How I Moved from Manager to Director Without Even Asking for the Promotion

Are you a manager who wants to contribute at a higher level and make a bigger impact on your company, but you're struggling to figure out how to break into a director level role?

I'm going to tell you exactly how I got promoted from manager to director, along with getting a 30 percent salary increase without even asking.

At the end of this video, I'm going to share a framework that you can use to apply it to your situation.

But before we get too far, I want to just quickly introduce myself. If you're new to the channel, I'm Doug Howard and... Basically, what I do here on this channel is I teach leaders how to leverage people skills to increase your impact on your team and your organization so that you can advance in your career, but I don't want to waste too much time so let's dive right in.

The Path from Middle Management to Executive

Now, just to backpedal a little bit, a common thing I hear from managers is that, you're stuck in this catch 22 where you're working hard, you're putting in extra hours. You're delivering results. You're growing your team and you're doing this for years, but you're not getting promoted and you're not advancing to the next level of your career.

It's a black box with respect to what does it take to get to the next level? What does it take to become a director or an executive? How do I get out of middle management? When you ask your boss, how do I do this? You don't really get a straight answer. There really isn't a clear roadmap.

I know I was in this exact same situation. I was grinding it out for years. I thought my performance, if I'm delivering results, if I'm working on the things that make a big impact, that's going to get noticed by the top and that's going to be what gets me to the next level of leadership and advances in my career.

But the problem with that is it doesn't work by itself. Don't get me wrong. You can't just be lazy or you can't not have the talent. But, the upper level management, they don't necessarily notice the value you're bringing to the table. They don't necessarily know what you're doing.

Skills You Need to Reach Director and Executive Level

Quite honestly nobody does tell you how to get in this position. There's a lot of different complexities to this, but what I want to say is that it all really boils down to one thing, and that's influence. You need to know how to influence all types of people upward, downward, and cross functionally. And you need to know how to influence other people's decisions to work in your favor.

I want to share with you how I did that when I tell you the story about how I got promoted without even asking. Now, just to give you a little bit of context around the story, the company I worked at was in a major transitional stage of our company.

We were going from a small startup into a major, global company is what we ended up becoming on the other side of the growth. And around this time we were acquired by a large company too. We were a structural engineering company. We had messy processes, unclear systems and operations, everything was just outdated, everything we were doing was archaic.

The whole industry was working in 3D technology for argument's sake, and we were working in 2D and, everyone else had electronic paper filing systems and we had manual paper copies. There was really poor information flow and poor documentation throughout our company. Everything was verbally passed throughout, Oh, he said this. She said that. There wasn't really good documentation on any of this stuff.

When we were a small, scrappy startup, it worked fine. We were able to hustle and we were able to rely on tribal knowledge to keep up and be aggressive and, attract new clients and have small growth in our business, but everything changed when our company was acquired. We were acquired by a major player in our industry and, we were all in commercial construction, our company and the parent company.

So it was a good fit as far as like they knew how our industry worked. They had tools that were relevant to our industry. We actually had shared customers. Our parent company knew, what could be expected from a company like us. They knew, market trends and industry trends and things like that.

So my point here is they were pushing for massive growth and they knew what growth was realistic. They were pushing us pretty aggressively and right around the time they acquired my company. They also acquired what would become a sister company for us, but that was based in the UK. They did exactly the same thing as us. They were just a company that did this in Europe and the idea was for both of our companies to merge into one nameplate so that we could have a global brand. That's why we were acquired.

Now, like I said, our parent company also worked in structural engineering, so they had tons of valuable resources, software, intel about the industry. There was a lot to be learned from them. When we were acquired, I was still an engineering manager.

Noticed Opportunities for Career Advancement

I was not in a director level role yet, and I saw plenty of opportunity for me. I saw plenty of opportunity for me to grow with this company, and I wanted to take advantage of that. Just being honest, I didn't want to get left behind. I can see where things were going. I could see where, as we were growing, there were two types of people in leadership.

There were the people that were driving the growth of the company. There were the people that were driving the decisions and that were having a big impact. And then there were the people that were in leadership that were just getting pulled along for the ride, yes, they were in a leadership position, but they weren't really being invited to contribute at a higher level. They weren't being included on major decisions. They were just a representation of leadership. They didn't really have any autonomy in their role. They couldn't really make major changes or whatnot. So anyway, you get the idea here.

I want it to be on the other end of that. I want it to be driving the company growth and with my product knowledge and experience, I felt like I was ready for that and I was in the right position for that and I was a good fit and I knew I could add a lot of value at the top. Now I had been grinding it out for a long time. I had been, burning the midnight oil and I had been, basically sacrificing my personal life going all in on my career to keep the department moving forward and making sure we didn't miss deadlines and, staying late to, to train people and hire new people and whatnot.

I'm not, bashing hard work or anything like that, but it wasn't paying off. Sure I was getting results with my team and with the department, but it wasn't really getting noticed by my boss. It wasn't getting rewarded. It wasn't getting promoted. I felt like I was doing the work of a director or at least a senior manager and I wasn't getting paid like that. I wasn't getting that title. I wasn't getting that credit.

In fact, a lot of times I wasn't getting included in decisions that were being made at our company. I was the highest ranking engineer in the company, but I reported to an executive who wasn't an engineer. So I didn't have a seat in these meetings where they'd be making decisions about budget or major clients that we're going to track or projects that we were going to accept. I wouldn't get invited to meetings where we would talk about deadlines and commitments that we were making to clients.

So then all of a sudden all this stuff was just dumped down to me. Decisions about our team and my people and my product that I had ownership of, that a design methods that I had ownership of. Decisions were being made by other people and I was stuck, carrying out their decisions.

I don't want to waste too much time talking about that. But the idea is I wanted to escape that, I didn't want to be in a situation where I was stuck carrying out other people's bidding, or where I was stuck following decisions that were made by other people.

Now I saw our company being acquired, I saw that as an opportunity for our company to actually start growing by integrating our parent company's systems and resources to basically get with the times and modernize. I was tired of dealing with all the messes that were created by, the archaic systems we had in place.

Building a Strategic Relationship with the Decision-Maker

I saw the potential of our parent company. I was excited by it. I was excited by, taking advantage of all these cool tools and resources they had. Like I said, I wanted to contribute at a strategic level and make a bigger impact.

During this period, this growing period, which was a few years, the position that my boss was in, which was a VP level, it was, basically a revolving door for many years. I think there was a period where I changed bosses four times over six years. The reason I'm sharing that is, I want it to be promoted, but it wasn't happening on its own. It wasn't happening by me just putting in the work, but I recognize that my boss, there was no continuity there. I didn't have any consistency there so by the time I built a relationship with one boss, they were gone and they were replaced by the next boss. What this means is my boss wasn't the decision maker who had control over my success, who had control over my career advancement. So I had to think a level up and I had to actually influence my boss's boss.

Now, just to tell you about my boss's boss, this person was a senior executive with our parent company. This person had been with our parent company for a long time. I think about, over 25 years, they were very proud of the parent company. They had a background in engineering earlier in their career. So that was a little bit of a common ground I found right away. They were, I think in mechanical engineering, I was in structural, but there was still, some common ground there. They had a Six Sigma black belt, so they're all about efficiencies and processes. I made that assumption at least.

The role of this person was, they were the voice of our parent company down to our company. He was the person that was pushing us to grow fast. He was the one that was telling us about the goals from our parent company and what numbers we needed to hit and when we needed to hit them by and what was the grand vision for how we fit in the big picture.

I looked at these things as a positive. I was excited about all the changes. I felt like we needed to change to, to improve and to grow, but a lot of people in our company didn't support that, they didn't see that as good. They looked at it as like big brother, coming down and changing the way everything was and they wanted things to stay the same. This is the way we've always done it, that type of mentality. Picture like how Michael Scott looks at Toby on the office, that's how everyone looked at this guy. He was an outcast, an outsider. He was in control, but, no one really embraced him or welcomed the resources he was offering from our parent company.

Now, I saw this as an opportunity to build a relationship with him. So what I did was I made an initial reach out. I didn't really have too much interaction with him before this point. He was based in a different city, so it wasn't like I could just walk to his office. I sent him an email asking for help and I asked him if he could connect me with scheduling resources in the parent company, because that is something we were struggling with. We were outgrowing our, current scheduling system. I knew it needed to change. So I basically told them, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I know that you guys have, massive scheduling systems that handle way more projects than we handle. Could you connect me with someone that could show me the scheduling system you guys use that I could look at ways to implement that with our operations here.

I emphasized how I wanted a fast solution. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel and I wanted to rely on our parent company's expertise. He was really receptive to this because he was, I think, really just happy that someone was embracing the parent company and someone was wanting to use the parent company's resources. He connected me with a few people. He connected me with some resources. I'm not going to go down that path, but long story made short, it was helpful. I took the stuff he gave me and put it into action.

I followed up with him, let him know that I was really appreciative of that and why I was appreciative of that, how it helped me. I asked him if it was okay if I reached out to him again. So what I did was, I did this a few times to nurture the relationship. I asked him for specific help on something that was related to me leveraging a resource from the parent company. In this, it just started a dialogue where I could ask him some more open questions and learn about the things that he wanted and learn about the things he was interested in.

The key here is, I was learning about his intrinsic motivations. I was learning about, what were his goals for the company. Before this point, I didn't really have much of a relationship with him, but what I learned in talking with him was that, he wanted continuity and leadership. He was frustrated with the revolving door of bosses that I had, he was frustrated with that. He wanted continuity in that position. He also wanted our company, our small mom and pop company. He wanted us to grow as fast as possible because we had a huge market opportunity and a tight window to fit in. There was a lot of competitors of ours. All sprinting to get into that top seat and time was of the essence. So he was just stressing growth as fast as possible at all times. He also wanted us to embrace automation technology and systems and operations because everything we did was very manual. We didn't have hardly any automation in our operations. And like I said, he wanted us to utilize the parent company's resources.

Another part of this is he wanted us to start collaborating with our sister company in the UK to see if we could find symmetries and to start streamlining our operations just based on consolidating our product and, turning it into, for argument's sake, one method of beam design and one method of designing stairs instead of having two different types of stair systems at both offices. Just as a high level example. So those are the things he wanted, continuity, growth, embracing automation, embracing the parent company's resources and partnering more with our sister company in the U. K.

What I did was as I learned what those things were that he wanted, I made sure to emphasize that I wanted those things too. I did that with each interaction with him. I would explain to him, yeah, no, I definitely see the value in that. I definitely see how that would help us. I definitely see why that would be key to us, advancing or growing or moving faster.

Then I would ask him questions about it. How do you think we can do that better? Why do you think we're struggling with that? I would just probe deeper to just get more perspective from him. When you start building relationships with people, you find that they quickly open up to you when you're asking them questions about what they think, or their opinion, or their expertise and he shared a lot with me.

Thinking Strategically to Navigate the Promotion

Once I had a good handle on what he wanted and why he wanted it for the company, I came to him one day with an idea.

Here's what I said. I said, I believe we could grow a lot faster by working together with the UK team. Do you agree? Of course he agreed. Then I told him, the challenge for me is that the UK team is a black box. As engineers, we learn best by doing and by understanding how something works. I'm sure we can learn a lot from the UK team, but is there any way we can give me a better handle on what the UK's product systems and operations are?

I leaned on the fact that he was an engineer and explained like, Hey, this is how we engineers think I created a camaraderie there. Hey, can you understand where I'm coming from? We engineers need to have our hands on something to learn it. I told him that, I wasn't understanding what was going on over there, but I wanted to, and that's something he wanted as well. I emphasized how I wanted to learn from them. So I was basically reciting a lot of the things he was telling me back to him and speaking his language.

After I asked him about this, he proposed that he and I go on a week long trip to England to visit the sister company. The goal of the trip would be for me to learn the end to end operations. So I jumped on this opportunity. Two weeks later we were in England. And it was a great experience.

While I was there I got invited to participate and contribute in their strategic meetings. I built close relationships with their executive team. I went to project sites with them. Basically I spent seven days inside the hip pocket of my boss's boss, the executive I'm telling you about, along with the executives over in our UK team. I'm contributing to strategic discussions. We're talking about future visions for the company and how we can work together closely.

This is something that no one else in my U S branch has done yet. They've all been resisting this partnership and I'm the one that's embracing it. By going on this trip, I was really able to just show that I think at a higher level and that I was thinking at a more strategic level and I wasn't just thinking about the day to day.

I showed that I was focused on growing and advancing the business. I was interested in long term growth opportunities. I was interested in partnering with the UK. I made it crystal clear. I made it clear that I was fully invested in the company. I wasn't a job jumper. I'm here thinking about how can we become a number one player in our market. I'm having these types of discussions with very high ranking people in the company. I also, got to have, dinners with these people every night and lunches with these people and, with the executive that I traveled with, we took a flight overseas together too. So there was just a lot of time talking about personal stuff too. Getting to know him on a deeper level. This is key. This is something that gets overlooked. Building relationships is very important for, your perception that you create in your office, but I'm not going to get into that here.

But what I want to point out is, after this trip, here's how he responded. Everything changed from that point. Before this trip and before the stuff I was doing leading up to this with building a relationship with this person, I was being excluded from executive level meetings. I wasn't really being invited into decisions that impacted my team at the executive level. But now on the other side of this trip, I was being invited to those meetings and I was included in the strategic level decisions. Everyone was starting to view me as a thought leader in our company. They looked at me as someone who could add value in any discussion or situation. They were asking me questions about sales and they were asking me questions about manufacturing and other departments that I didn't really have, any true expertise in but now people looked at me as someone that could just be a good problem solver and come up with good ideas for any problem in the company.

Taking Control of Building Your Reputation as an Executive

Here's the part that, really is bittersweet. All of this had nothing to do with my performance and it had everything to do with the reputation that I created, nothing about me changed in that week.

I wasn't doing anything different in my job. My technical skills were the same. I still felt like I was just as good of a leader with my team. I felt like my team was performing just as well. Like nothing changed. All that changed was the relationship I built and the reputation I built with the decision maker.

Flash forward two months after this trip, I was promoted to director with a 30 percent salary increase without even asking for the promotion. So I didn't even bring it up. I didn't even say I think I'd be good for this role. I just focused on nurturing that relationship and there was a few other things I did.

Main Takeaways from My Path from Middle Manager to Director

I want to point out the main takeaways from this story that I just told. Because I didn't really spell them out.

1 - Figure Out Who the Real Decision-Maker Is

The first thing I did was I focused on the decision maker. I think this is a big mistake that a lot of managers make. I think you either rely on your results to speak for themself and just trust that you'll be taken care of. Which, we live in a very busy business world where everyone's distracted. So don't take it personal, but no, there's a good chance your boss doesn't notice what you're doing and they don't notice the value you're bringing to the table. But that might be a little bit obvious. The other thing that's not so obvious is focus on the decision maker.

In my situation, my boss was a revolving door, changed heads four times over, over a few years. So they weren't the decision maker, so I had to go to my boss's boss. But just to think about this a little differently, take a look at your boss. Are they the decision maker for your career? What I mean by that is, do you think your boss has the power to get you promoted? Does your boss have the ability to get that done? If they don't, who is that person? Is it your boss's boss? Is it something else? Is it, you need the entire executive team to buy into you?

Every company structure is different, don't just think of it linearly as, okay, I need to convince my direct boss cause your direct boss might not have all the power it takes to this type of thing done where you're going to get promoted into an executive level role.

This is why you need to focus on the decision maker. So identify who the decision maker is. If it's not your boss, then you need to focus on building a relationship with whoever the decision makers are. You also need to influence your boss to go to bat for you.

2 - Build Strategic Relationship with the Decision-Maker

The second main takeaway I want to give you from this story is how I built a relationship with the executive I was telling you about. What I did was I made him feel appreciated and that's where I started. I did this very strategically, while most of my company was snubbing him and making him feel like an outsider, and they weren't really showing any appreciation for the resources he was giving us from the parent company. They weren't really showing any interest in his insights or his expertise or really just him at all. I contrasted that by showing him that I did appreciate those things. I went out of my way to ask him to connect me with those resources. I asked him to connect me with, other people in our parent company. I showed him that I really respected his expertise and I respected the parent company.

I started there. I didn't really go in with any type of agenda that he could see. I didn't go in saying. I think I should be promoted to director level role because I have all these ideas. I just started by going in there and just saying, Hey, I really appreciate this is about you and the company. How can take advantage of this? How can I use this to help my team to help our company? That really opened him up to me. I had very little conversations with that. So basically it was creating a very positive first impression from his perception of me.

3 - Influence in Gradual Increments

The next thing I want to point out here is that I influenced him in gradual increments. What I mean by this is I didn't go for the moonshot right away. I didn't say, in my first conversation with them, Hey, I want to grow, send me to the UK, let me learn all about their end to end operations.

Instead of doing that, I started with a very small ask. I think this is something that a lot of people misunderstand about influence. You think of influence probably as a persuasive conversation. You go in there with some clever tactics to convince someone in a one time conversation, but that's not what influence is. That's manipulation. That's tricking someone. That's not what this is about.

Influence is... starting small. What is the minimum thing you can get them to say yes to? The M V Y, the minimum viable yes. Give them something to say yes to. That's really easy for them to say yes to, because what you're doing there is you're getting them in the habit of saying yes to you.

If you start with a tall ask that, feels like, Whoa, I don't know about this. I don't know if this guy's ready for it. You're starting off on the wrong foot because now they're getting used to saying no to you. It's going to be easier for them to say no to you next time. So you always want to start with something that you know they're going to say yes to.

In my situation, I asked for help with the scheduling resources. I knew he was all about pushing the parent company's resources on our company. So why wouldn't he say yes to that? I was basically asking for something that he wanted already. So I did that a few times. I was getting him to say yes to giving me those resources and to giving me his attention and time.

Then I started increasing the ask slowly, and then I didn't even really ask to go to the UK. He just brought it up as a solution because he was so used to, saying yes to me. The main point is when you're trying to influence someone, really focus on what is the minimum thing you can get them to say yes to. Get them to say yes first before you go with the real ask or whatever the big ask is.

4 - Help the Decision-Maker Visualize You in the Role

Another thing I want to point out is, I showed him exactly what it would look like for me to be in the director role. Once I had this opportunity to go to the UK, instead of just being a wallflower and listening and taking notes, I rolled up my sleeves and actively engaged with the UK's team.

If they were talking about problems, I gave my ideas. If they were talking about their product, I showed an interest in it and I asked things like, have you considered this? Or what happens when this happens? I showed that I was very interested in what they're doing, but I also got really engaged.

The reason I did this, one because I was genuinely interested in it, but two, it helped my boss's boss, it helped him envision what it would look like for me to be contributing at this level. I fit like a glove in this environment and he didn't have to use his imagination to think would Doug be qualified for this? Cause he actually had a, a real example throughout the course of a week for me to show him what it would look like for me to be at this table with everyone talking about these types of things. Visualization is key. I had a really good opportunity to take advantage of when I went on this trip to the UK.

If you don't have that type of situation come up where you're able to just spend a week with executives and show them what it would look like to work with them. What you have to do to influence them is, paint that picture for them. What you can do is, find out what the problems are and then talk about how you can contribute to solving them.

You get stuck in these meetings when you don't have someone like X, Y, and Z to contribute to these solutions, wouldn't it be nice to have someone there to contribute to these problems. You have to paint that picture and help them understand what the value is of you being brought up to that level.

5 - Intentionally Influence the Decision-Maker

There's one more takeaway that I want to point out from my story. and this is perhaps the biggest takeaway. Throughout the entire story, I was using a very simple three step framework for intentionally influencing the executive's decisions. This simple framework can be adapted and applied for leading upward and cross functionally, as well as for managing downward with your team. If you want to learn how to leverage this framework to your advantage, watch my episode called How to Manage Upward and Cross Functionally.

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