Have you tried talking to them?

I got passed on a promotion so you don’t have to. 

I was working at a mid-sized startup and had my heart set on a move to management. I thought my time had come when my manager left for greener pastures. The team was too big to scrape by with only one manager, and from what I could tell, I was the only engineer who was interested in the role. I sat back and waited to be tapped. 

Two weeks later I was crestfallen to learn that instead of moving me, or anyone else into the manager role, our director had taken a step back to lead the team directly. After a few conversations, I pieced together the story: without an obvious person to fill the gap, the company decided to flatten the organization, rather than have a director with only a single report.

I felt burned! I should have been the obvious choice! I joined the company, in part, because I wanted to be a manager and thought that a growing start-up would be a shortcut to that goal. I could have become a manager, my director could have stayed in his role, and the office could have kept its capacity to expand.

When I told this to my former skip level, and now new manager, he stared at me for a few seconds before saying “I wish I had known what you wanted two weeks ago.”

This was a crucial, and hard learned lesson for me. I had assumed that my interests were obvious, that my director was just waiting for the right moment to move me to the next stage of my career. I also didn’t want to make a big deal about my interests. It seemed uncouth to talk openly about my ambition, especially since I thought it should have been as obvious to my manager as it was to myself. I was disappointed to see my director make a decision without considering information that was known to nobody but me. The impact was not limited to myself either. My former director, now new manager, could have had a better outcome for himself as well if he had better awareness of his options.

I know I’m not alone in this experience. I’ve heard variations of this story recounted by coworkers, reports, mentees and friends. As a manager, this is part of why I consider it so important to talk about career development with my team, but this breakdown of communication doesn’t just happen around promotions and role changes.

Years ago, a coworker from a distant part of the company was venting to me one day that they got passed up for leading a project they were interested in. The perceived slight had them questioning whether their manager respected them, and whether they had a future at the company. My first two questions were: did the manager know you were interested in the project? And did you ask them what factors they considered when choosing who to run the project? The answer to both questions was no – they had fallen into the same trap I had.

The next week we were chatting again and they had talked to their manager. It turned out that there was another project starting soon that was an even better match for their skillset. The manager was lining up my coworker to be the tech lead of that project, but hadn’t shared the news because the project itself was still going through approvals. It wasn’t a slight, it was the result of the manager trying to find the best match.

To be sure, better communication with your management isn’t the whole story. Telling your manager what you want is a necessary but not sufficient condition to getting what you want from your manager. A while after getting passed by for that manager role, I moved companies. I told my future manager and my skip level about my managerial aspirations before I took the job, but the team didn’t need another manager at that moment. Still, knowing that was the direction I wanted to go, they put me in positions to develop and practice the skills I would need, like partnering me with a summer intern, and having me run standups and retros for my team. This way, when the team had the need, I already had the right training, and the organization’s leaders had an idea of the kind of manager I would be.

I don’t want to pretend that this is always a straightforward and super easy conversation. Telling your manager that you are interested in a new role or an expanded scope is a fast way to find out if your manager doesn’t think you are ready. Grappling with that feedback can be challenging, but it is important to keep it in perspective. Asking the question didn’t change the answer – it just helped you learn what the answer was. Now you can move forward with more data to inform your choices.