You always remember your first real promotion. It’s a big moment. It’s bigger than just landing your first real job. To do that, you need a good resume and interview. To get promoted, you have to prove yourself. I remember mine.

I started my career as a contractor working on the Y2K crisis. After doing that for about a year, I decided I wanted to be real employee at a real company. Some people love contracting, but it wasn’t for me.

I landed a job at a respectable corporation, RFC, which was a mortgage subsidiary of General Motors. My first role was as a help desk analyst. I shared a cubicle with my co-worker, wore a headset, and answered the phone with the phrase, “Technical Support Center, this is Zach. How can I help you?”

I did that job to the best of my ability for about nine months when a higher-level job opportunity opened up. I was excited. About half of us on the help desk applied for it. Of course, we all sent in our resumes and interviewed, but those weren’t the only criteria used to judge us.

Reputation

Every help desk analyst has a reputation with the rest of the IT department. Here’s how it works: The help desk analyst solves the problem if she can, but if she can’t, she writes up a ticket and escalates it to the correct support group to resolve the problem.

Every day, the higher-level support groups look at their tickets and they ask themselves several questions:

1. Did the help desk analyst troubleshoot effectively before escalating?
2. Is the ticket well-documented, with background information, troubleshooting, screenshots, and error messages?
3. Was the ticket escalated to the right team, or should it have gone elsewhere?

Whether the answers to those questions are positive or negative, after hundreds of tickets, every help desk analyst’s reputation is very well-established.

The promotion

I got the job promotion. I didn’t just get it because I interviewed well. I got it because I made a lot of really good tickets.

I was pumped. I didn’t have to log into a call queue and wear a headset for eight hours a day anymore. I even got my own entire cubicle. How cool was that? I had officially climbed my first rung on the corporate ladder.

The reality

The honeymoon lasted about 10 minutes. After settling in, the senior engineer on the team sat me down and showed me the team ticket queue. We called it “the bucket.” It had about one hundred tickets in it, and some were months old. I was shocked.

He made a straightforward explanation: “We’ve been busy with projects. But now that you are here, you can take care of the support work.”

I quickly figured out what happened. As soon as they got approval for the new position, they stopped doing the support work, figuring help was on the way. Hiring always takes longer than planned, even internally, so what started off as a couple of weeks, turned into months. Ugh.

I spent the first month of my job promotion digging out from the backlog. I had been used to dealing with upset customers before. After all, no one calls the help desk because they are having a great day. I was used to that. But I wasn’t used to talking to people who were upset and ignored. Ooooh, that was bad.

Several of the tickets, I had created and escalated myself back in my former role. I assured my customers that someone would get back to them shortly. Now I was that someone, and I was very very late!

The leadership lesson

What’s the point of this silly story? Here are a few takeaways that stuck with me:

1. Everyone has a reputation. Your reputation is either unknown, good, bad, or complicated. If you want to get promoted, it better be good. None of those other options work.
2. Easing into things is overrated. Diving straight into the deep end, while stressful, makes for a fantastic learning experience. I picked up the job way faster this way than if I had shadowed the senior engineer.
3. It’s all about the customer. Remember all of those angry and ignored customers? I got to know every one of them. Then I served them better the next time and the time after that. It’s incredibly empowering to turn an angry customer into a loyal fan. It feels like a superpower.

Those are my leadership lessons. I hope you enjoyed the article. If you can relate to this story, give me a shout in the comments.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download