Beena Kavalam: 5 High-Impact Strategies to Get Promoted
Rising in one’s career is more strategic than it is organic or random. As women, we often operate from the belief that as long as we keep our heads down and work hard someone will notice us and give us the promotion that we deserve. But we couldn’t be far from reality.
Female representation on managerial boards was a dismal 15.2% in India in 2019. After more than a decade of gender equality conversation in the corporate world, male vs female numbers in the top management continue to be skewed. While gender biases against women undoubtedly make the road to the C-suite rocky, a significant way to close the gap is for us women to take ownership of our career trajectories and actively work towards the promotions we deserve.
Beena Kavalam, founder of Personal Revolution LLC, a coaching, speaking and consulting firm in Denver, is a leading expert in helping high-value professionals command the respect, recognition and promotion that they merit. More women in the C-suites and decision-making roles means that we have greater power to impact change. Kavalam shares with us five high-impact strategies that are powerful and practical, that women can use to get ahead in their careers.
STRATEGY 1: Know our ‘what’ and ‘why’
Wanting to get promoted is not (specific) enough. What role do we want? By when? Who do we want to work for? Which company do we want to work with? How do we want to feel when we get promoted? Being specific and clear about our goal creates focus. Similarly, but more importantly, we must understand our ‘why’ – our motivation for getting promoted. Is it to make more money? To please our parents? To help impact change? To further our career? Being clear about our ‘why’ will propel us forward in times of doubt in our journey towards the promotion.
Because this clarity is so critical to the process, it is invaluable to write down our ‘what’ and ‘why’ and place them somewhere we can see every single day – our mirror, night stand, phone/desktop wallpaper, office desk etc. Studies show that the simple act of writing down our goals and seeing them regularly significantly increases our chances of accomplishing them.
STRATEGY 2: Identify our personal competitive advantage (PCA)
As a professional, what is unique about us that sets us apart from other individuals in the marketplace? How do we differ? And why should our manager, evaluator or client care? Taking steps to identify our personal competitive advantage, and why it is valuable in the marketplace, is a compelling edge that can take us places.
STRATEGY 3: Build our promotion team
While mentors are necessary for guiding us on our path to success, it’s having a sponsor on our promotion team that makes the crucial difference. Mentors are usually senior people in the industry or our extended network who are not always in the same organisation as us. They rarely manage us directly and so don’t have a vested interest in fighting for us to get us a promotion. A sponsor on the other hand is someone who is in our direct line of management and has visibility on our work. She/he is at a senior position in the organisation and has the power to make/influence decisions, specifically about promotions.
A sponsor is a key decision-maker who can be our champion. Someone who will foster and build our brand and help us grow in the organisation. Someone we can rely on when promotion time comes. As women, our humility can get in the way of us talking about our accomplishments, which is why we need sponsors to advocate us and speak about us at the right places.
Going after a promotion isn’t easy; we need all the push and support we can receive. Let’s not limit ourselves to one sponsor and mentor in our promotion team; let’s cultivate as many as possible. This makes our chances for promotion stronger. Let’s also keep our friends, family and partners close during this time – they build us up, remind us of our ‘why’, and provide comfort when days get rough.
STRATEGY 4: Communicate our PCA
Identifying our PCA and doing nothing about it is a lost cause. The next step is to understand who it matters to and why, whether that’s our manager, client or sponsor. Once we have that compelling understanding, it’s vital to communicate it clearly. We must ensure that it is in all our personal marketing material – our resume, cover letter, elevator pitch, thank you notes, and most critically, our performance evaluation. All of these interact together, so it’s important to be consistent with our messaging. We are in control of our brand and our performance evaluation, especially, is our opportunity to shine.
Pro tip: Keeping a ‘praise’ folder on our desktop/phone as Kavalam does. Every time someone thanks us or says “great job” or we feel like we’ve accomplished something, add it to the ‘praise’ folder. This way when performance evaluation/promotion time comes, we’ll have information handy from months ago.
STRATEGY 5: Look and feel the part before we get the part
We don’t have to wait till we get the promotion to start looking and acting the part. We can begin to make the switch by observing and modeling a woman in a senior leadership role at our organisation – what she wears, how she carries herself, her body language, how she presents, how she speaks etc. We can start looking at leaders as models who we can emulate. The other key thing is to think about how we would want to feel once we’re promoted, and find ways to spark those feelings in us right now. We have to picture ourselves at the promoted level. When we start changing our mindset, we’ll feel more confident and empowered of where we are right now, which will only help us get closer to our goal.
A fantastic thing that happens when we start looking, feeling and acting the part we are gunning for is that it becomes easier for everyone else to see us in that future role too! Once we’ve made that connection for ourselves and stepped into those shoes, others start picturing us in that role as well and, subconsciously, find it easier to promote us.
About the Expert
Founder of Personal Revolution LLC, a coaching, speaking and consulting firm in Denver, Beena Kavalam helps high-value professionals define and craft their personal brand so they can command the respect, pay and promotions that they deserve. Her rich corporate experience of over 15 years – where she impacted some of the world’s top companies including Google, Facebook, Apple, AT&T, Accenture, Deloitte, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer HealthCare, WhiteWave Food and more – informs her work. Kavalam is an alumna of UC Berkeley Haas and NYU Stern, and also a professional certified coach from the International Coaches Federation (ICF).
