The promotion I didn’t get, and the question I ask now
I had about thirty letters of recommendation. They came from peers, from colleagues, and from a few district sales managers on other teams. People I had helped. People who liked working with me. People who had watched my numbers.
None of them came from the people who would decide whether I got the job.
This was at FedEx, in Miami, in 2013. I was an account manager, and I wanted to be a district sales manager. It looked like the natural next step. My numbers were there. I was respected, and people already treated me as a leader. When our district manager left the company, the regional director made me acting district sales manager for a few months.
So I interviewed for the permanent role with a stack of letters and time in the chair. I did not get it.
Our regional director gave me the news, with the usual words. I had done great. It had been a difficult choice. I was disappointed, and a bit upset.
It took me a while to understand why. Not that day, and not that year. I learned it later, from more experience and from talking to people who had already gotten the jobs I wanted.
The decision was never my peers’ to make. It belonged to the regional sales directors, and most of them did not know me. They had not seen my results. They had not seen me lead. I had put almost all of my effort into the people with the least say in the outcome.
It felt like the right thing to do. Winning over your peers looks like leadership. Making sure the people who decide know your work looks like politics. I chose the version that felt cleaner, and it cost me the job.
The letters were real, and so was the support behind them. It was addressed to the wrong people.
Now, when something I care about depends on a decision, I start with two questions.
The first is who decides. Not who will be in the room, or who has opinions. Who says yes. Bain’s RAPID framework helps here, because it makes you write one name next to the D. If I can’t write that name, I am not ready to ask for anything.
The second is whether that person knows my work. Not my reputation among the people around them. The work itself. If I can’t picture them describing what I did in their own words, they don’t know it yet, and fixing that is my job.
Last summer I finished a piece of work I was proud of. It needed one sign-off, from an SVP with a full calendar. I sent the deck, a short video walkthrough and a date. Two dates passed. My note to myself that week was blunt: sending more documents was never going to work. So I stopped sending and booked thirty minutes. I cut twenty-two slides to six and framed the ask around one of their own goals. One meeting settled it.
None of this makes peers less important. They matter for different reasons. They are the people you will lead with, or lead. Their trust is what makes the work possible once the decision is made. And they are often the first to tell you what the people who decide are thinking. Influencing them is part of the job. It is not the part that gets you the job.
I still have the letters. These days I am comfortable talking to VPs and SVPs, and I make sure the people who decide know my work before I need anything from them. The letters remind me why. Being liked by the people around you and being known by the people who decide are two different things. The job needs both.
I first wrote about this in 2021, in a post called Stakeholder Management.