Simon Answers Your Most Asked Questions on Pay, Promotions, and More

hey there I thought it would take a little time to answer some questions that have been coming through on social media so let's just jump right in um can you shed light on how some people who are never good at their jobs get promoted okay so there are two reasons why people who are never good at their jobs get promoted uh the first one is um they're completely unqualified for everything that they're doing but they're really good at managing up they're really good at faking it and eventually um that'll collapse and they'll get found out

um and that that's the real world but sometimes sometimes the leadership is actually looking for different skill sets sometimes being good at your job doesn't mean you're actually necessarily good at leading other people to do their jobs and sometimes you don't have to be the best at something to be good at leading other people to do it so sometimes we're looking at people who are you know they're not the top players not the best at their jobs but maybe leadership sees something in them which is why they want to put them in a leadership position

so if you're thinking about your own career as well yes absolutely you want to be good at those hard skills the skills that are about being good at your job but it's the human skills as well which is learning to listen or get uh help others Thrive around you that may more likely lead to your promotion than simply hitting all the numbers I actually very cynical of companies that only promote People based on if they hit the numbers because then they're just performance driven only and if they completely ignore all the human skills it actually

can do Dam damage to a team so don't assume that because somebody's not the top player or the top performer on the team that they aren't worthy of promotion um and if somebody's just good at leading up managing up well here's another question how do you define safety how important is psychological safety in a culture and how is it a factor an employee burnout great question we all know what it feels like to be on a team where we are offered psychological safety it means that we can raise our hands and say I made a

mistake or I don't understand or I've got some stuff going on at home and it's affecting my work or I need help or can you please be patient with me um when we can say these things um uh without any fear of humiliation or retribution um we can say these things without any fear that will hurt our promotability but more important we can say these things with the confidence that those in our team will rush in to support us or our leaders will rush in to support us um and this is a huge factor for

employee burnout um because when we feel that we can say those things and we can feel supported we're more likely to seek help for whatever is uh stressing us out or causing us anxiety and more importantly we don't feel alone as we're going through the stress that's leading to burnout so absolutely psychological safety is a big part of helping reduce employee burnout oh also um psychological safety and providing psychological safety is not just something provided by our leaders it is something provided by every member of our team team to other members of our team in

other words we're all responsible for creating psychological safety for each others okay what do you do when you become the leader you wish you had but you were undermined by senior leadership that doesn't support you okay so this is an interesting question when you say you become the leader you wish you had does that mean you just got a promotion um because being the leader wish you had means you're operating in a way um that you wish your leaders did and so when you say being undermined there's a few things to consider consider like I

used to joke you know the only thing that all my failed relationships have in common is me um and so if if you feel you're constantly being undermined um is it the way in which maybe you're presenting your work or or or conducting yourself in front of your leaders um are we making them are you making them feel threatened so sometimes you have to check in with yourself and say is there something I can adapt here so that maybe I can be better heard or better better included in fact I saw it recently I saw

a guy walk into his bus's office and with good intentions start telling his boss everything he was doing wrong well guess what the boss did walls went up and he couldn't hear it because it's very hard to open a door and just have somebody lambast you and tell you everything you're doing wrong um so he may have felt that he was being undermined but in reality um I would recommend that confronting his boss and suggesting things that could be done better maybe by starting by saying some of the things that are going well would be

a better strategy um but if you're truly truly being undermined um then can you have an effec of confrontation with your boss um uh the old FBI um what is your feeling what Behavior are they doing that makes you feel that way and what impact does it have um it's a way to have an effective confrontation you have to be really really really specific you can't speak in general like you always undermine me you're always yelling at me so nothing's going to get done that won't work what you want to do is be really specific

you go into your boss and you say hey on Thursday in the meeting that we had when I made a suggestion of something we could do you were very quick to push back or throw out my idea and my fear is is that um if every time I have an idea in a meeting and you and um and you push back against it um that eventually it's going to hurt team morale and eventually it's going to do damage to productivity you say something like that um and what FBI is designed to do is um allow

the other person to hear you and take accountability so give it a try an effective confrontation sometimes is the way to go here's another one how do I start a difficult conversation regarding pay okay this one comes up more and more and more and I've seen it screwed up so many times where somebody comes in and says um I deserve this amount and these are the reasons why or look how hard I've been working I deserve money and very often they put a number out there right um and very often those when that happens it's

putting it's backing somebody into a corner that allows no room for in other words they're saying setting up a yes or no which is very difficult what I find is way more productive is to talk to somebody and say may I talk to you about my pay may I talked about my compensation like set it up because conversations about money are are often very uncomfortable so you're setting up an uncomfortable conversation the leader hopefully will say yes or they can schedule a time so they know what's what it's about um and then basically want to

say is um um I you want to set up something about feeling like you belong which is I really like working here um I want to stay here for a long time um I and I'm learning a lot and I want to continue learning and I also feel that I've taken on more work for example that may be the case or I've gone above and beyond um and I wanted to have a conversation with you about um the opportunities that I could have that my compensation could reflect um the additional work that I'm doing can

we talk about sort of what schedule I can be put on and what uh goals I can achieve with you in other words you leave it slightly open-ended so it can be a conversation and you can have numbers in your mind of what you'd like to achieve that's totally fine but what you want to do is create a dialogue and very often these conversations go south because they become a demand rather than a dialogue they become something that is proposed as a yes or no um and it becomes much more heated and much more emotional

so give it a try try and make it a dialogue where you can have a conversation about how to get on a path to get more compensation in the short medium and long term if you have any additional questions that you would like me to answer uh please put them in the comments and I'll hope to get to some of them in the near future thanks very much take care of yourself take care of each other