Program Tactics #006 - The Vanishing Act

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

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Estimated reading time: 5.5 mins

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​When pain gets you promoted

Okay, this tactic is a little spicy, and will probably be in the gray territory. Just promise to not be evil, okay?

When's the last time you took a long vacation from work?

Like 2 weeks or more?

I mean the real kind where you uninstall your work apps and leave your laptop at home. No cheating.

If you're putting in important and high quality work day after day and you're not getting recognized or promoted, it might be time to use absence as a tool to remind everyone what you bring to the organization.

I've seen several examples of colleagues who just held everything together so well that management wasn't sure they did much at all. Then they leave for a few weeks and management was absolutely surprised and hamstrung in their absence.

If you're this person, it's time to use absence as a tool.

Are you ready for The Vanishing Act?

The trick is, you have to leave long enough to require them to perform the role you did. Not just skip the meetings and processes you do for a week or so and have you recover the pieces when you return.

To do this, important and high quality work is a requirement to pull this off. If you want this tactic to work, some of these points must be true.

You only need a few items:

Important

• Major project or program
• High visibility
• High budget
• Strong impacts to bottom line
• Strong effects to team productivity

High quality

• Your execution ability
• Your knowledge of the space
• Your work quality
• Friction removing ("grease")
• Uniting everyone towards a common goal, not easily achieved without you ("glue")

If you don't really have a strong case for both camps of this criteria, your vanishing act might not have the effectiveness you'd want. Come back to this tactic in the future, or just take a regular break.

Preparing for leave

When it comes to preparing for your leave, there's a fine line between spoon feeding people to cover you, and just straight up disappearing with no bread crumbs.

For the purposes of this tactic, you want to leave enough information for someone to find out what needs to be covered or done, but you don't want to spoon feed it. If you give too much, they won't miss you. Give too little and people will be really frustrated at the lack of professionalism.

If straight up disappearing is a 0 and spoon feeding is a 10, I recommend to leave at around a 4-5 using this tactic.

Something will happen

If you did this right, when you return you're likely to become more valuable and gain recognition for your efforts. If you want to get promoted out of this, you're going to need ride this wave while they realize how valuable you are-- and like any surfer knows, you have to do a little bit of paddling to catch the wave.

Ride the wave in

If you notice a positive shift, stabilize your workload again, and then ask your manager about advancement opportunities in your next 1:1. Keep bringing it up approximately once a month in your 1:1's.

This is because the way most people get promoted is not a single event. It's actually after months intent from you and reception from your manager. It's not a white-knuckled meeting where we convince them to give us a promotion before we leave the room (or quit). That's the kind of stuff that only happens virtually on LinkedIn for likes (yes I said it).

There's too much to expand on in terms of promotions. Instead of doing it a half justice I'll write more in the near future.

Oops, missed the wave

Sometimes, we miss the wave or there was no wave. Let's talk about that.

Provided you didn't make the handoff too easy (such as frontloading, automating, spoon feeding), you should have elicited a reaction from your manager, team, or org.

If you come back and nothing's changed, there are a few possibilities:

1. It just didn't work for the environment you're in (or your coworkers are as stellar as you)
2. You didn't have enough of the criteria above
3. Your role isn't as valuable as you thought

Either way, you've learned something about working where you're at. This should tell you more about the climate of your organization and will give you important data to consider about your long term prospects there.

Not getting a reaction to your leave is actually really important data.

If your role isn't seen as valuable to the organization, and you're not doing important work, what will happen the next time cost cutting comes around?

I don't mean to scare you, but we should all really be thinking about stuff like this. How much runway do you think you have? 6 months? 12 months? Will you still be safe in 24 months? The longer your time horizon goes out, the more likely you could become impacted.

The way forward

When it doesn't go our way, it's time to evaluate what's in our control-- our careers. I always go back to this timeless advice:

Would you say that you're still learning or earning?

Learning: are you continuing to learn new skills and stretch your abilities?
​Earning: are you making the kind of money that you want to or can in the open market?

Doing at least one of these is good. Doing none devolves into complacency (don't stay here too long).

Sometimes it's okay to stay put if you're not learning or earning when there's a family situation, or the economy is just not doing great. Use judgement, but be aware it's easy to wake up and find that the time has passed, a few years have gone by, and we just haven't grown.

There's always a better job with better pay out there, and you'll have the opportunity to learn a lot more.

The question is, do you know when you will have learned and earned enough in your current role?

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P.S. I've helped numerous people get promoted, and as a manger, I've worked with HR to give out promotions to my staff. If you want a partner to help you get through this, drop me a line.

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