How to Get a Job Promotion [4 CLEVER TIPS]

Summary

• As the co-CEO of acquisition.com, my purpose is to help companies grow from $3 to $10 million in annual revenue.
• It's crucial to keep up with the pace in a high-growth company to sustain your value and job security.
• Being closed-minded is a significant detriment in a rapidly expanding company.
• Ensure peer-to-peer feedback is part of the company culture; it's more effective than hierarchical feedback.
• I advocate managing up—giving constructive criticism to higher-ups for company betterment, rather than just top-down feedback.
• Leaders and employees should gain a broad understanding of the entire company, beyond their department, to add more value.
• Learning to read the P&L and understanding your impact on it can significantly contribute to your development and the company's success.
• Advancing in a high-growth firm entails doing 20% of your boss's job—and doing it better.
• Comprehend how the company makes money, and either help drive revenue or protect it.
• Instilling the habit of driving or protecting revenue in your team encourages growth and adaptability in face of organizational challenges.
• Remember to provide feedback to peers, manage up, extend your understanding across the company, take on some of your boss's responsibilities successfully, and understand revenue generation and protection to thrive in high-growth or normal-growth companies.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing peer-to-peer feedback in your team's culture. This means, instead of waiting for the boss to point things out, team members should feel comfortable telling each other how they can improve. This makes everyone better. Make sure you know how to give constructive feedback, so you don’t hurt anyone's feelings.

It's also important to give feedback to your bosses and not just get it from them. This helps them see things they might miss. It might feel scary to tell your boss how they can do better, but it's super valuable and can make the whole company stronger.

Learn about more than just your own job. Understand how other departments work and how the company makes and spends money. This makes you way more valuable because you'll know how everything fits together. If you can, sit in on other departments' meetings sometimes to learn what they do.

Try doing some of your boss's work if you can handle it, and try to do it even better than they do. This shows you're ready for more responsibility and can be trusted with important tasks.

Lastly, it's super important to know if your role is about making money (driving revenue) or keeping money (protecting revenue). Figure out how you can do that best. Every job helps with this, even if it's not obvious how. Ask your boss to teach you about this if you're not sure.

So, remember:

1. Be brave and give feedback to others and accept it from them, too.
2. Talk to your bosses and help them see what they might not notice.
3. Learn about the whole company, not just your bit.
4. Help your boss with their work and rock at it!
5. Know how you help the company’s money grow or stay safe.

Doing these things will help you do better in your job, and they don't cost much money or time to start.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Understanding how the company makes money is key to adding value and becoming indispensable"

– Leila Hormozi

"Often the most powerful feedback in the world is peer-to-peer"

– Leila Hormozi

"Being closed-minded is probably the worst thing that you could have in a company that's growing quickly"

– Leila Hormozi

"Being able to manage up is a huge skill and it's very valuable"

– Leila Hormozi

"The moment you stop thinking about your own career and start thinking about the business is the moment you will win"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

don't know who i am my name is laila hormozy i'm co-ceo of acquisition.com which is a portfolio of companies that does about 85 million per year in revenue and i my goal with this channel is really to get you from wherever you're at between 3 to 10 million in revenue per year for free so that being said what i want to talk about in this video is actually something that was it came up at a talk i gave this past weekend and after the talk you know we all get into a room and it's me and alex and you know maybe 30 people in the room and they get to ask us whatever questions for 30 minutes and so this company that i spoke for at the event they're one of our portfolio companies and so the team that was there is a team that you know we're invested in their company and you know i know who everyone is but i haven't necessarily met everyone until this event and so they had the chance to ask us questions as well and the question i got that really prompted me to make this video was you know how do i continue to grow add value keep my job in a high growth company and context for this is that when we started working with the company it was doing like 300 350 a month and now they're doing about 1.3 a month about a year later and so that's a lot of growth for a company you know i've been very vocal about the fact i even said it when i was making my speech of like you've got to keep up and the reason i do this is not to scare people it's to give people the same knowledge that i have in my head right which is like i know that there's a very large possibility that you won't be here in a few years and i want you to know that too so you can beat the odds and so some people look at it like oh you're provoking fear i look at it like i want to make sure that all the knowledge in my head is also in my team's head and so they asked this question and um it prompted me to make this which is really i want to talk about how do you continue to grow in a high growth company how do you maintain the uh value arbitrage that you're providing to that company when it's growing incredibly fast and i think that it's a lot of the times much easier than people let off it's just that a lot of people don't have the innate character traits and so because they don't have the innate character traits to continue to grow and be open-minded and coachable that you're not open to the things that i'm going to provide this video right and so i'll start off with that which is like if someone's not open-minded or coachable there's really no use even watching this video because we're doing any of these things because they're just not going to do it right and so being closed-minded is probably like the worst thing that you could have in a company that's growing quickly that being said there's really four things um and when they asked me this question these four things came to mind because uh first men those of you who don't know in 2019 i actually hosted a full team meetup for gymlodge and it was literally everybody it was 120 employees they all flew into austin texas it was this huge event very expensive very chaotic and i'd never done a full company meet up like that before we'd done leadership which was like you know every quarter what we've always done is like all of leadership will always fly in and you know it's like anywhere between 10 and 20 people depending on like what's going on that quarter initiatives etc this was 120 people so it's very much more like educating them you know pouring into them like trying to really just like cement the culture of the company and what i told them all i think it really stuck because a lot of the leaders will still tell me they remember the speech this day which i got up on that stage in front of everyone i said dude 95 percent of you won't be here in five years and they were all like you know like we thought this was like a team meetup like rah-rah like why is she telling us this and the fact is it's like those are the stats so in a high-growth startup the stats are that 95 of the founding team won't be there in five years and so i don't say that to provoke fear in people i say it so that they have the same information that i have in my head i think that the biggest disadvantage that a ceo can can put upon their team is not to tell them the same information they know if i learn something i want to see how fast can i translate it to my team and so that was what i was trying to do and i explained to them what do you have to do to continue to be here in five years what are the traits of people who are going to be here in five years and that's what i shared with them and that's what i want to share in this video today because i thought it was a really good question how do you continue to add value how do you continue to maintain your job in a high growth company and listen if you're not in a high growth company or something normal continuously you know five percent three percent whatever year over your growth company this would be probably a good video on how to get promoted and so i really thought about what are the four things that i typically recommend to people when they're asking me these questions right the first one is that if you want to continue to keep up with the company this is one thing that you can do as a teammate employee leader in the company it's switch from top to bottom feedback into peer-to-peer feedback and i'll explain this from two points of view right one is as the company is growing very quickly it's really always a strain on leadership it's a straight on everybody but it's definitely a strain on leadership because that's typically lagging typically we fill the front line and the you know higher touch you know customer facing roles first and then we lag in terms of management in companies like this and so what happens is that leaders feel this immense pressure to always have to hold everyone accountable and they like can't it's impossible to always remember everything everyone's doing checking up in people holding it all together etc and like yes there's systems you can use et cetera but like your brain can only take up so much attention so i know when i had like 11 direct reports and they all have completely different part departments under them i was like losing my mind sometimes you know i'm like i feel shitty because it's really hard to hold everyone accountable what you can know is that what your leader what is going to help you your leaders ship team or if you are a leader that's going to help your entire team kind of congeal more is if you cannot just hold your direct reports accountable or let your boss hold you accountable but if you can hold your peers accountable and that's one of the hardest things for a boss to cement into the culture is hey it's not just me that should be giving you feedback and it's not just you that should be giving me feedback but i need everyone to give each other feedback and that's when you create like a flywheel effect with your team is when not just top to bottom can give each other feedback but peer to peer can and so what that means is like when you have an issue with somebody on the team when you see someone on the team or on the meeting that didn't do what they said they're going to do you don't just wait for your boss to say something you say something and this is very counterintuitive for most people they think oh that's my boss's job oh that's this leader's job oh this you know the most powerful feedback in the world it's peer-to-peer right so like think of it if you're in the classroom uh say in high school and your teacher tells you that you know you did a bad job on something blah blah rah-rah you know you suck you're like uh okay well i hate the teacher anyways right or like the teacher always brings me the bad news like you're almost numb to it because the teacher's the only person delivering you bad news but say you have a group that you're accountable to and you have to complete a project and you fail to meet the requirements that project and your group says you let us down like we're waiting on you what are you doing like buck up this isn't what we expect you're like oh right because those are people that you relate to and those are people that it's more of um it gives you more of a feeling of isolation when you are not able to live up to the expectations of the entire team and not just the leader because you're almost numb to what the leader's saying and so if you're in a high growth company or even just a company in general stop talking to your boss about your peers and start talking to your peers about your peers that is one of the best things that you can do in a high growth company because what happens is as you continue to add more and more people in the company the communication becomes vastly more complex i can tell you that when we had over 100 employees my main job was figuring out how to communicate something in like eight different ways every time any change in the company anything that was happening anyone getting hired anyone getting fired it's like i have 17 different channels i need to put this in it's like text video meeting this like all these different ways to make sure it's disseminated down and so the number one thing that you can do is help your boss by providing feedback to your peers rather than giving it to your boss and expecting them to do so because peer-to-peer feedback is always more effective and so the number one way you could implement this is on meetings really it's just you know when people are kind of you know showing what did they do for the week what are they planning to do this week etc and if you have a thought of like hey i thought they were supposed to do this or hey why is this not done i've been waiting on this person for a week say something and i have a video in here basically how to give feedback if you just you know search it it'll come up and you can use that and make sure like as long as you're using that framework on how to give feedback and you don't sound like a complete it's extremely effective and so that's the first thing i would be doing now the second thing that i would be doing and this kind of goes hand in hand is that instead of just doing top-down feedback you need to start as an employee as a leader as soon as company giving bottom up feedback and so i'll tell you this is you know i was at this event i was talking to different people and i was saying you know do you give this person the leader i'll call him uh david david feedback and they're like well no i expect that like other people do that i'm like the biggest reason that companies fail is because the founder is unaware of the problems that are occurring it's almost like everyone has this rock and underneath the rock there's all these little bugs and and nobody wants to flip it over and show the boss and be like look at all these bugs over here instead they're like they they flip it open they look and then they're like oh covered up and then i went to the boss like he's so excited he's so happy there's all this growth i don't want to be the right like i don't want to rain on the parade i don't want to be negative it's like there's a difference between providing feedback and productive criticism and being negative right it's different and so that being said being able to give your boss feedback being able to manage up is a huge skill and it's very valuable and the number one thing i see is in people that are green right you've never been in management before maybe this is the highest role you've ever had you've never been promoted past where you're at right now is that almost all the time you are not as good at giving your boss feedback as the person who has 20 years on you so like the people that i've hired that have 20 30 years more experience than me you know what they're very good at giving me feedback they tell me like hey you did a great job there hey that wasn't your best you know like they they're not afraid to because they know that i value their opinion and the only way to even find out if your opinion is valued is to express it and so that's the second thing is that it is absolutely on you it's absolutely your responsibility as an employee as a person of this company as a representative of this company to give your boss feedback to tell them where the problems lie to say these are all this is all the under the rug here's the stuff that sally's not telling you here's the stuff that rich isn't telling you do you know how valuable that is because it is much easier to solve small problems than big ones and if you tell your boss the problems when they're small then they are going to be so grateful that they didn't have to find out later when it was so big that nobody could hide it anymore and it's just learning and really gathering and mustering up the courage to do so and that's what stops most people they're just like afraid to tell their boss i promise you your boss will be grateful and if your boss isn't grateful then maybe you need to quit i don't know probably an so anyways that's the second piece now the third piece right if you're looking at how do i continue to add value in a high growth company how do i continue to how do i get promoted right in a normal growth company would be rather than only focusing on depth of skill say you're a customer success leader you're always reading customer success customer success customer success focus on width holistic view of the company and this is where a lot of leaders miss is they silo themselves they only study their department they only think of their department they only better their department the moment that you stop thinking about your own career and your own department and start thinking about the business is the moment you will win and this is where so many people have it twisted they think i've got to make sure my department's the best and they almost boast about it a lot of people do especially in like newer companies like well my department's unlocked well my department my department my team my this your any what like would you say when you think of like the amount of irony to this is ridiculous to me because the only way that a team functions is when they're all functioning as one team not ten teams right yes there are teams within a team but you can never forget the picture of the whole team and so a lot of leaders miss this and they become so wrapped up in their own career and their own resume and their own department and their ego that they forget to the company comes first which means many times you must sacrifice your own department you sacrifice your own career growth you sacrifice for the greater good of the company and if you do that you will be more valuable than anybody else on the team but people don't do that right they're too afraid they want the immediate gratification the short-term gratification of doing what feels good to them of doing what they know can get them you know a rah-rah on a meeting or like a snap so you did a great job but they're afraid of doing the things that delay gratification they're afraid of taking time to learn about all the other departments and the rest of the company because they're so focused on themselves and so i'll tell you some of the best things that you could do as a leader as somebody that wants to understand the rest of business when it's growing very quickly is like first off learn how to read the pml how do you affect the pml and a lot of people don't know this and if your leader hasn't shared it with you ask that they do explain that you want to understand how you affect the piano a little pressure on them is good because sometimes they're nervous to share it i was the first time it's been like the best thing i could ever do i always share it now with everybody i don't care everyone should see the piano they should all know how the company is doing and how they affect how the company is doing and so that's the easiest thing you can do the second easiest thing you can do is ask to sit on other departmental meetings if you're in sales why are you not on once a month the marketing and the customer success meeting i have no idea if you're running a sales party you're not those meetings i literally don't know what you're doing because if you don't understand marketing and you don't understand customer success how the do you know what to do with the sales department you have no context and so in order to grow as a leader you need to gain context you need no more depth much of the time everyone already focuses on the depth they're very proud of their departments they're very focused on that skill but you need to expand and see the business holistically because you know the most valuable person in the company it's the ceo do you know why they're most valuable because they understand all of it so the more you can understand the more you take off their plate the more valuable you are and i just wish people would understand this a little bit more because if you do then you can rise up to the occasion and eventually you can take on a much bigger position but most certainly if you're in a high-growth company you will add much more value than you will detract from so that's the third piece and then the last piece is if you're in a high growth company or if you're trying to get promoted within a normal rate of growth company do 20 of your boss's job caveat do it better than your boss i tell people this and i've gotten controversy everything like what am i supposed to do i don't have enough down time lately you think i can do my job in there so i was like good luck but like if you want to continue to grow in that company if you want to continue to be adding value what i've had happen to me many times and when it is effective is when someone starts doing the job of their boss they start taking things from them but they do it better and so it's like if somebody takes something from me but they do it shitty or half-assed or worse do i look at them and think they should be promoted they're doing a great job they should get a raise no i'm like i've got to redo that and so if you're going to take on the responsibilities of your boss if you're going to try and take things off their plate make sure that you do it better and oftentimes here's the thing it's not hard to do it better because your boss is doing five times more things than you especially if they're the founder gosh anytime someone takes something from my plate they almost always do it better than me because i'm doing like 30 things at once i'm operating the company it's growing quickly and so it's like yes please take it because you'll definitely do a better job than me and so that's the fourth way that you can grow is do take something off your boss's plate and do it better than they have been doing it and then the last thing i will say which you could call it a fifth point or not i don't know is you need to if you want to continue to add value if you want to continue to move up if you want to continue to be somebody that is a linchpin to the company you need to understand how the company makes money and a lot of people especially people that you know watch my channel and follow me you know you're in operations or you're in leadership or either whatever there's lots of different 50 of my viewers who you're not in a revenue driving role you need to still understand how to drive revenue how the company drives revenue and then how do you protect revenue if you're not driving revenue you're protecting revenue it's one or the other and so you need to understand where do i fall in what bucket and how do i do that what is the number one way that i can either drive or protect and a lot of the times what happens is as the company continues to grow there's nobody looking out for the revenue the bottom line the numbers like the ceo and i can tell you that practice that i've done you can ask your boss to do this or if you are a boss i suggest doing this is teach the team how to read the p l teach the team the financials show them where they're driving revenue and start holding them accountable for the revenue start holding them accountable for the recurring revenue start holding them accountable for the profit margins and the thing is is that many times if you're a leader you feel like you can't do this but the only way for your people to grow is for you to actually make this what they are responsible for and to it's almost like you have to go what is against what is intuitive what is intuitive for you to take responsibility everything but if you take responsibility for everything they never have a chance to take it for themselves therefore they never grow therefore they're never capable of doing it and so if you say i am now you are now chief revenue officer you now look out for the bottom line or if you ask your boss like how do i protect or drive revenue i want you to tell me and i want this to be my focus now because any role is either driving or protecting that's one of the most valuable things you can do because the number one piece that people forget to continue to look at as the companies continue to grow and grow and grow is a lot of times the bottom line and then new ways to drive revenue they think oh if it's good now it's always going to be good we're growing so fast you know what happens after you grow fast you hit a wall grow fast hit a wall grow fast hit a wall and a lot of times people grow faster while never come out of that wall and the reason is is because there's like one person with a brain and then everyone else is just relying on that person to think they're relying on that person to focus they're relying on that person to do all the hard work and all the thinking and so if you can be the valuable person who can come up with other ways to drive revenue other ways to protect revenue and educate the rest of the team on how they do that too you will become a linchpin to your organization and so again just to kind of recap that really the five ways that you can continue to grow in the company or to get promoted in a normal growth company right one is peer-to-peer feedback two is bottom-up feedback three is not just going deep into your knowledge or expertise but expanding it being more holistic in terms of your view of business fourth is doing 20 of your boss's job but better and then lastly is knowing how do i protect or drive revenue and so i hope this is valuable if you're a leader share this with your team you know like let me communicate it to them because i have done this many times with my team and i try really hard to educate them on how they can do these things and how they can continue to add more value and if you don't tell them don't expect them to do it with that i hope you enjoyed this video and i will see you on the next one