Struggling with “why am I not getting promoted” despite excellent performance? Explore Jeffrey Pfeffer’s power insights: Break the performance myth, master visibility, political skills, and boss relationships to unlock career advancement and avoid common traps.
You’ve been crushing it at work. Your projects exceed expectations, your metrics are stellar, and your manager regularly praises your contributions. So when that senior position opens up, you’re confident it’s yours. Then the announcement comes—and someone else got the job. Sound familiar?
Jeffrey Pfeffer, organizational behavior professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, delivers a message in his book “Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t” that many professionals don’t want to hear: outstanding job performance is neither necessary nor sufficient for career advancement. This isn’t cynicism—it’s decades of research on how organizational power actually works.
The Performance Myth That’s Holding You Back
Most people operate under what Pfeffer calls “the just-world hypothesis”—the belief that good work automatically leads to good outcomes. We want to believe that the world is fair, that competence is rewarded, and that if we simply do excellent work, we’ll naturally rise through the ranks. This belief is comforting, but it’s fundamentally wrong.
Research consistently shows that job performance accounts for only about 10 percent of variance in salary. Performance is loosely, weakly, and not very consistently related to salary increases and promotions. In one study Pfeffer cites, CEOs who presided over three straight years of poor performance and led their firms into bankruptcy only faced a 50 percent chance of losing their jobs. The determining factor wasn’t performance—it was power.
Why does this disconnect exist? Because performance has many dimensions, and what matters to decision-makers may not be what you think matters. Your technical brilliance might be impressive to you, but your boss might care more about how you make them look to their superiors. Your efficiency might be noteworthy, but the executive team might value visibility and relationship-building more than execution.
When Excellence Becomes a Trap
Here’s an uncomfortable reality that Pfeffer illustrates through real examples: being too good at your current job can actually prevent promotion. He describes Phil, a talented executive at a large financial institution who consistently brought complex IT projects in on or ahead of schedule and under budget. His boss profited mightily from Phil’s performance and was willing to reward him financially.
But when Phil asked about broadening his experience by moving to other jobs in the bank, his boss’s answer was immediate and definitive: “I’m not going to let you go because you are too good in the job you are doing for me.” Phil’s excellence trapped him. His boss expanded his responsibilities within the division but refused to do anything that would bring Phil to the attention of others and risk losing him.
This isn’t an isolated case. Pfeffer shares the story of Glenda, a Scottish manufacturing executive with extraordinary ability to bond with front-line employees. She worked for her employer for more than a decade, moving around the world to accomplish miraculous turnarounds in troubled plants. Her evaluations were great and she received bonuses and raises. But there were no promotions in Glenda’s past or future. The senior executives saw her as extremely effective in her current position and didn’t want to lose her abilities in that role. They also didn’t see her as senior executive material for much more senior jobs.
Great performance may leave you trapped because a boss does not want to lose your abilities and because your competence in your current role does not ensure that others will see you as a candidate for advancement.
What Actually Matters for Career Success
If performance isn’t enough, what is? Pfeffer’s research points to three critical factors that most people overlook.
First, you must get noticed. People in power are busy with their own agendas. They probably aren’t paying that much attention to you and what you’re doing. You should not assume that your boss knows or notices what you’re accomplishing and has perfect information about your activities. Your first responsibility is to ensure that those at higher levels know what you’re achieving—and the best way to ensure they know is to tell them.
This advice contradicts conventional wisdom. Many people have heard the saying that “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down” and consequently seek to fit in rather than stand out. But blending into the woodwork is career suicide. As one of Pfeffer’s former students put it, “You can make a great career as a middle manager doing quiet work, but can you gain a lot of power? The answer is most definitely, ‘no.'”
Second, you must define the dimensions of performance on which you’ll be judged—and make sure those dimensions favor you. Tina Brown, the legendary magazine editor, increased Vanity Fair’s circulation fourfold during her eight-year tenure and grew Talk magazine’s ad revenue by 6 percent even as the overall economy languished. But she apparently never earned a profit at any of these magazines. Did that matter? It depends entirely on what performance dimensions the organization values.
Brown’s performance depended on what people chose to measure—circulation and buzz, or profitability. She understood how to frame her work in terms that made her look successful. Similarly, you need to influence what gets measured and what gets valued. If you can’t control what matters, at minimum you need to understand it and excel on those dimensions.
Third, you must manage those in power, particularly your boss. Most people think their job is to achieve results. That’s incomplete. Your job is also to make those with power over you feel better about themselves. This isn’t about being fake or obsequious—it’s about understanding a fundamental human truth that Pfeffer’s research reveals.
Most people, not just those who are insecure, like to feel good about themselves. They are motivated to self-enhance, seeking out positive information and avoiding negative feedback. People overestimate their abilities and accomplishments—a phenomenon called the above average effect—with way more than half of surveyed respondents reporting they are above average on pretty much everything. When you make your boss feel good about themselves, you align yourself with their psychological needs and motivations.
The Political Skills That Separate Winners from Losers
Research by Gerald Ferris and colleagues developed an eighteen-item political skills inventory. Studies on school administrators and bank branch managers showed that people who had more political skill received higher performance evaluations and were rated as more effective leaders. Political skill mattered more than actual performance for how people were evaluated.
One study investigated the primary motivations of managers and their professional success. One group was primarily motivated by a need for affiliation—they wanted to be liked. A second group was primarily motivated by a need for achievement. A third group was primarily interested in power. The evidence showed that this third group, the managers primarily interested in power, were the most effective—not only in achieving positions of influence inside companies but also in accomplishing their jobs.
This doesn’t mean you should become a ruthless political operator. It means you need to understand that organizations are political systems where power matters, and being naive about this fact puts you at a severe disadvantage. The people who succeed are those who combine competence with political savvy—they do good work and they ensure the right people know about it. They understand power dynamics and use them strategically.
Breaking Free from the Performance-Only Mindset
The first step is accepting that the world isn’t always just. Merit alone does not guarantee success. As Pfeffer documents through extensive research, systematic empirical studies confirm what these stories suggest: being politically savvy and seeking power are related to career success and managerial performance.
The second step is getting out of your own way. Many people engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”—they don’t actively seek powerful positions, which protects them from the self-esteem consequences of possibly failing in that effort. The logic is deceptively simple: if you don’t try to build power, you can’t fail at it, and therefore your self-image remains intact. But this protective mechanism ensures you’ll never achieve the influence you’re capable of wielding.
The third step is to stop waiting for someone to notice your good work. Build visibility deliberately. As Pfeffer notes, in advertising, one of the most prominent measures of effectiveness is ad recall—not taste, logic, or artistry—simply, do you remember the ad and the product? The same holds true for you and your path to power. Research shows that repeated exposure increases positive affect and reduces negative feelings. People like what they remember—and that includes you. Simply put, in many cases, being memorable equals getting picked.
Moving Forward with Eyes Wide Open
None of this means performance doesn’t matter. Incompetence will eventually catch up with you. But competence is table stakes—it’s the minimum requirement, not the differentiator. The professionals who build substantial careers understand that performance is necessary but not sufficient. They combine solid work with strategic self-promotion, political awareness, and relationship management.
Pfeffer’s research shows that people who ignore organizational politics do so at their peril. The case of Beth, a graduate from prestigious institutions with strong interpersonal skills, illustrates this perfectly. Despite holding senior positions in government, she experienced a “nonlinear” career punctuated by unemployment and job insecurity. As she explained to Pfeffer, “People take credit for the work of others. People mostly look out for their own careers, often at the expense of the place where they work. The self-promoters get rewarded. I guess I haven’t been willing to be mean enough or calculating enough to sacrifice things I believed in order to be successful.”
Beth’s unwillingness to play organizational politics cost her career stability and advancement. Meanwhile, professionals who embrace political realities—like Anne, who used strategic positioning and resource control to become CEO of a high-tech startup within a year of graduating business school despite having no technology background—achieve remarkable success.
The world of work is not necessarily the world we want, but it is the world that exists. Building and using power are essential organizational survival skills. There is zero-sum competition for status and jobs. Most organizations have only one CEO, one managing partner, one prime minister. With more well-qualified people competing for each step on the organizational ladder, rivalry is intense and only getting more so.
You can either accept this reality and develop the skills to navigate it, or you can insist that performance alone should be enough and watch others advance past you. The choice is yours, but make it with full awareness of what research actually shows about how careers are built and power is acquired. As Pfeffer concludes, if you are going to seek power, you will be happier if you are effective in that quest. And being effective requires understanding that your job performance is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
