Bosses control things – resources, assignments, roles, salaries, promotions – which are desirable. Their purpose is therefore clear: they are there in order to give these desirable things to you rather than wasting them on someone else. Naturally this doesn’t just happen. They need to be farmed, like milk-cows, or perhaps chickens, so that they lay these desirable things at regular intervals.
Your first task, therefore, is to identify who controls what and whether or not those things are desirable. If you can’t decide what sort of farm to run, you are unlikely to grow anything successfully.
Consider “promotion” as an example. Promotions come in two kinds. The first type involves being advanced from grade 23 to grade 24 with commensurate salary rise, with no appreciable change in required level of work or responsibility. “Congratulations to the Man in the Moon on his promotion to Senior Man in the Moon”. The second involves real additional duties, responsibility and/or power: “The Man in the Moon has been promoted to Our Man in Havana”. Quite often separate mechanisms exist for determining how these are acquired. The former is frequently the decision of your line manager alone, the second by committee.
“All promotions are determined by application and interview in my organisation,” you cry. Rubbish. No one ever advertised a position in that way without having already decided, or at least short-listed, who is going to get the job in advance. Even if the process appears to be fair, the job specification, minimum qualities required, or whatever, will have been biased in advance towards the preferred individual. How could the advert have been written unless the boss in question had visualised his/her “ideal applicant” beforehand? Nobody can visualise their “ideal applicant” without picturing one individual, or at most two or three stirred-together. These will of course be the desired short-list.
You cannot get ahead of this particular game unless you know how the system works. Firstly you need to decide which kind of promotion it is that you would prefer. Secondly you need to know how they are conferred. For example if it is by committee: who sits on the committee; what are their likely criteria; how is the short-list determined; is there a right of veto? A veto-based process, by the way, is a particularly helpful one to you, because your task is simplified. You need only ensure that your target group of decision-making bosses has no particular reason to veto you personally. Most less discerning candidates, who have not identified their target boss group so carefully, will probably cross one or another of the relevant bosses just by chance along the way.
Here of course your Spy staff have a role of fundamental importance to play (what to do if you don’t have staff is covered in another post). They need to find out what desirable things are likely to come on offer before everyone else finds out and find out on what basis they will be awarded. Having established the ground rules, your job is to get them awarded to you before the real selection process begins. It may still be necessary to go through the motions – many companies have policies in this area – but you should land a sufficiently high percentage in this way to make the effort worthwhile. Don’t be discouraged if you lose more than you win; the point is to have as large a field to play for as possible at all times, and to play with an inside edge, so that your win-rate is suitably great.
