You probably think your manager decides whether you move up. In most companies above a certain size, your manager decides whether to argue for it, and the decision itself happens in a meeting with eight other managers, a budget, and a pile of names.
Picture that meeting honestly. Your manager has a few minutes. Everybody else in the room has either never met you or has seen you once in a review. Whatever cannot be said out loud in those few minutes does not exist.
Three things follow, and none of them are about politics.
The first is that vague warmth dies in that room. She is great, very reliable, everyone likes her, is not an argument, and the person presenting the name after yours will have scope, outcomes and a system that person owns. So make your manager's job writeable. Once a quarter, give them five lines: what you took on, what changed because of it, and who outside the team noticed. Not for your own comfort, and not a long document. Five lines they can lift straight into a sentence.
The second is corroboration. A name that two other leads recognise travels differently from a name only one person can speak to. That is not campaigning. It is presenting at the internal session, reviewing something outside your team, or helping the platform group with the thing they keep getting stuck on. One or two of those a year is enough.
The third is timing, and it is the one nobody tells you. Those decisions are usually made weeks before anybody talks to you about them, against work that had to be visible by then. Finding out in March that the cycle closed in January is an expensive way to learn the calendar.
None of this replaces the work. It decides whether the work is representable by somebody who was not there when you did it.
Monday: ask your manager how levels are actually decided here, who sits in that meeting, and when it happens. It is a completely reasonable question and most people never ask it.
– Asael Shinder
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