Promotion Bias: Why the People We Promote Remind Us of Ourselves

We’ve got an opening for a new team lead role and we’ve got two strong people for that role. The first one speaks up in every team meeting, tells us what he’s achieved, and he’s asked us twice about the next steps in his career. The second one speaks less. When she does speak, it’s often the point that other people may have missed in a meeting, and she’s never mentioned promotion once. We choose the first one for the promotion because it feels like an easy decision. And eight months later, Sofia, our second candidate, she resigns, and it feels like things in the team aren’t quite going the way that we’d like them to. The problem wasn’t the choice of one person, the problem was how we saw both of them.

Twenty minutes or so about one real problem and what we can actually do about it. Today: why the people we promote so often remind us of ourselves and how strong people on multicultural teams often get overlooked along the way. Let’s go.

And we’re not just talking about national culture here, we’re talking about our culture as an individual that’s based on our national culture, it’s based on our experience, it’s based on where we’ve worked, who we’ve worked with, it’s all of those things that make us who we are that we take into work. And I think our next podcast will be looking a lot more at exactly what is cultural friction in the way that I’m defining it. But let’s get back to this episode, because in this episode we’re going to be looking at promotion bias and affinity bias. We’re going to look at how working in a second language changes how people are seen. We’ll look at how more individualist, more collectivist, and high power distance work cultures teach people different rules for showing good work. And we’ll look at what people in different cultures expect from a good leader. And then we’ll finish off with our four things that we can do in our next promotion decision.

So let’s get into this and let’s kind of start with our team. So we lead a team of nine people. It’s a mixed team, people from different backgrounds, some working in their first language and some in their second or even third language.

Our current team lead is moving to a new role, so we need to fill that position, and we have two strong candidates. The first is Mark, and Mark is really easy to notice because he’s the one that speaks up in every meeting. His updates are clear and specific. I closed the supplier contract, I fixed the reporting problem. He’s told us more than once that he wants to lead a team and he’s asked us twice what the next step is for him and his career.

The second is Sofia, and Sofia speaks less in meetings, but when she does speak, it’s often that point that everyone else missed. The risk in the plan, the client who hasn’t been told, the deadline that isn’t realistic, that’s where Sofia speaks up. Outside meetings, something else happens. When people on the team are stuck, they go to Sofia. They don’t come to us, they don’t go to Mark, they go to Sofia. And in her update, she says, We, we got the release out, we solved the data problem. And she’s never once asked about promotion.

So when we sit down to decide, it doesn’t take us long. We’ve got a lot of evidence for Mark. When we look at it closely, most of that evidence has actually come from Mark himself. For Sofia, we have a general feeling that she’s really, really good and she seems happy where she is. So we promote Mark.

So what’s actually going on here? We understood that Mark was ready and wanted the role. He’d said so. He’d shown us his results, and we understood that Sofia was content in her current role. She’d never said anything different. Mark understood that this is how you show up ready for more. You make your results visible, you say what you want, you ask. Where he learnt to work, that’s what a serious, ambitious person does.

Sofia understood something very different. She understood that good work gets noticed, that a good manager watches, sees who’s ready, and offers the role. That talking about your own success is boasting, and taking credit, really, that should belong to the team. And asking your manager for a promotion can come across as pushy, even disrespectful.

So when we announced that Mark is to be promoted, Sofia didn’t hear we didn’t know you wanted it. She heard my manager has looked at my work and decided that I’m not ready.

Eight months later, Sofia resigns, and in her exit conversation she says quite calmly that she didn’t see a future for herself here. The team cohesion is starting to change, and Mark is working long hours while results are slipping. Partly because the questions people used to take to Sofia now go to him and he doesn’t always have the answers. So now they come to us. We could never have foreseen this happening, but here we are. This is promotion bias in multicultural teams.

So why is this happening? Well, I’m going to go through a few reasons, and the first is that we tend to trust what feels familiar. We judge people more favourably when they remind us of ourselves. This is called the affinity bias. And it’s not a conscious decision, it’s something that happens well before we’ve had time to think.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter saw this in the 70s when she studied managers inside a large American corporation. She found that managers tended to promote people who resembled them because those people felt easier to trust and easier to predict. More than 30 years later, Lauren Rivera found the same pattern in hiring at elite banks, law firms, and consulting firms. Interviewers kept choosing candidates who shared their background, their interests, and their style, and of course, those interviewers called it finding the best fit.

Now, let’s look at Mark, because Mark works in a way that many of us can recognise. Many of us were taught to work this way. When he talks about his results, it kind of sounds like the way that maybe we’ve been taught to talk about our results. So when we look at Mark, we see ourselves at that stage of our career, and that makes him feel like a safe choice. That’s why good intentions aren’t enough here. If we want different results, we need a process, not just a promise to be fair. So that’s our first reason.

Now, our second reason is that confidence is really easy to mistake for ability. I’m gonna say that again, confidence is really easy to mistake for ability. People who speak the working language with ease, they tend to sound quite confident. And confidence, as I said, is easy to mistake for ability.

Tsedal Neeley studied a global company that made English its official working language. People who are less fluent felt that they had lost status, and many of them spoke less in meetings as a result. From the outside, speaking less can look like having less to say or being less engaged.

Sofia works in her second language. In a fast meeting, by the time she’s found exactly the right words, the conversation has often moved on. So she speaks when it matters the most. Whilst many of us will read that as being quiet or not having anything to say, it’s just possible that she just might be being careful. So that’s our second reason.

Now, our third reason is that different work cultures teach rules for showing good work. So in more individualist work cultures, so think about the USA, Netherlands, Germany, that tend to be much more individualistic, people learn to talk about their own results. They say I and they ask about the next role. And if you don’t ask, people assume that you don’t really want it.

But in more collectivist cultures, and think South Korea, Ghana, Colombia, people learn to give credit to the group. They say we. Talking about your own success can feel like boasting, and boasting damages trust.

And in work cultures with high power distance, where the gap between a manager and their team is wider and more formal, people learn to wait. So countries like Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, they tend to score high on those kind of power distance scales. A good manager notices your work and offers you the role. Asking for it yourself can feel like you’re questioning your manager’s judgment.

If you listen to episode 6, why our best regional hire leaves sooner than we think, you’ll recognise this. The people most worth keeping are often the least likely to tell us what they want. We read Sofia as being happy where she is and doing the job that she’s doing. Being quiet is not the same as being happy.

And there’s another important caution here, and it’s the main point of episode four. And you can check those podcasts wherever you’re listening to this. And episode four was the episode that talked about reading a culture guide, but then you actually meet the person. These patterns that we talk about in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, these patterns are across groups, they’re not boxes for individuals. Sofia might work this way because of where she grew up, the company where she started her career, the manager who trained her. This just might be how Sofia is. This is how she works. We don’t really need to know which one it is, we just need to know Sofia. And we just need to know that for Sofia, that doesn’t ask does not mean that she doesn’t want.

So, we read Mark as ambitious and Sofia is happy where she is. Both readings could be wrong. We think we’re measuring leadership potential. Often we’re measuring how familiar someone’s way of working feels to us.

So, what are we missing? Let’s go back and look at what Sofia was showing us all along. Colleagues trust her. She notices what other people miss. She shares the credit, those are leadership qualities. They’re just quiet ones.

The GLOBE study, led by Robert House, surveyed around 17,000 managers in 62 societies and found that people in different cultures expect different things from a good leader. In some places, a good leader is visible and decisive. In others, a good leader listens, builds agreement, and protects the group. A multicultural team holds both sets of expectations. Some of our team want a leader like Mark, some of our team want a leader like Sofia. The person already working well with both groups may be the person that we didn’t choose for that promotion.

And the cost of missing that doesn’t appear on the day that we make that decision. It appears over the next year. We lose the person that the other people went to. Sofia, we lose her. We then spend months recruiting, then more months before the new person knows the work. The person we promoted may need extra support because part of the team doesn’t respond to their style. And over several rounds of promotion, our managers start to look and sound the same. For anyone in HR and L&D or leading a country or a region, this is a pattern, not a single decision. A succession plan can often show the habits of the people doing the choosing. It doesn’t always show the talent that we have.

So then, what can we do about this? We don’t fix it by trying harder to be fair in the moment, we fix it by changing how we make decisions. And I think there are four things that we can do, and we can use all four of them in the next promotion that we make.

So here’s our first one. Define the role before we look at the people. Before we think about any names, write down what this role needs over the next two years, and we need to be specific. So we don’t say things like strong leadership or good communication. We say things like keeps a team spread across three time zones working together, spots problems before the client does, gets two departments to agree on one plan. When that list of the role comes first, when those needs come first, we compare people against the role, not against each other and not against ourselves. Put Sofia next to that list, and she is already doing most of this stuff.

Second thing is collect evidence from outside the meeting room. Meetings reward people who speak quickly and confidently in the working language. So we need to look further. We need to look at delivery records, we need to look at written work, what got done, who made that happen. And we ask the team a really simple question: when you’re stuck, who is it that you go to? The answer is often not the person who speaks most in the meetings.

And our third thing, ask about ambition directly, but do that in private. We don’t wait for people to raise it. We ask one-to-one, are you interested in leading a team? What would you need to feel ready to do that? When we ask, when we ask that question to Sofia, she isn’t then putting herself forward, she’s answering her manager’s question. And answering your manager is respectful in every work culture. We ask everyone on the team, not only the people we think might be interested. Then we’re not guessing who wants this role. We know. We’ve collected the evidence.

But remember, if you are a low-context individual and you’re speaking to somebody who may be higher context than you, then we need to also be looking at the body language, the eye movement, we need to read the room, listen to the things that are not being said. All of this is going to be really important to understanding how a person really feels. Remember that those explicit words are for low context people, and all of the meaning is held in those words. But for higher context people, meaning is held in context in a lot more than just the words that are spoken.

And finally, number four, check our own pattern and get a second view. Look at the last five people that we’ve promoted. What do they all have in common? How do they speak? How do they present their work? Where did they start their careers? how much of them is really like us. If our notes on all of those five people say the same thing, like confident, speaks up, ambitious, then we’ve probably been promoting one way of working, not five different strengths. That tells us our process is picking people who work like us.

So before that next decision, we bring in a second person, someone who works differently from us, and we ask them to look at those same candidates and give us their perspectives.

So if there’s going to be one thing, we always have our one thing that I’d love you to take away from the end of each episode, and I guess for this one, it’s this. The person who asks for the role is not always the person most ready for that role. And the person who waits isn’t always waiting because they don’t want it. So before we decide, we ask everyone and we look at the work of those individuals, and we don’t just listen to how those individuals are talking about their work.

Seeing people clearly when they work differently from you is a leadership skill, and it can be learned. That’s what the BASIS Leadership Programme does. It’s leadership training for team leaders, managers, and CEOs, built for real teams where people come from different backgrounds. It’s one-to-one, you can do it online, you can do it in Barcelona, or we can come to your office wherever you are. You can find it at brendanthomasquinn.com/leadership-programme.

The full article on this topic with all the references is also at brendanthomasquinn.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. Do follow me, I’d love to connect with you. And if you don’t want to miss that next episode, follow the show wherever you’re listening right now. All the links are in the show notes as well as the links to that leadership programme. Take care wherever you are.