A promotion is an advancement to a position with a title and responsibilities that indicate a change for the - better in your prestige and power. It may be accompanied by a substantial raise, or admit you to the company profit-sharing plan, or provide an extra week's vacation, or do no more than give you a key to the executive's men's room. But unless you' are "kicked upstairs" to a pretentious but empty title, as some companies do when they can't retire aging executives soon enough, a promotion is a recognition of your ability to assume responsibility for the work of others as well as yourself.
The mere fact that others are involved alters considerably your approach to your work. Whereas before you were concerned with how well you did your job, and what the boss thought about your work, you are now concerned about how well you and your subordinates do the job, what you think about them, what they think about you, and above all, what your superiors think about you in particular and your department in general.
All of which brings up the subject of company politics. The man with his nose to the grindstone can remain aloof from company politics because neither he nor his obdurate nose is going anywhere anyway. But you are concerned with your subordinates and your superiors, and where you are concerned with people, you are concerned with politics. In that spot there are no neutrals-only insiders and outsiders, and you can't help steer the ship unless you are a recognized member of the crew.
If you want to continue to be prompted up the managerial ladder, you must realize that the higher you go, the smarter will be the men with whom you must play politics. In his famous best-selling book, The Status Seekers, Author Vance Packard asserts that it is becoming increasingly difficult for non-college graduates to win top managerial positions, the implication being that college men can get along together more smoothly than their rougher contemporaries who came up "the hard way."
My own experience with both college and non-college men in approximately equal numbers gives the college men the advantage in only one easily remedied respect. The college man is trained to "think rich," and moves confidently ahead on the assurance that his diploma will carry him through. No matter that he may be poverty-stricken in the ability department; he is rich in college associates and rich in thought. What he can't do himself, his air of confidence often will help him do. Confronted with this collegiate self-assurance, the non-college man tends to go on the defensive, and few are the sales made when the pitch is in defense of the product instead of in the assertion of its merits.
Two things must be taken into consideration here. Success is an accumulative thing. The higher you go, the more responsibilities you accumulate. To the vast majority, college or non-college, this accumulation of responsibilities and the resulting "high pressure" becomes a terrifying thing, and they tend to slack off just when the going is good. At the same time, the higher you go, the more experience you have in handling responsibilities, and the more subordinates you have to handle them. And if you haven't left the selection of your subordinates to intelligence tests and letters of recommendation from "old grads," you've got a loyal crew behind you shoving you ahead for their own good.
If what I say next sounds derogatory to college educations, it is not because I am not in favor of colleges.
I am in favor of all the education a man can get. What I do object to is the smug assumption that what a man learns in four years of ivy-walled seclusion, during which he may or may not have achieved anything worth mentioning, is going to last him the rest of his life. As the old Latin proverb has it, "A good man is always a good learner," one of the few proverbs as good today as then. The reverse of that, equally true, is that a good learner is always a good man, only in that case college has nothing to do with it.
As I have pointed out, the habit of success is based on a constant study of your achievements and their relation to how you want to function in life. This is no ivory-towered study to be completed in four years and then forgotten. It is an unending and ever-expanding process through which you accumulate increasingly valuable-experiences. And when these achievements are written down and analyzed in terms of value to your organization and yourself, you will have living dollar signs speaking for you with far more authority than can a dusty diploma.
