My friend works for a major hospital network in a decently-sized city in the Southwest (USA). I’m currently looking for a job and we were talking about red flags to look for during interviews. She said that she was recently in a virtual all hands meeting for her job, where an HR rep got on and said the key to getting promoted and moving up the corporate ladder ISN’T to have consistently high performance scores. Nope. The key to getting promoted is to take on additional work outside of the scope of your job description, so you can prove that you’re doing your job well AND another job too! We laughed for a solid 10 minutes about this.
Heads up for anyone who is new to corporate America: if you take on additional work, you’re LESS likely to be promoted because your company isn’t about to spend a dime more on your salary if you’re already doing the work for what you currently make. The real secret to getting promoted is to spend all your time and energy making friends with the people that make promotion decisions because promotions are usually just about who likes whom. Just don’t be complete garbage at your job, rub elbows with the right people, and you’ll be promoted constantly.