I spent twenty-two years inside the system before I ever coached anyone in it.

I was well rated for years. I was also, for years, not promoted. If you have read this far I suspect you know the exact feeling — the review says one thing and the announcement says another, and nobody ever quite explains the gap between them.

I spent most of those years negotiating for a living, which is a discipline that teaches you very quickly that the person across the table decides what your case is worth. Not you. It took me a good deal longer to notice that the same thing was true of my own career.

For a while I did what you would expect. I delivered more. I made the case better. And the case kept going to people who were not weighing it the way I was weighing it.

Changing behaviours is in your control. Changing perceptions is in their control.

That sentence cost me several years to learn, and it is more or less the whole of what I do now. What finally changed things was not working harder. It was going to the people whose view actually decided, asking them directly what I could do better, and then acting on what they told me — and going back to check.

Eighteen months later the rating was “ready now”. A gift versus a pain, in the end, though I can promise you it did not feel like one at the time.

I did not invent any of that. I followed Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching, and I followed it to the letter, because it is better to learn from someone else’s failure versus making your own. I have made my own share of those too.

What I am not going to tell you

I am not going to tell you that politics do not exist. They do, and I have watched good people lose out to them. What I will tell you is that the part you can move is real, and it is usually larger than it looks from inside the frustration.

I am also not going to promise you a promotion. Nobody honest can. What I can do is help you find out what the people who decide are actually seeing, which is a different thing and, in my experience, the thing that was missing.

This is a second profession for me rather than a volume business, so I work with a small number of people at a time. I also do not work with anyone whose employer would put me in a conflict with my own.