The Scorecard Fallacy
Promotions are decided by people, and understanding them matters more than a perfect scorecard.
Many of us, especially those who excelled in structured environments like school, carry a particular model of the world into our careers. We tend to believe that advancement, like getting good grades, is the result of a fair, well-calculated, numerical system. Do task A, get 10 points. Do task B, get 20. Rack up enough points, outperform others on the scorecard, and a promotion is the logical outcome. This is the GPA model of career progression.
But the workplace often works very differently, especially when it comes to who gets promoted or why a customer buys your product. There is rarely a transparent, calculated score behind those decisions. People make them, so they are much more human, and much more opaque.
Story first, reasons second
The first thing to accept is that the people deciding (your boss, your boss’s boss, the investor, the customer) are human, and humans are not consistently rational. If people can be wildly irrational with their own life savings in the stock market, driven by euphoria or panic, how can we expect them to decide on your career, or on a purchase, purely by logic and spreadsheets?
Many decisions start from an impression, a feeling. The reasons and justifications often come later, constructed, sometimes unconsciously, to support a conclusion that was already forming. Nobody likes to admit they go on gut feeling, especially at work, so a narrative gets woven around it afterwards.
What sways these decision-makers is usually harder to measure than the tasks you ticked off. One thing is trust: does your manager trust your judgment, your loyalty and your character, as well as your competence? Another is whether they see you as “one of them.” That comes from a subtle, often subconscious recognition of shared values and perspectives (which is a different thing from blatant cronyism), or even from a sense that you remind them of a younger version of themselves. They’re investing in someone they feel they understand and can count on, in a way that’s hard to put on paper.
Beyond the scorecard
So the scorecard is only part of the game, and being a flawless task-completion machine only gets you so far. The most effective way to get promoted is often to help your manager succeed: to help them get their promotion, or reach their key objectives.
In practice, that starts with seeing things from their side: what pressures they’re under, what keeps them up at night. Then look past your assigned tasks to the bigger picture, and ask how your work feeds your team’s goals and your manager’s. When your manager cares about a problem, offer a solution to it. If you can make their life easier and help them get what they’re after, you become valuable in a way that ticking off tasks never makes you.
What gets in the way
Working this way runs into a few widely held beliefs that, in my view, do real damage. The first is “This is just sucking up or playing politics.” Many people, particularly those shaped by systems that reward individual, measurable achievement (like the exam-based education systems), recoil from the idea. It feels distasteful to them, a departure from a “fair” world where merit is rewarded objectively. They believe the “school system,” with its perfect scores and clear rubrics, is how things should be. But the school system is largely an artificial construct. The world of human interaction, of unspoken cues and trust built up through relationships, is the default state of human affairs, and you can learn to work in it without giving up your principles.
Another is “Maintain strict boundaries; work is just work.” Today’s emphasis on work-life balance and professional boundaries matters, because it helps prevent burnout and keeps you out of office politics, but it can be misused. It can turn into a reductive, almost mechanical way of treating colleagues: “They are my upstream; they give me X. I am midstream; I process X and give Y to downstream.” Being professional is important, but treating your colleagues, including your boss, as cogs in a machine is a mistake. They are people. Notice how they feel and what pressure they’re under. You don’t need to be best friends, but seeing them as people builds the kind of rapport and understanding that oils the wheels of collaboration and trust. Don’t “gear-ify” yourself or others.
And then there’s “I’m paid X, so I’ll only do X amount of work/thinking.” Many employees feel that thinking about their boss’s problems, or going the extra mile beyond their job description, is unpaid labor: “They don’t pay me enough to worry about that.” I can understand this from a purely transactional point of view, but it’s very shortsighted. It ignores the power balance in most employer-employee relationships, where the employer usually holds more bargaining power. If you rigidly stick to “I’ll only do more if you pay me more first,” you’re likely to end up in a stalemate. More often, you need to be proactive and show your value and potential before the bigger pay comes. Think of that extra effort as an investment: it builds trust and shows what you can do, and that is what leads to bigger opportunities and rewards. Those who only focus on the immediate exchange often miss the bigger game.
Work, like much of life, runs on these less obvious, more human dynamics, and seeing them clearly makes you more effective. Promotions are decided by people. More than whoever has the best score, people promote those they trust and understand, and those who have helped them succeed.