RULE 26: Study The Promotion System

When you start your career, it is at the lowest level, and you gaze upward at the boss, the manager, the managing director, with reverence and awe. One day, inevitably, you will age, gain experience, and ascend to greater heights yourself. Either that or maybe start up on your own. And for most people that’s about it. Career-wise they meander vaguely upward, often getting sidetracked and stopping at a level where they seem comfortable, coasting, happy. And that’s it. Career over. Game over. Very sad. Unless that’s really what you want. And if you’re a committed Rules Player, I doubt it.

The Rules Player never meanders or arrives anywhere vaguely. You plan. You know the system and use it. You understand the steps to be taken to get you from A to B and onward and upward all the way to Z.

You have to study the promotion system if you are to enter it and profit from it. It is simply no use waiting for something to turn up, or for fate to take a hand and propel you upward by luck or chance. You have to seize the day and make your own luck. You have to know exactly how to avoid all clichés and elevate yourself within the system.

So, what is the promotion system within your industry? Do you know it? Have you studied it? Study the background of others who have been there before you. If not, chances are you are relying on luck to get you somewhere. This may be fine, and it may get you where you want to be, but it is unreliable— bit like playing the lottery in the hope it’ll make you rich and you can retire. It might happen, but it’s not likely.

Making a promotion chart:
• Within your industry look upward to the most senior position that can be held (or the highest you could possibly expect yourself to aim for—they should really be the same thing—mark this).
• Now look at the lowest—mark this.
• Now plot all the steps in-between.
• Now mark your own place.
• Now list the steps needed to get there.

You now have your own promotion chart and can cross off each step as you make it.

(The same principle of steps also works if you decide that rather than ascend where you are, you’d like to go up on your own and be entrepreneurial rather than corporate.)

While you are doing this, you can also list all the skills/experience, etc. that you would need for each step to be made successfully. Next to this, you can add what you have to do to acquire these—where you must go, what you have to learn, what you need to study. You can add these back into your long-term plan and your five-year plan.

YOU HAVE TO SEIZE THE DAY AND MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK.