102: Fast-Track Your Executive Promotion: The Secret Introverted Women Need to Know

In this episode, we open the curtain on how career advancement really happens for senior leaders and share a clear, humane path for introverted Black women to move from overlooked to advocated for without selling their soul or overworking. 

If you’re tired of watching less qualified peers leapfrog you, this is your blueprint for building powerful advocate relationships while staying true to who you are.

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*****Stay tuned for more information next week on the Secure Your Sponsor Challenge designed for you to finally identify, approach, and activate sponsors who will advocate for your next promotion and salary increase.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hi, lady leader, and welcome back to another episode or this week's episode of The Leading Her Introvert Way. I'm Dr. Nicole Bryan, and I am traveling. It might sound a little different. I don't know. By the time I get the chance to edit this podcast, maybe I can make it sound the same. But I am actually sitting in a very, very lovely, very well-designed office in Vienna. And no, not Vienna, Virginia, or Vienna in any other state within the United States, but I'm actually in Vienna, Austria. And this is actually the second week that I've been traveling. I was in Prague prior, and I am recording this podcast, and I'm very, very excited about it. The office that I'm sitting in, I'm renting an Airbnb. And the office that I'm sitting in is absolutely gorgeous. I will probably try to take a picture of it and I'll post it on LinkedIn so you can see. But yeah, I'm excited to be here and probably even more excited to be able to connect with you while I'm here. So today I am going to be talking about a conversation that I had last week. And the conversation was with a brilliant, brilliant woman. She has her PhD, very, very smart, very capable, someone who has impeccable work quality, multiple certifications, the whole nine. But she's been stuck in the same director role for four and a half years. So four and a half years, y'all. Now she's not someone, just to be clear, she's not someone who wants to stay at the director level. She's made it clear to her company even before she joined the organization when they were courting her that she was looking to move up into senior leadership. And so in my conversation with her, you know what she said to me? She said, Nicole, I keep doing everything right. My performance reviews are stellar. I volunteer for just about every project. I stay late, I show up early, but somehow I'm not getting promoted. And people around me are. And I don't think that they're as qualified as I am. Now, does this sound familiar? Because if it doesn't sound familiar to you, it sounds very, very familiar to me because I hear this over and over and over again. When my clients first start working with me, this is their story. It's very, very similar to what this young lady was saying to me, right? And I know at one point in time in my career, this was my story. And then when I speak to my followers on LinkedIn, on TikTok, on Facebook, this is what you're telling me in my DMs. So if you're nodding your head right now, if any part of what I'm saying sounds familiar to you, then today's episode is for you. Because what I'm about to share may be a little nuanced, right? It may be a little, you may not want to hear it, but it is going to change everything. So here's what I want you to know. And I've said it before, but I will say this until every episode, frankly, if I have to, I will say it every episode because you need to not only hear it, but I want you to start to believe it. I need you to start to internalize it. Here's what I want to say: performance does not equal promotion. Let me say that one more time. Performance does not equal promotion. And I know, I know, it feels like it should, right? In a perfect world, the hardest worker gets the corner office, the hardest worker gets the accolades, the hardest worker gets the promotion. But we do not live in a perfect world, Lady Leader. We live in corporate, we live in our nonprofit organizations, we live in the startups. That is where we live, and that is where we work. And in those environments, there is a different kind of currency that determines who moves up and who stays stuck. And it's not your GPA, and it's not your 50 certifications or degrees, and it's not even your work ethic. And frankly, sometimes it's not even your brilliant ideas. The different type of currency that I am talking about is sponsorship. Now, I can already hear you saying, Nicole, I don't want to play politics. That is not who I am. And I get it. As introverted black women, we have been taught that good work does speak for itself, that we should put our heads down and we should work hard and eventually someone will notice it. But here's what that mindset costs us. The average black woman spends four years longer in middle management than her white counterparts. Four years. That's not just about time. That is also costing us money, that is costing us influence, and that is costing us impact. So, what is this hidden currency? It is having people in rooms that you are not in fighting for your name to be on that promotion list. It is having advocates who see opportunities and think of you first and make sure that you get considered. I have 50 million mentors. Mentors are beautiful. I love mentors, but mentors and sponsors are not the same thing. Your mentors give you advice. Your sponsors give you advancement. Your mentors help you think through problems, but your sponsor, they are going to put your name in the room where problems need solving. Your mentor believes in your potential. Your sponsor bets their reputation on your success. You see the difference? This, my friend, is organizational psychology one-on-one. But nobody teaches this in business school, right? There are three types of power players you need to know about. The first is the legitimizer. Now, this person's opinion carries weight in validation conversations. When they say she's ready, everybody else's objections, they fall away. The second type of power player is the opportunity broker. This person controls access to the experiences and visibility that create executive advancement. They don't just advocate for you after you've proven yourself. They create the conditions for you to prove yourself in the first place. And the third type of power player, the path clearer, this person identifies and removes obstacles to your advancement. Sometimes without you even knowing it, you ain't even aware that it's happening and they are clearing the path for you. They address concerns behind closed doors and they build coalition support for your promotion, for your salary increase, for you to get that first and be the first and foremost person to get that new project. Most of us are trying to build relationships with everybody around us. But what if I told you that focusing on these three types of relationships could cut your promotion timeline in half. Here's what happens when you don't understand this currency. You work twice as hard for half the recognition. You watch less qualified people leapfrog over you in terms of advancement. You start questioning whether there's something wrong with you when really you're just playing by the wrong rules. I see this all the time, over and over again, especially with my introverted Black female clients. We think that if we just do excellent work, someone is going to see it. But excellence, even black excellences, without advocacy is invisible. And for us black women, the stakes are even higher. Because while our white colleagues are benefiting from informal sponsor relationships, the golf course conversation, the afterwork drinks, the culture fit connections, we are often left out of those spaces entirely. And that is not by accident. That is usually by design. You do not have to wait for someone to choose you. You can be strategic right now about building these relationships. You can create value that makes sponsors want to invest in your success. So the most when I tell people this, the very first objection I get, because they understand it, and you probably understand it. Like now that I've explained it, it's like, okay, yeah, that's actually logical. This kind of makes sense. Once people understand it, then the first objection that I hear is, Nicole, this sounds like networking. And networking really drains me. Okay, but what if I told you that introverts actually have natural advantages when it comes to building sponsor relationships? Because think about it, sponsors don't want surface-level relationships. They want depth. They want someone who can provide thoughtful analysis, who listens more than they talk, and who brings solutions instead of just problems. Because guess what? There is no sponsor out there. There is no executive out there, there's no professional out there who's going to want to put their reputation on the line for someone that they don't have a deep relationship with, for someone that they don't trust, for someone that they don't know who's going to do everything in their power to be successful. And that's what you have as an advantage as an introvert. That's literally your strength. That is your superpower. The key is that you have to be strategic about where you invest your energy. So instead of trying to network with everybody, instead of trying to build relationships with everybody, you will intentionally select one, two, maybe three people who you will build a relationship with and who will actually help you move the needle. This means you don't have to show up to every goddamn happy hour. You don't have to pretend to want to be around these people. Instead, you will create value around specific challenges that you care about and that your potential, your potential sponsors care about too. So instead of exhausting yourself trying to be visible every goddamn where, you will engineer selective presence, but you'll also get maximum impact. Okay? You've heard me say it before that this is not about changing who you are. Navigating these business spaces does not require you to change who you are, despite what maybe people have said to you before, despite even some of your prior experiences, that it's not required. It may feel like it's easier sometimes, but it's not required. And frankly, it's not sustainable. This is about leveraging who you really are, but doing so strategically. Okay. So I picked today's topic because I get the question. All right, Nicole, if I hear what you're saying, that means that I have to start doing something different. And I don't know how to do that. So how do I actually get started? I'm glad you asked, sis, because I got you covered. Next week, I am launching something that I have never done before. It is called the Secure Your Sponsor Challenge. It's going to be a four-week intensive that go that's going to teach you everything you need to know about identifying, approaching, and activating sponsors who will fight for your advancement. And I'm only taking a limited number of women because I want to make sure that everyone gets the personal attention that they deserve. And since this is the first time that I'm doing this in terms of hosting a challenge, I want to make sure that the right people get access. So this isn't theory, y'all. This is the exact framework that I use to go from director to VP 18 months. This is the exact framework that I still use with all of my clients to get them their promotions into the executive level and to get them their 50 to 100K increase in salary and total comp. These are the strategies that all of my clients use to secure their executive promotions while actually working fewer hours instead of more. If you are tired watching less qualified people get promoted ahead of you, if you're ready to stop waiting for someone to notice your brilliance and start making your own opportunities, if you want to learn how to build powerful advocate relationships without compromising your authentic self, then you need to be in this challenge. Make sure that you register because seats are going to be limited. And I'm expecting this to fill up fast. Until next time, lady leader, keep leading your introvert way.