Why Great Engineers Get Passed Over for Promotion

One of them, Curtis, changed how he communicated the work that he was already doing, and he went from fearing another performance problem to the best performance review of his entire career, new machine learning opportunities, and even receiving an award for his proposal. So I want to show you the equation behind that shift.

Your next promotion, Promotion is not about results. It’s about your reputation. It’s about your reputation. And your reputation equals results multiplied by reach. Today, I will prove to you why getting promoted requires both for you to get to the next level. We need to build results and reach. Now, before I get to it, we’ve got 3 things to cover, your reputation, your results, and your reach. That 3rd one, reach, frankly, is the hard part for almost every engineer at any level I’ve ever worked with.

So I put together a resource for you that’s gonna be linked up in the show notes, in the description, 200 techniques that you can leverage to amplify, to multiply, and to extend reach in your career. I put So many in here because I want you to understand that it’s not that hard. It’s just your willingness to take action and do it. So let’s get started on building your reputation. So what is a reputation? If results are not what gets you promoted, if results are not what gets you exceeds performance ratings and reputation is, we better define it. And the simplest way for you to think about Your reputation is understanding that it’s what people think of when they think of you.

The answer to the question, what do people think of when they think of you, is your reputation. You hear a lot about personal brand, especially on social media, here on LinkedIn and YouTube and Instagram, all the places maybe where this video is showing up for you. People talk about personal brand. Well, as far as I’m concerned, we’re gonna call those the same thing. Your personal brand is your reputation. And like I showed you here, the formula is results times reach. Now, because it’s a multiplication of these 2 things, you can think of it simply geometrically.

To put a picture here, imagine that you have 10 reputation points to invest in your career and you choose to invest 1 of them into reach and 9 of them into results. By the way, this is a pretty typical engineering approach to amplify your results. Well, that would be 9— we’ll call them reputation points. Versus— you see where I’m going here— what if you just put 5 and 5? You’re doing less work than this other engineer, and you’re putting more emphasis on reach. And that leader has 25 points. They’re winning in this reputation-building game. By the way, you don’t have to like this game. But if you don’t play by the rules of the game that is your career, then you’re going to have more resistance, more friction, more challenge, more frustration, more burnout, more stuckness, all of the things that you don’t want. So let’s understand the game. Let’s learn how to play it in a way that’s optimized for you. Don’t fall into this trap of a career that is really skinny on just results. with no reach. What you want is to build a very rounded reputation where you’re delivering great results and getting big reach. Now, there’s another important concept about reputation before we move on and talk about the right kind of results and the right kind of reach.

The formula being a multiplication, implies that if either side equals 0, then it doesn’t matter what the other one is. Think about this. If you delivered the absolute best results, ah, Max, I just saw that I wasn’t sharing the screen there. Let’s back that up just a second. Here we go. One more thing on reputation before we move on and explore how to amplify results and amplify reach. Remember, this is a formula that’s multiplication. Reputation equals results times reach. What happens if either one of these equals zero? Zero times anything. Equals zero. So if you have zero results, it doesn’t matter how many people are aware of what you’re doing. You have no reputation. Zero results, zero reputation. Okay. But the same is true if you have zero reach. Zero reach equals zero reputation. So consider this. Imagine that you did more work and the best work, the highest value work that your company has ever seen from anyone ever by a factor of 10, by a factor of 100. I don’t care. You could pick anything you want. You are the absolute best employee that has ever worked there when it comes to delivering results. But nobody In the entire company is aware that you’re the one doing the work. The work just magically shows up.

People are enjoying it. They’re taking the credit for it themselves, or they just enjoy the magic of it all. Somehow the work shows up. Will you get promoted if nobody knows that it was you doing the work? Of course not. How how could you? Nobody is aware that it was you, so they’re not going to be able to promote you. Your reputation equals results times reach. If either side is zero, your reputation is zero. Now let’s talk briefly about results. I don’t want to spend a lot of time here because frankly, as an engineering leader. This is what you’re good at.

This is your default setting. The reason you’re watching this video is not because you’re struggling with results. And I wanna remind you about one key thing that engineers often get wrong, especially when we move into those first manager positions, senior manager. I even see this at the director level, which may seem surprising, but the temptation when it comes to results, Is to begin by focusing on more, more results. Hey, if 1 is good, 2 is better, right? If 2 is better, 3 is better than that. And we just keep focusing on more, more, more, more, more. Hey, if this is the kind of work that my boss wants, that the skip wants to see, if this is what’s getting rewarded on the team, then let’s just do more of that. Let’s do more of that. This is what’s on my job description. Do more, do more, do more. Oh man, I’m looking over here at Zach doing all this, so I better make sure that I do more than Zach did so that I can stand out. More is a lazy way to amplify your results. The first shift that you need to make is to go away from more and focus on actually delivering something that is in fact higher quality. Something better. Better is better than more.

Think about opportunities to deliver that incremental value, to improve the process, to change the way that we’re doing things, to deliver a higher quality of output than Zack is doing. So rather than looking at Zack’s work and saying, oh, I better do more than him, look at Zack’s work and say, How can I do something that’s better than what he’s doing? Because better is better than more. But here’s the real key. Better is hard to come by sometimes. We’re working on these, you know, edge-of-the-knife pieces of technology and designs that have been around in some cases for hundreds of years that we’re optimizing around. And a lot of the cost and a lot of the engineering that’s been done over decades and decades, it’s gonna be hard for you to come up with something better. So, The real secret, if you want to amplify your results, is to focus on finding something different. Something different. Different is better than better. Better is better than more, but different is better than better. Why is that? In a sea of black and white cows, it doesn’t matter how great your milk is. But if you can be the purple cow, as marketing genius Seth Godin wrote about, you immediately get everyone’s attention. Invest the incremental effort when it comes to your results, not in doing more work, putting in a ton of extra hours, or even just trying to be smarter or better or faster than your peers, those things have smaller and incremental gains. But if you can find that differentiated level of performance, that output that no one else has been working on, that innovative idea that has not yet been explored, and you can be the face who delivers it, that’s the kind of result that multiplies your reputation. Not all results are created equal.

Don’t see this reputation formula and fall into the trap of thinking that more, working harder, is the path to my success. You might remember I mentioned Curtis earlier in the video, and Curtis almost fell into this same trap. He was a senior software engineer at NASA, and he was already working really hard. Now, the thing about Curtis is he had been placed on a performance improvement plan not long before he and I started working together. He had done a lot of work on more and better, right? And he was actually a bit fearful that his current role could follow that same path, that he might end up on a PIP again. And he was extremely excited about the opportunity and the role that he was in, and he didn’t want to ruin it. So he came for coaching and said, hey, like, what else do I need to do? How can I be even better? What more do I need to be working on to make sure that that doesn’t happen again. And I showed Curtis this same distinction that I’m showing you right now. I said, hey, look, you’re already performing at a high level. You’re not in any risk of being on a PIP.

And you’re also not building your reputation at the level you could simply because you’re not communicating, building reach, which we’ll talk about next. So Curtis began giving his managers clearer information about his contributions. He started sharing with more people about the work that he had been delivering. It was the same work. He didn’t add anything to his plate without claiming any change in capability. No new skills, no new growth. Curtis went on to receive that year the best performance review of his entire career. All right, he got new machine learning opportunities. He won an award, like I mentioned before, because of the machine learning project proposals that he was putting in. His career exploded. But here’s what’s amazing. The work was already there. It was reach that changed what became possible. So let’s talk about this 3rd and critical piece of the formula. If our reputation equals results times reach, then how do we create that reach? And like I said before, I’m going to go through some high-level principles here, but you’re going to need to take action and be tactical in actually creating this for yourself.

So I created a guide with 200 techniques, 200 tactics, ways that you can go and amplify and multiply and extend your reach in your career. Don’t overcomplicate this. Go grab the free guide and pick a couple of those actions that you can take right now to get started. So let’s talk about reach. And just like results, not all reach is created equal. It actually reminds me of a trip that I took with my wife from Southwest Michigan up to Traverse City, Michigan. Absolutely beautiful place. Highly recommend the bay. Traverse City and the bay there is just stunning. Awesome place. And not too far from Mackinac Island if you want to make a whole week of it. We went up to Traverse City. Well, on the drive We found this hole-in-the-wall sushi place. I don’t even remember the name of the business. I remember the exit. I remember where it was. And I remember pulling up to the building thinking, whoa, should we actually be eating raw fish from a place that looks like this? It’s a little bit sketchy. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah. The like hole-in-the-wall vibes that are Uh, you know, I’m not so sure how this is gonna go. Well, we went in, got a table, not a lot of people in there, and I was nervous. Like, this could be a big mistake. I’m about to ruin my vacation, uh, you know, if I eat some, some raw fish here. Well, the sushi came out. Oh my goodness, gorgeous presentation. They had these, these big wooden boats, and the sushi was all laid across this boat. It was stunning. The taste, the textures, the flavors, the creativity, the recipes— everything about this sushi was top-notch, world-class. I mean, okay, maybe New York City or some of the big cities on the coasts are gonna have sushi that would make this seem, you know, average. But for Michigan, this is the best sushi I’ve had in the state of Michigan. It was Awesome.

And so we put a pin on our map and we said, man, we are coming back here on our way home. And we went again. And then the following summer, on our way to Traverse City for another trip, we said, oh, we know exactly what we’re doing. We’re going for sushi on the trip. Well, guess what? Sushi place went out of business. The best sushi I’ve had in the state of Michigan Went out of business. The best-kept secret, the best sushi in town, still goes out of business if nobody knows that they are there. You see, from the outside, you couldn’t tell that it was a nice restaurant. And when we went in, there was nobody there eating. They didn’t have a very big business going. And just because they produced the best product doesn’t mean that their customers knew about it and they went out of business. Your career can go out of business no matter how good your product is, if the right people, your customers, don’t know about it. Which brings me back to my point that not all reach is created equal. Well, there are people in your career who are far more important than others to reach. And I imagine you can guess who they are. You see, at the center of that bullseye are the decision makers. Right. This is just a handful of people. Who are going to have the highest influence on your future inside of your company. Or if you’re looking to transition to a new company, these are the interviewers, the hiring directors, the people who are making that decision to bring you on.

There are a handful of people who matter more than anyone else. Outside of that circle, you have a whole nother group, a bigger group of peers. You have mentors. Right? You might have sponsors who you need to keep informed, your friends, other colleagues. There’s all kinds of people who you want to inform about your work, but the priority is making sure that the decision makers know what you have done. Then we can spend and invest time on this second circle, and that second circle can be quite influential, don’t get me wrong. But the outside of the ring is where you find things like LinkedIn, strangers on the internet. Well, it’s so funny to me when people hear me talk about this idea of reach, the first thing that they do is go out and post on LinkedIn as if somehow the big gap in building your career at your company is how many strangers on the internet know about your results. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to post on LinkedIn. It’s a great idea. And I’ll do a video another time that explains how you can get more value for your reputation from your LinkedIn presence. But please hear me. What’s far more important in building reach is that you start from that inside out when it comes to the sphere of influence, the people who you need to connect with and who need to know about the results that you’ve delivered.

Not all results are created equal. Better is better than more. Different is better than better. Not all reach is created equal. Start at the center, the decision makers, the people who have the biggest influence over your destiny for what’s next. Then expand out with the additional time and energy that you have. Don’t waste time on reach with the people who have no ability to control where your life and your career goes. From here. Listen, the truth is your work does not speak for itself. It, it never has and it never will. Someone has always come along and spoken on behalf of your work. It could have been a great boss that you had in the past. It could have been a mentor or sponsor who came into that room and spoke to your results on your behalf. Maybe it’s been you. You’re the one who’s out there really talking about and bringing that authentic self-promotion. But if you’re stuck in your career, if you’re not getting the opportunities that you want, if you’re not getting those promotions and those exceeds performance ratings, it’s very possible that you’re not focused on building your reputation.

You’re just out there working your butt off, Delivering results. Make this shift, and I promise you, you’re going to see a tremendous amount of acceleration the same way that Curtis did. And if you don’t, then it might be that you are still stuck in phase 2 of promotion and not understanding how using this reputation allows you to move through the 3 phases of promotion. I’ve done a video on the 3 phases of promotion. I will link that up here so you can go watch that next. If you understand this reputation concept and you’re saying, Zach, I’m doing all the things, I’ve downloaded your freebie, I’ve done 50 of these tactics to expand reach and it’s still not working, then go check out the 3 phases of promotion because it’s important before the promotion happens that you get out of phase 2 and into phase 3. Go check that out and I’ll see you there in the next video. Let’s do this.