How I went from Underestimated to Promoted
There are moments in life where you are silently screaming through a tight-lipped smile. Those moments for me come when I’ve been underestimated by the people around me. It makes me so frustrated to sit in a corporate space and know I’ve been working so hard for so little reward.
I know why they underestimate me – I’m a petite black female with a bright smile and a face that could be sixteen years-old rather than twenty-six. The color of my skin and the size of my frame doesn’t make it easy for me to navigate a white corporate space filled with colleagues who are twice my age. Yet, somehow, that underestimation has become my strength because the element of surprise can be such a sweet victory.
I have had to work twice as hard as my white colleagues and advocate for myself in so many situations just to get to the career I have now. It was not easy, and with each fake smile I plastered on my face, I have conquered the space. I had to research how to talk, how to move, how to play chess in the stiff white underbelly of corporate America. Imagine the surprise on a white woman’s face when I pulled out excel spreadsheets of my accomplishments, coupled with sentences that dripped with passive aggressiveness as I sat down with a smile on my face to ask for a promotion. The evidence sat on the table and my words were researched thoroughly; I knew how to ask and I calculated every answer to my question with precision. I couldn’t go in with a half-ass plan; I had to have every hypothetical situation plotted out because that is the life of a young black woman in America. Nothing can be mediocre for us in the workplace – or else we will always be the sacrifice for scrutiny and blame.
When I was an assistant, I began to take up work that was above my role, due to someone higher up than me leaving the team. I wanted to prove myself to my manager and show that I could accomplish the work of a coordinator — the next level up. In order to do that, I believed I had to do the work that coordinators were designated to do. This did work to my advantage when asking for a promotion, but now I am of the mindset that adding more work to your plate in order to get a promotion is not necessarily the best step, as you still may not get that promotion and just have more work to do.
As I was working the job of two people, I began to feel a deep frustration about how I was looked at within my team. All the work began to fall on me, and rather than adding more money on top of the workload, it became the new normal. I couldn’t bear sitting in meetings with a smile on my face as the accomplishments I had brought to the team were unrewarded. I was working so hard that it became difficult to even take a vacation as the anxiety of the massive amount of emails waiting for me would stop me in my tracks.
Many times, in the workplace, a promotion won’t just fall on your lap. Upper management is determined to get double the work for the same pay. Thus, you must advocate for yourself. You must be the one to stand and ask for that promotion. When fiscal year reviews were underway, I did advocate for myself and I got led on with promises that a promotion was coming soon. Months passed, and all I wanted to do was stay silent and be that good worker bee. However, I knew that strategy would never work for someone like me; I had to speak up once again. I had to research ways to ask for a promotion, and I reached out to another black woman in my workplace who was a few years older than me and ahead in her career. I wanted to know how she got there, and if she could give me tips so I could thrive as well. It was so important having that guiding light in my career journey because it truly did help me gain confidence to put into words what I wanted. I had begun to think I was going insane because I was constantly told by my manager that I was doing excellent work, and ready to become a coordinator, yet nothing changed. My teammates were all promoted before me. I felt as though I was becoming a shell of myself; but reaching out to this woman and hearing her story made me realize – it wasn’t just me. This was happening to so many black women across the company. Having learned her story, along with the tools I needed to make a final ask, I pushed forward.
In the 2 and a half years I have been at my company, I have gone from being an assistant to a coordinator; and then moved from the coordinator role into a different team as an associate manager. My journey isn’t over, but every jump I’ve made in these two years have been because of my willingness to stand up for myself and the career that I hold dear to me.
Definitely check out How to Prep for the Promotion Conversation here.
