Wouldn’t it be great if promotions were based solely on loyalty and tenure? Okay, we should probably throw skills in the mix, too. That being said, the truth about climbing the corporate ladder is, sometimes, there’s no rhyme or reason why one employee stands out over their equally deserving colleagues.
It can be incredibly hard to watch someone else get the promotion you believe should have been yours. What makes that even harder is knowing that you taught the person moving up in your company everything they know.
One employee is contemplating letting her team ‘crash and burn’ after the ‘personality hire’ she trained got promoted to a managerial position.
“A new lady started at my work and is maybe 10 years older than me, is immediately chummy with everyone and they all act as if they’ve [known] each other for years,” she wrote in her since-deleted Reddit post. “I find it extremely strange considering the same older people in my team ignore me entirely.”
“If I didn’t speak to them first, I’d be totally invisible to them,” she admitted. “They seem to have no respect for younger workers.”
PeopleImages.com – Yuri A | Shutterstock
The worker shared that she trained this employee, who has been in the role for less than six months, on everything. Yet when a new management job came up — which the Redditor applied and interviewed for — the woman she trained got the promotion over her.
“I was told I didn’t have enough experience,” she wrote. “Guess what? They gave the job to the lady with six months of knowledge … who I trained and taught everything to.”
The employee got the promotion because she is a ‘bubbly’ person.
“She apparently got the job over me because she was a ‘bubbly’ person,” the Redditor continued. “Like, what the [expletive] does that even mean? She has no technical knowledge and if you need to troubleshoot anything I can’t ask her because she simply won’t know the answer.”
“I am far more qualified and she has even said multiple times in our meetings that she is just ‘winging it,’” she insisted. “I have also lost out on quite a large pay raise because of this. Don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
Now, this worker has decided that she must look for another opportunity and has decided to look into moving departments.
“I’m tired of being suppressed of my potential and I don’t feel valued,” she stated. “The team will crash and burn without me, but that’s their problem. They’ll soon see how well the ‘bubbly’ woman copes once I move and all technical knowledge is gone.”
She admitted that she doesn’t plan to tell anyone about her feelings or give advanced knowledge about her potential transfer in an attempt to “reverse Uno them and leave them blindsided.”
Companies often seek to put those with strong social skills in leadership roles.
The Harvard Business Review “analyzed data from Russell Reynold Associates, one of the world’s premier executive-search firms.” Their research revealed that, in recent years, the most important quality for those in executive and management positions has been strong social skills.
If social skills are the most important qualification for leaders, it makes sense why this so-called “personality hire” got the promotion — and Redditors agreed.
“You don’t want to be a manager, you want a senior technical role,” one user observed.
“People management roles typically focus on social skills rather than technical in my experience,” another commenter wrote.
If this woman wants to be promoted to a managerial role in the future she should work on her communications skills to set herself up for success.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news, and human interest topics.
