Invisible Promotions: Necessity, Subjection, or Opportunity

We discuss ‘invisible promotions’ at work: when you take on so many additional responsibilities but without additional pay or title; how should you think about accepting additional responsibilities and how do you balance expanded roles for your team members?

Transcript

Dr. D.  0:03  
Hello, and welcome to the realm. I'm Dr. D, I bring the strategy.

Dr. K  0:07  
And I'm Dr. K, I bring this psychology, we are business psychologists and your guides to the executive realm where we bring strategy and psychology together.

Dr. D.  0:16  
So you can bring your best to your C suite, your teams and your customers. Today, we're talking about invisible promotions. This is when you take on so many additional responsibilities at work, but without the title or pay. How should you think about accepting these additional responsibilities? And how do you balance new responsibilities with your team members? So let's get to work. Dr. K, what are invisible promotions? And how do they happen?

Dr. K  0:39  
Well, invisible promotions are kind of what you said at the beginning, it's additional responsibilities that we have at work without getting the title or pay. Sometimes it might even be in addition, it might even be without getting the recognition or the appreciation, thank you very much for taking on this additional work. We know this is a lot. So it's kind of the title says it's invisible. Nothing is really shown to you that here's the additional work of the promotion.

Dr. D.  1:09  
People who are perceived as high performers tend to take on additional responsibilities. And those things don't often come with a pay bump, or they don't come with a title bump, if you're not careful, your job can look very different after a couple of years. Really the question is, where's that balance point? When is it you demonstrating your ability to do more or asking your teams to demonstrate their ability to do more and when is it taking advantage of somebody, it's a really big challenge. And I think even more so now in the time of COVID, when companies have had to scale back and so many people have had to make so many sacrifices, those that are still working, the job still has to get done. So if you had to slash some folks from your organization, somebody had to pick up some of that work. And it's probably not all being absorbed by efficiency improvements.

Dr. K  1:54  
Absolutely. I've worked with many clients who and I never really gave it a an official title of what was going on for them. But I've been working with quite a number of clients that are struggling with additional work, not knowing where their role begins where someone else is role, and also the additional stress of being at home trying to get that work done with kids being home or significant others being at home, there's generations living within the home dealing with that as well, because maybe they had someone come in and care for an elder parent. And now all of a sudden, that's not happening. So there's these additional roles they feel, I have found that people feel good, oh my gosh, my company, trust me, at least at the beginning, my company gave me this, they trust me with this, this is going to look good on my resume. But as time has progressed, that good feeling that feeling of being proud or excited that something's gonna come out from this is starting to decrease. And it is leading into kind of like what we've talked about recently, with the stress, the burnout, and then the possible depression, I am starting to see clients start dipping their toe into burnout, which is not helping, what they are trying to accomplish and all the additional responsibilities that they've taken on.

Dr. D.  3:09  
It really is all about balance. Do you take on additional responsibilities, the company trusts you enough to ask you to do more? Or you as a leader might be trusting a team member and asking them to do more? Where does that trust end? And you have to actually demonstrate with making somebody a senior of their role or giving them a promotion or actually formalizing a new job description because the job has changed so much for them. How do you find that balance and oftentimes through organizational growth, meaning you take on some new clients or some new product line, there are new requirements that come with a job, there are efficiency changes, organizations get slimmer, because organizations drive efficiency improvement, and it doesn't take as many people to do the same job. And then there's also opportunity, it's nice to take on some new responsibilities at work because it gives you the opportunity to try some new things and to work in some new areas.

Dr. K  4:06  
Taking on those additional roles at or giving those additional roles as a leader, it's important to check in with the person that you are giving these additional roles, what if you are giving these additional roles or responsibilities, and that person may not have worked in that part of you know, the organization or may not know everything, and you're just like, Here you go, you I need you know, in addition, I need you to do A, B and C but if they don't have either if they do not receive the proper training, or at least some sort of, you know, backup help or they've never been in it and you just say okay, figure it out, I go for it. This is what needs to be done. That's going to cause a lot of problems that you know, that's going to change. You know, as often you talk about, you know, the mission and you know, the vision of the organization or the mission in that employee that's taking on the additional roles may get blurred. It may get covered With, they don't care about me. So I don't care about them. I'm just going to plug through this turn in whatever I need to turn in. And I'm not really going to look into it to make sure I did things right.

Dr. D.  5:10  
Sometimes new job functions just need to be handled by somebody, there's two approaches there is go out and hire, bring in somebody who already knows that function, or Johnny in accounting is really great at figuring things out, he's always come through for us in the past, let's give him the chance to take this on and see what he can do with it. It's important to ask the right questions when those responsibilities come up. Is this something that one person can do? Do you have to support this with the team? Are you changing somebodies role from an individual contributor to a more of a leadership or a lead role? If you're an executive, and you're taking on some new responsibilities? Do you have the support around you that you need? Is that does this come with additional team members? does this come with dollar investment, a budget or something to support this? Or are you being asked to take on as a leader the new responsibilities and with that, you're going to have to delegate some of those responsibilities to existing team members, if you're wise enough to say, Hey, this is a really big responsibility. I'm happy to take it on. Let's talk about what that means. From a comp perspective. You also have to think about what does that mean for the comp perspective of my team, I'm going to need to ask my team to do the same thing. And I'd like to be able to walk in with something to offer to say, Hey, we recognize your value. And that's why you're being asked to take this on, how can we make sure that you're being rewarded in the same way that reflects the trust that I have in you to support the mission in a new way.

Dr. K  6:34  
Agreed. To piggyback off that, it wouldn't be just at the beginning, hey, we know that this is additional roles that you're taking on? What can we do to help? It might be that it's checking in, if you are giving extra roles or responsibilities to one team member or a whole team, the leader needs to check in not just once and say okay, here you go. Thanks, guys. It's coming in and saying, how are we doing? Do we need any additional support? Where are we getting lost at? It's that communication that we talked about every single one of these sessions that we do we talk about that open communication, that level of what's the word I'm looking for? Yes, thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, that level of transparency, it's, you know, it's going, Hey, I see something's going on over there. How can I help or for the person that is taken on or the team that has taken on the extra responsibilities, you know, it's being transparent, hey, this is really starting to weigh heavy on us, we need additional support.

Dr. D.  7:31  
Some organizations are really good at saying we're going to try this new thing, or we're going to reallocate some responsibility. And we're going to make sure that the funding and the investment follows. And that becomes a collaborative effort within the leadership team to figure out what that should look like, whatever your estimate is, on the first day, when you're proposing the adoption of this new process with the new team, you're going to learn a lot along the way. And those investment commitments might change along the way. And you might find that you under or over invested in certain areas, and you need to rethink that, as you rightly point if a leader says we're doing something new, and we'd like you to take the lead on that. And it's your process. It's part of your responsibilities, you have to evaluate what are you going to take off, but you also do have to stay on top of it. Because it is an organizational commitment is not an individual commitment from a person, you're asking for an individual commitment, but you're also committing yourself and your leadership team in supporting that person or that team to make sure that they can deliver on that mission. Staying on top of it, they might not know what to ask or how to ask for additional resources or investment in technology, a frontline employee making a recommendation that costs $10,000 can feel like a really big request for that frontline person, whereas a senior leader who hears the $10,000 investment on something can just sign that away and say, Yeah, sure. Here you go. Depending on your level in the organization, your perception of asking for money changes, as you get experience and more responsibility in an organization at the end of the day. You're absolutely right. It is about communicating and supporting those changes within the team. That's something that organizations often do poorly is they tend to over task, people who are high performers until they become mediocre performers. What I mean by that is you have a star player who just knocks it out of the park and everything that they do. And so you keep loading them up with responsibility. And they're like, yeah, you know, we don't have the budget to pay you more, but keep loading them up with responsibility. They either gets so overloaded with trying to support and please the organization and do the best to maintain that positive reputation that they may at some point become oversaturated. And their performance might slip not in the thing that you've given the most recently, but on some important aspect of their role from some time ago. So it's important to as you're adding roles, take something off of that person's plate. To so that they have time to focus on. The other challenge with loading your high performers up is you're giving them a lot of experience. And a lot of experience looks good on a resume and your best performers are the ones that are most likely to lead. And so you really have to recognize over time consistently, if they're taking on new responsibilities and adding to their capabilities, then you have to reward that or you're a bigger risk of losing those top performers.

Dr. K  10:27  
When you have those additional responsibilities. Yes, that does make your resume look good. Sometimes people forget that these experiences that they had, especially if they are outside of what their original job title and job roles and job traits were, they forget that they now get to use this as their advantage to one either look for another job, put it on their resume, these are all the experiences, these are the projects that I worked on, when I wasn't even in that job title, it's not that easy to walk up to your boss and say, Hey, we need to rethink what my job title is, or what my pay is. But after maybe a six month period, or a year, you can use that as your advantage to walk up to your boss and say, Hey, we need to set up a meeting and then use that to show all the additional work in addition to what you've already been doing to show what advantage it is to keep you on what your performance looks like. And use all of that to your advantage. Now with that the problem that may possibly come with that people will take on a little bit of an imposter syndrome because they were never trained in it or they were never educated in it. Sometimes people aren't educated or trained in certain areas. But that doesn't mean that you don't have the ability or the skills or the experience to get the job done.

Dr. D.  11:48  
As a leader, it's important to always evaluate the capabilities of your team and understand who has the opportunity to take on more. There are some really stellar people that are task oriented people they like a rigid process, they perform exceptionally well in the day to day execution of their job. That doesn't mean that they're great at change management or they're great at leadership. There are ways of recognizing people who have a really great task orientation or process knowledge or process orientation that doesn't require promoting them into a leadership role. You can advance them through a separate job ladder that is individual contributor focus and give them higher pay and higher title, reputation Ollie, what's the word I'm looking for more prestigious, prestigious, there you go look at that we've helped each other out. There are ways to promote them into more prestigious titles. Of course, people don't only work for money. But if you can reward them with a with a paper recognizing their continued contribution value to the organization, it's a really important thing to do. If you take on a ton of new responsibilities. At some point, you should raise your hand and say, hey, I've done these seven new things. My job description looks very different. I've taken on all this new responsibility, doing some research and saying in the outside, I'm worth this. And typically these types of positions, these types of roles come with a title that looks like this. I know you can't spin it on a dime, it'll take some time. But I'd like to discuss moving in this direction. And what that looks like.

Dr. K  13:24  
Yeah, as you said, you know, fairness or balance, if someone asks you to take on another responsibility, it's not an automatic boom, let me get the pay bump, or the title change or what have you, you have to show that you actually can do this, because if they give it to you, and then everything else falls, then maybe they are going to take that away from you. They're not going to give it to you unless they see that you have the capability of doing it. It's important also, though, for the employee to recognize, you know, what if if you're getting to a place where things are starting to crumble, then it's going to your supervisor or your manager or what have you or your leader and saying, Hey, we need to delegate this out. If someone can do this one part, I can get XYZ, I can get it out more efficiently, faster.

Dr. D.  14:11  
People by nature, always remember the things that they took on the extra work that they took on, but it's easy to forget about the things that you stopped doing. I've been very fortunate in my career, as I've moved along, when people would ask me to take on new responsibilities, I would say yeah, of course, I'd love to do that. Because I love the new challenges. And then I would always think about that one thing, or those one or two things that I really didn't enjoy doing or wasn't didn't really motivate me a lot to come to work. There's some routine process or something. Maybe Hey, you know what, while we're talking about this, it would be great if so and so take on this part of my role, because it's not really where my strength is. And I want to make sure that I'm giving the right amount of focus to this to this new responsibility. If you approach that in that conversation in that way and say, Hey, here's the thing, I think so and so would be really good at this part of my Roll, do you think we could work that out so that I can take that off of my plate, I'm happy to back it up. But let me take this new thing on. But I want to, I want to clear off some of the dust from some of the old processes that to make room for this. And people are really open to that. And they like that, because oftentimes, they, they might not even know that you're doing that other part of the job function. So it's a good reminder that you've been doing that critical piece. But it also gives somebody else an opportunity who might be well suited for a piece of your job that you're not particularly fond of, to get it to somebody who's going to do it even better than you could and give you the room to do that new thing.

Dr. K  15:33  
As an individual, you need to keep the documentation of your role in all of this, you know your role and what you've either not been doing and or have taken on. So that way you have support for yourself evidence of what your performance looks like. And then on the other hand, it's also important as a leader with your team to say, Okay, this is what your title look like, this is what I've seen you do, this is the additional stuff that I've seen you do. And this might be the things that I haven't seen you do. So I think it's important for both to do the documentation. And that way, that's where that communication comes in.

Dr. D.  16:09  
That's where that transparency comes in. And a little bit of collaboration munication. And a regular review supported with factual information always makes those conversations easier if I have a team of 20 or 30 people or I have a leadership team supporting my broader organization being really clear and setting the expectation and leading by example of what good documentation looks like what good data management looks like, in support of making that case and understanding of what jobs and functions are getting done and capabilities are being employed certainly helps in all of those conversations. And it's a really great leadership development practice to develop your leaders to manage their teams in that way with that level of communication, but supported by factual information that will really help them in their career as they develop into more senior leaders within the organization. Exactly.

Dr. K  17:01  
If there's three new tasks that have to be given to someone, maybe not giving all three tasks, your top performer, because if we're only allowing top performers to get all this work, then their experience goes up. And that's great for them. But what about other people that are trying to move their career forward, instead of just looking at just the top performers, maybe you look at some of the other performers, because I'm thinking about, you know, when you have a child that is extremely intellectual, and they get bored in class, because they finish their work, or they already kind of understand it, they start getting into trouble, their grades go down. If you give them additional work, maybe it's because they need additional work, to have that motivation to keep going.

Dr. D.  17:45  
If you keep recognizing the same people on the team and record and rewarding them with additional responsibilities that can be motivating for a lot of other folks within the organization. So you do really have to think and be deliberative and thoughtful about how you are breaking up new responsibilities. And that's exactly right. giving people the chance to demonstrate and shine. They might just be sitting by waiting for you because they're shy, or they don't just speak up or don't want to be disruptive may just be waiting to ask they've just been maybe waiting.

Dr. K  18:19  
So Dr. D. What can leaders take away from this discussion?

Dr. D.  18:23  
Additional responsibilities are a great way to develop yourself and your team. Look for opportunities to contribute to your mission in new ways. Keep job descriptions handy and note or update regularly with new and obsolete responsibilities. This will help when making the case in pay, title, and promotion discussions. Use new responsibilities as a team or member development opportunity clearly articulate what new responsibilities are added which are removed and don't overload your top performers Spread the Love Around. Remember your commitments to take on new responsibilities have an impact on your team plan for the downstream impacts of that decision. It's about balance, every new responsibility shouldn't require a pay or title bump plan to recognize those who continually perform because they have the best opportunities on the outside, know when to say when a plan for a sustained conversation, perhaps over several months and have data prepared and asked for deserved recognition. Be patient, sometimes things like title and pay, they take time. So you have to keep the conversation alive, but you also have to be patient. So with that, what's on tap for next week?

Dr. K  19:29  
Well, next week, we will be talking about managing virtual teams, virtual teams are much more commonplace now. And organizations are facing decisions about continuing remote work, hybrid, and in office. What are the tactics and strategies to get the most out of the teams with virtual members?

Dr. D.  19:49  
I think every organization's facing discussions about what to do with virtual teams and...

Dr. K  19:55  
...a lot of fears for people going back in and how is that fear If they have to go back in going to change their jobs, and how is that going to change their performance?

Dr. D.  20:06  
Yeah, absolutely. And to all of you joining us on this journey to the realm, thank you so much. I'm Dr. D.

Dr. K  20:12  
And I'm Dr. K and we are looking forward to your next visit to the Executive Realm.