on something, what's the value to the company?
Does it drive the bottom line?
Does it make us more efficient?
Does it solve a problem?
Sometimes these can be binary.
They can be a yes, no of like, hey, we need this thing and I built it, and it's a yes now, and it was a no.
Right.
But what is the impact to the firm?
(10:22):
If you cannot articulate the impact of something you're doing in terms of how it helps the company, odds are you shouldn't be doing it.
Yeah, I'm letting that sit for a minute.
All right?
I have people come to me all the time and they're like, well, I'm working on this project, super high profile, but there's no impact to the company.
I'm like, cool, who asked you to do it?
And they're like, oh, my boss.
I'm like, great.
Do they know that it's not adding value to the company?
(10:45):
Well, we never talked about it.
Well, do they know that this other project you could have been doing with this time did have a big value to the company?
Well, we never exactly talked about it.
Great.
So you just traded helping your company for answering something that your boss asked for that doesn't add value without educating them on that trade off.
If you're that boss, are you going to be happy later when you figure out, oh, I sent you on this wild goose chase didn't add any value.
(11:08):
You could have been doing this other thing, but you didn't.
No, you're going to be like, why didn't you do the other thing all the time?
Bosses will come back and they'll be like, yeah, I asked you to do that but it was dumb.
Why didn't you say no?
I see it all the time.
A leader being like, well you should have known better.
You're like, but you asked me to do it.
But we didn't educate up front our concerns, we didn't educate up front the trade offs that were making.
(11:29):
And so you have to educate.
Education is the first step in self advocacy.
Now as you move down that journey, the second step in self advocacy is making sure your boss knows what you want.
Hey, I have expectations of promotion in the next 12 to 18 months or hey, I'm looking to get a raise in order to be more in line with market values.
We do want to communicate those things to our boss because if our boss doesn't know, odds are they're not trying to do them.
(11:52):
And I'm a firm believer.
Don't get me wrong, I love to job hoping.
I've job hopped.
You guys can check my LinkedIn.
It's happened.
But I'm a big fan of giving your company the opportunity to do the right thing for you.
Before you hop.
Don't just quit and jump ship like I didn't get promoted in the last four years.
And I'm like, okay, well what did your boss say when you talked to him about it?
And they're like, oh, I never brought it up.
(12:12):
They should have just known.
They don't know.
They are fielding requests from everybody.
And if say you're on a team of 10 people, say three of those people are asking for a promotion and you're not, it doesn't matter if you're the most qualified for the promotion.
Your boss is likely going to give the promotion to one of those three that are the loudest because they don't want to lose them and they want to retain them.
(12:33):
And they're probably good performers too.
If you don't advocate for yourself, your boss doesn't know.
They're not able to prioritize you effectively.
So you need to be clear with your leadership.
Hey, here's what I'm looking For here's my timeline expectation, here's what I want in the future.
And be able to have that conversation and have it in advance.
Don't wait till you're ready for promotion and then be like, too late.
Okay, I've talked about this in a lot of episodes.
(12:55):
I'm not gonna spend a ton of time on promotion.
But like, make sure that you are advocating for yourself.
You are asking for the things that you need because your boss isn't going to give them to you otherwise.
Generally.
Now, there are times in my career where I've gotten promoted and I was like, oh, that's nifty.
Wasn't expecting that.
But for the most part they came because I took on a very clear scope of work.
I advocated for myself, I talked to people.
And to give a quick example, in my career, there was a time frame where I was passed over for promotion for three years, which was six cycles, all right?
(13:24):
And at the time I had absorbed the job of a director and I was a manager.
So two levels more junior.
And cycle goes by, and cycle goes by.
And finally I go to my VP and I'm like, listen, I haven't been promoted in five years.
And the last six cycles I thought it would happen and it never happened.
And they're like, no, we promoted you last year.
(13:45):
And I'm like, no you didn't.
Turns out my boss thought I had gotten promoted on the cycle before he became my boss.
Never happened.
But everybody in leadership was under the perception that I had just gotten promoted to senior manager.
I waited three years to say something and when I did, they thought it had happened three cycles ago.
(14:06):
My fault.
Yes, you could say, well, they should have been paying better attention.
They should have caught it.
Na na na.
In reality, that's my Ms.
I did not say anything to anybody that I was expecting a promotion, that I didn't get one, that I was disappointed, nothing.
I got promoted on the very next cycle.
But I could have been promoted three cycles earlier had I advocated for myself.
(14:28):
So ask for what you want.
So first you have to educate, which means you have to understand your impact, your trade offs.
Then you have to advocate for yourself and then you have to have a network.
Your boss is not making this decision by themselves.
I wish they were.
I wish if they really liked you could get promoted.
But the problem with that is it also works in reverse.
If your boss doesn't like you never get promoted again.
(14:50):
So generally these decisions are made by committee, meaning maybe you're a Manager and everybody who's reviewing your performance is around the director level or you're a manager, and everybody who's reviewing your performance is a VP level.
Depends on your company size, et cetera.
I used to work for a company that was really cool in the way they did performance reviews, in that anybody who managed people sat in the performance review for their people and then they left as the group got more seniors.
(15:15):
So, for example, all the leads would be there as they were discussing associates and senior associates.
Then the leads would leave.
Then it would be managers and up.
Then when they were done discussing the leads, the managers would leave and the senior managers and up would discuss the managers, and then the senior managers would leave.
They discuss senior managers.
You get how it goes.
I worked for a company that did it once that way, and I thought that was so cool because you get so much exposure to how performance reviews work, so much insights into, like, what kind of deliberations are taking place.
(15:41):
But that was one company that I've worked at.
Every other company I've ever worked for did directors and above.
At a minimum, my current company does VPs and above, I think.
So the conversations are going to take place.
You're not going to be there.
There's a chance your manager is not even going to be there, depending on their seniority level.
And you need other people in that room who think you're awesome, because if they don't, who is talking about you?
(16:06):
Your boss's boss who's never had a meeting with you.
That's not good.
So you have to have a network, and that network needs to include the senior people who do performance evaluations.
Recently, an individual on my team was up for a promotion.
We had a conversation about it.
I didn't even say two words.
And my boss's boss was like, oh, no, that's no brainer.
Let's do it.
I didn't have to do anything and advocate it all for him because my boss's boss was like, oh, that's a clear yes.
(16:32):
Why would we even discuss that?
That individual had such a strong network that everybody else in that call was like, oh, yeah, let's do that.
Makes my job as a boss way easier, right?
So what you need to do as the individuals, you need to take responsibility for building that network, for getting that exposure, for sitting in those meetings.
Now, quick caveat here is I know that some managers will not let you present.
(16:55):
I know this.
I see it all the time.
I hate it for you.
I hate it for me.
When your Boss is like, nope, you can't present.
You can't be in front of this audience.
I don't want you talking to them.
I see it.
I know that it happens.
Those are the worst bosses to work for.
My advice to you is build your network anyways.
You can do it outside of your boss's organization.
So meet with directors who work in a totally different division, hiring managers in a different division, because one, you're eventually going to need an internal transfer out of your team.
(17:22):
You're not going to stay there long term, and two, you still want voices in that room.
So if your boss goes in and goes, kendall sucks.
She's terrible.
And Susie in marketing has been meeting with you every month and is like, well, actually, didn't she just deliver that huge presentation you gave last month?
I thought she did a really good job on that.
Now you have protection.
Now you have other voices.
Now it's not going to improve your relationship with your boss.
(17:43):
You're still going to need to move out.
But it keeps you from getting low performance reviews in the interim.
It keeps you from getting demoted in the interim or fired or laid off or whatever it might be.
So you need to have a networking.
You need to build those relationships strategically.
I'm not going to go into the how of that too much today because I have so many podcast episodes that are completely dedicated to how to build your network, how to nurture relationships, what to talk about on those calls.
(18:08):
Again, we will link in the show notes.
But the important thing to get out of today's episode is that your boss is not aware of the ins and outs of the complexity.
And I don't just mean, like, your boss doesn't know how hard it is to do your job.
Oh, it's hard.
It is probably right.
I'm not devalidating that, invalidating that.
I'm not invalidating that.
(18:28):
But I think I do feel like devalidated should be a word.
Share in the comments if devalidated is a word and should be a word anyhow.
But what I'm saying is that you don't want to complain to your boss.
You don't want to be that person that's like, oh, this is so hard.
Oh, this doesn't work.
You should be educating, hey, I understand this thing that you want me to do.
It makes perfect sense.
I can see why it would be valuable.
(18:50):
Unfortunately, the data we're working with isn't set up to be ingested that way.
So in order to get it into what you're describing, it's going to take us four or five weeks of work to clean the infrastructure data first before we're able to build on top.
Are you comfortable with a six to eight week turnaround time for this?
You have educated on what the problem is, the effort to fix it, and when you could expect a delivery.
(19:15):
Then we have to weigh that against the impact to decide if that's even worth it.
Right?
Especially if you work for any company right now, who's talking about AI, which is probably every company, probably even if you work for a company that's talking about AI.
I saw an image.
We'll have to find it.
I'll put it in.
I'll put it right here.
It's like a bar of soap and somebody has put a nozzle from a soap dispenser stuck into the bar of soap.
(19:37):
And it says, when my boss tells me to fix a problem with AI, it's so true.
So much of what leaders are doing right now is like, oh, you have this super bad data and this super complicated process and it doesn't work well at all.
Like, have AI do it.
And I'm like, do you understand how complicated it is to build an AI model that can do what you're describing?
That would be cray.
So if you work in a company in AI, again, we have to describe the effort and the complexity.
(20:01):
One of the conversations I'm having a lot right now is, hey, I understand the need for AI.
I think it's super valuable.
We need to be intentional with where we apply it because it's not going to solve every problem.
And I don't want the team wasting effort trying to solve a particular problem with AI when we could have gotten so much more leverage and efficiency somewhere else.
That's where I want us to do it again.
(20:22):
Comes back to impact.
And you, as a leader, as a growing leader, as an emerging leader, as a strategic leader, want to be able to articulate these things.
Quick caveat here.
A huge part of self advocacy and education and awareness comes down to communication.
In all of the examples I've given you today on how to communicate, at no point did I ever say no.
At no point did I ever say that's a dumb idea.
(20:44):
At no point did I ever say it won't work.
No point did I say that's super hard.
And Steve sucks at data.
If you want to be effective in your job and in your leadership, you cannot be negative.
You need to educate in a positive way.
And this comes down to communication, right?
(21:04):
Hey, I'm happy to use AI in my space, but I want to make sure we get the impact and the lift that you're looking for.
Spending a ton of time building a prompt engineering system on this particular issue is only going to save us about 15 minutes a month.
But if I take a little more time, I could deliver something in this space and that has the potential of saving us six to eight hours.
I think that would be a better use of our time.
(21:25):
But I wanted to validate with you first.
That is a positive.
I'm not saying no, it won't work on process A or no, that doesn't save us any time.
I'm communicating the cost and trade offs.
If you want to get better at your career, if you want to develop as a leader, if you want potential growth opportunities, you must under all circumstances improve your communication.
(21:47):
I know I talk about this every episode.
I'm sorry I sucked at it.
All right?
I was terrible at communication.
I am living proof that your communication can get better over time.
The biggest tips for improving your communication are Take self ownership.
When I make a mistake, I'm the first to say I made a mistake.
I'm also going to tell you how I'm never going to make that mistake again, what processes I've put in place to prevent it, and how we're going to get through it this time positive.
(22:12):
But I'm the first to admit that I made a mistake.
If I need you to do something or if I feel you're not doing something, I'm the first to take ownership for my part in that.
Hey, you know, I'm realizing in hindsight that my expectations were not very clearly set at the start of this project.
What I really need from you is to deliver on xyz.
In return, I'm able to do ABC which benefits all of us for the project.
(22:35):
But I wanted to level set those expectations because I feel it was a miss at the start on my part that is so much more palatable to the other person than dude, why aren't you doing your job?
Take self ownership.
When you communicate concerns, negativity, risks, you do it in a positive way.
This is a trade off conversation.
I can do anything.
I tell my boss all the time.
(22:56):
I can do anything you want to.
You want the moon?
I can get you the moon.
It's going to cost a lot, but I could do it.
You want me to create AI models on all this?
I can absolutely do it.
Here's the cost.
You must have a cost.
You must have a trade off.
You must have what?
Something needs to be done.
But if you're communicating in a negative way, hey, I'm not doing this thing because I don't want to or no, I don't want to take that on or no, I already worked 80 hours this week.
(23:21):
If you're always negative, you're not going to grow because people don't want to come to you with what they need, which means you're not going to be put on high impact projects, which means you're not going to be able to drive your impact higher, which means you're not going to be able to be seen as a leader.
You have to work on your communication first.
So educate your leadership.
Advocate for yourself, build a network, improve your communication.
(23:43):
Literally, if you only ever do those four things, you will see such a change in your perception at work and in your career growth.
If you want more tactical tips on how to do this, there are a bunch of podcast episodes.
Again, we'll link some things in the comments below.
But also check out my book, Secrets of the Career Game.
It is a very tactical way to improve in all four of these areas.
(24:04):
It was written as a textbook and a guide to help you.
Don't sit back and wait for your boss to tell you need to get better at something.
Don't sit back and wait for your boss to give you an opportunity.
Go for it.
Make an effort.
Be the CEO of your own career.
That's when you're going to start to see things change.
Hopefully you guys like today's episode.
If you do have any questions, please leave them below in the comments.
(24:25):
Otherwise, if you liked it, go ahead and give us five stars and check back in next week for another great episode.
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