Being Collaborative May Hurt Your Chances For Promotion

Spending too much time on collaboration and being well-liked will hurt your ability to make progress in your career.

Coaching client: My team is delivering high-quality work. I am getting praise regularly from my team, my manager, and a few senior leaders about how much I am supporting the team. And yet, whenever I ask about promotion to Director, I am brushed off. And my peer, who is less well-liked, just got a promotion instead. Why? How can I change this?

When we don’t see progress in our careers, we default to doing more. We take on more projects. We help those around us so they appreciate and like us more. Some leaders fall into people-pleasing modes, working around the clock to ensure they are "well-liked” and “team players.” This leads to the frustration that I am doing more than others, but I am not getting recognized.

At Meta, for product leaders, work is broadly divided into two areas: impact and collaboration. Performance ratings for PMs are weighted 80% impact and 20% collaboration. For managers and directors, closer to 70% impact and 30% collaboration. This is a simple way to highlight something most high-achieving leaders figure out — not all work is promotion-worthy work.

Most tasks that fall into the “collaboration” bucket are not promotion-worthy work — non-promotable tasks (NPTs). Following praise and gratitude often leads you squarely towards tasks that no one else wants to take on (and so they appreciate you for taking one for the team).

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Yue’s Coaching Corner

• Give yourself a fresh start with Unleash Your Leadership Superpower: Chart Your Path to Executive. Now enrolling for the Feb 3-14 cohort. This course is for mid-career folks who are doing a lot but not getting noticed. Learn how to find your strengths as a leader, shift your workload to showcase those strengths, and get noticed.

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Sniff Test for Non-Promotable Tasks

Non-promotable tasks are tasks that help organizations but do not advance your career. The NPT sniff test is three-fold:

• Does it contribute directly to a company objective? Can you clearly articulate how in one clear cause-and-effect relationship? If there are two or three or more hops, then it is not a direct contributor.

• Is it highly visible to others not involved in the day-to-day work? If I asked the skip level of your cross-functional team, would they know that you’re working on it?

• Does it require specialized skills? Even better, does it play to your leadership superpower? If it’s a task that anyone can do, then it can be assigned to anyone. This does not move your career forward.

Take a look at your calendar for the next three months. What percent of your time are you spending on non-promotable tasks? Here are some examples:

• running the internship program

• onboarding new hires

• being a mentor to others

• taking and sending notes

• organizing the next social event or team offsite

• handling low-revenue and time-consuming projects

• handling a difficult client that no one else wants to manage.

• creating documentation that no one else wanted to do

• managing the feelings of others

If you are spending more than 20%-30% of your time on the above as a Senior Manager or below, it is too much. You are not moving your career forward. While these tasks may be valued because they improve team sentiment and morale, they are not driving the perception of you as a visionary and effective leader.

Fill the Impact bucket

If you’re looking for that promotion in the next 6 months, spend 70% - 80% of your time on work that falls in the “Impact” bucket. Some examples include:

• pitching and leading high-visibility projects

• sharing team insights broadly across the organization.

• spending time with executives and leaders on vision and strategy

• hitting stretch metric goals

• resolving high-visibility and important conflicts or debates

Businesses promote people who deliver business impact, make difficult decisions, and push for innovative strategies. Focus and prioritize work that directly ties to these perceptions of you as a leader.

Necessary But Not Sufficient

At this point, I can hear some of your shouting: but I was dinged for not being a team player, too aggressive, or not collaborative!

Yes, managing perceptions around collaboration is a foundation for promotion. Being a team player is often necessary but not sufficient. Hence, I encourage clients to spend 20% - 30% of their time on one or two high-impact and high-visibility collaboration areas. It is an “AND” for impact and collaboration — not an “OR”.

In the early days at Meta, there was a very strong focus to only do work that has a direct impact on the business. It led to the promotion of non-team players who were laser-focused on business impact but hurt team morale or took advantage of others. To counter this, leaders had to create a specific area of assessment in performance reviews for “collaboration” to ensure that the company wasn’t falling to the other extreme. Many NPTs fall into this bucket.

Women leaders also more frequently encounter the warmth vs competence dilemma. They are expected to make difficult (read: not universally well-liked) decisions but also be kind and warm. Women end up handling more collaborative because they are asked more often and expected to say yes more often. In contrast, men are more likely to get a free pass for saying no or “breaking a few eggs” in the name of efficiency towards impact. As such, I often see female leaders err on the higher side of 30% of their time on collaboration and strategically avoiding highly critical detractors in collaboration.

With the start of a new year, take a look at how you’re spending your time at work. What percent of your work falls into Impact versus Collaboration? What tasks are you taking on that are non-promotable tasks? Does this split align with your goals for your career?

That’s all folks. See you next week at 3:14 pm!

Yue