The Promotability Index Assessment: How To Stand Out And Advance Your Career With Amii Barnard-Bahn

 

Promotability takes more than just qualifications and experience; it’s developing a strategic approach to career advancement. In this episode, Amii Barnard-Bahn, a former Fortune Global 50 executive, shares her unique perspective on Promotability. She introduces the Promotability Index assessment she created, which helps individuals identify their strengths and areas for growth. Amii explains why understanding Promotability is essential to advancing in your career, and delves into the 5 Pillars of Promotability.  Amii also emphasizes the importance of ethical workplace culture and building strong relationships with mentors and sponsors. Whether you’re new to the workforce or a seasoned professional, this episode offers valuable insights and strategies to help you achieve your career goals. Tune in to gain valuable knowledge from Amii’s extensive experience, and discover how you can unlock your full potential and become a more promotable candidate.

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The Promotability Index Assessment: How To Stand Out And Advance Your Career With Amii Barnard-Bahn

The 5 Pillars Of Promotability

My guest is my friend, Amii Barnard-Bahn. I have been following Amii since I first met her because she’s so awesome. She has a whole lot to talk about, especially the Promotability Index assessment that she has created, which helps you analyze where you’re strong and where you could shore up your strengths. Her official bio is Amii Barnard-Bahn is a former Fortune Global 50 executive. She’s a consultant to the C-suite and leaders at global companies like Bank of the West, Adobe, and The Gap.

She’s recognized by Forbes as one of the top coaches for legal and compliance executives. She’s also a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches. That’s huge. If you don’t know about that, that’s a big deal. She’s a guest lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley. She’s a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Compliance Week and a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Coaching.

Amii earned her Law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and her Bachelor’s at Tufts. She’s been a lifelong diversity advocate. Amii has testified for the successful passage of the first laws in the US requiring corporate boards to include women. You can receive her free Promotability Index self-assessment by texting PROMOTEME to 4-222. You can also get The Promotability Index Guidebook in three formats, paperback, PDF, and Kindle. We had a lot to say about how you think about promotion and how you know if you are promotable. Here comes my conversation with Amii Barnard-Bahn.

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Amii Barnard-Bahn, I am so happy to finally have you on the show. You’ve been on my wish list for quite some time, so I’m glad we made it happen. Welcome.

Thank you.

We’ve known each other for quite some time. You do some amazing stuff. I have a whole list of questions for you. First, I’d like to ask you, if you had a dream interview with someone who is no longer with us, so you couldn’t call them up, who would it be, what would you ask them, and who should be listening?

Someone who I admired but never got a chance to meet is Ida B. Wells. She was born in the late 1800s and lived until the 1930s. She was a prominent Black-American investigative journalist, educator, and a very early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the NAACP. She dedicated her whole life to documenting all kinds of atrocities post-Emancipation including lynching in the United States. She owned a newspaper, which was very unusual at that time to have a Black-owned newspaper.

She was a phenomenal businesswoman and leader, so I love her for that. She was entrepreneurial. She was mission-based. She was born into slavery in Mississippi and was freed during the Emancipation Proclamation. That period in history is phenomenal. She survived everything from having her press burned down to all kinds of things and persisted. I would love to talk to her about the situation we’re in, what progress we’ve made, what progress we haven’t made, and what she would advise because she was an incredible strategist. She was able to leverage privileged White women into her cause because of the way she deconstructed and reframed things.

You’ve talked about reframing things. Something we do a lot, especially with our clients is how you reframe things. She was incredible. You do so many amazing things, but what I particularly want to ask you about is the Promotability Index. It’s a leadership self-assessment and an excellent guidebook. I have a copy. Tell us a little bit about what it is, who should use it, and why it makes the workplace a better place.

In terms of who should use it, anyone who’s interested in continuing to learn, always be employable, potentially also to accelerate and climb the corporate ladder or wherever they are, and get more responsibility should read it. You assess yourself against the five key elements that lead to promotability and constant employability with a growth mindset. It’s the five elements that employers and organizations look to when making decisions with limited resources on who to invest in and who to promote.

Anyone who's interested in continuing to learn, always be employable, and get more responsibility should read the Promotability Index. It can help them to speed up and climb the corporate ladder. Click To Tweet

You mentioned the five key elements. What are they?

There’s self-awareness, external awareness, strategic thinking, thought leadership, and executive presence.

Tell us a little bit more about each of those.

Self-awareness is a degree to which you know yourself, what your values are, what motivates you, and what your working preferences are. Those are the type of people you like to work with, the size of the company, whether you’re a fast-driven, fast-paced results person, or you’re a consensus-driven, a little bit slower cross-collaborator. All of us have different styles. There’s no one right style that’s right, but it’s good to find a good fit in the company for your personal strengths or for satisfaction. It can be stressful for people to be in a company or to work for a boss or in a team that is at odds with how they prefer to work. We can all accommodate 10% to 20% or longer if we have to, but it’s not as easy or joyful for us.

One of the things that I talk about and hear about a lot is how it’s important to have multiple points of view and multiple learning styles in a team because each person brings the elements that need to come together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. How would this fit in? 

The Promotability Index is neutral to styles around more core. It’s not a personality test. I use those in my coaching. This is around core competencies that are important regardless of your style, and I’m sure you would agree with this, such as communication and speaking. The higher you want to go in an organization with rare exceptions, you need to be a good communicator and comfortable on stage, especially at a Fortune 500. You have to exude gravitas.

I break down executive presence. Thanks to Coqual, which is a wonderful resource in terms of research. They researched and defined executive presence, which I appreciate because it’s often tossed around without a definition. It feels fluffy and not actionable. It also divided it into three areas that anyone can improve on if they put the work in. The first is communication skills, which are good speaking skills and good written skills. The second is gravitas, which is having a point of view, having it heard, being calm under pressure, and being a voice of reason. It’s emotional self-management.

It comes from the word gravity. It’s being grounded in who you are and your own worth, I’ve always thought. 

The third and lesser that was only attributed to 5% of executive presence is professional appearance. I take that to mean well-groomed and appropriately dressed for your workplace culture. There has certainly been a lot of push on that in a good way, and we’ll see where it settles out. They’re very conservative organizations like Wall Street that expect you to wear a suit every day and they’re not going to change all the way down to Hollywood which gets a lot more on artistic professions like hairstylists, makeup artists, and fashion. They get a lot more leeway. Almost everything else is in between.

If you are a hairstylist but you’re not comfortable wearing wild clothing, then maybe that’s not the place for you or vice versa.

They tolerate. I find hairstylists to be some of the most tolerant people, but it depends.

Let’s say one of the professions in which being loud and proud and wearing bold colors or in a culture where wearing bold colors is important, you have to see whether that’s going to fit who you are. I found this guidebook fascinating and very useful. What is the key element that people underestimate? 

In my coaching, what I find is the key element people don’t focus on as much is their external awareness in terms of how people appreciate the impact of their actions on other people and what their brand is, which is popular. It’s about how you show up to others and what their perceptions of you are. A Harvard Business Review published my article, Promotions Aren’t Just About Your Skills – They’re About Your Relationships. Promotions aren’t always fair or rational. When it comes down to promotions, your skills, knowledge, and abilities are often the ticket to the game. They don’t necessarily of themselves get you promoted.

 

You need to be good at what you do. At the end of the day, people are often surprised and shocked to find that maybe they haven’t built the support network or sponsorship that they need to have speaking for them in the room when it happens, which is not where they are. Someone needs to stand up for you, which is usually two levels above, be aware of your work and understand who you are. A lot of people who don’t have as much experience think that their boss alone has the power to promote them. That’s not how organizations usually work.

What if your direct manager doesn’t like you, is threatened by you, or is doing the best they can to claim your successes as it was their idea? One of the common things clients come to me for is to say that. What do you say to somebody who says, “I have all these ideas and then my boss takes them, considers them his own, and reports them as his ideas.”

There’s a specific question and then a general question. A general boss that doesn’t support you or that you don’t get along with isn’t going to result in a lot of support or advancement for you. You need to think hard about why you are there. If you have the financial cushion to go elsewhere or look for another job, you can try to work the system, find other sponsors in the organization, or make a lateral move eventually. You can pray that your boss will go away, but it is limiting. I have found it very rare that someone has been able to move with that same manager in place without leaving the company.

Talk to us a little bit more about sponsors and the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. I’ve heard you talk about that. Let’s define that.

A mentor is someone who takes you on voluntarily. I don’t find it works well when they’re assigned although there are a lot of well-meaning programs out there. Ideally, you find a match with someone. They’d either remind you of yourself when you were younger. The mentor relationship is usually someone more senior and experienced than you are who is offering to give back and who sees something in you that they genuinely want to help develop.

 

It’s beneficial to the mentor as well to be mentored, especially by the next generation to stay current and understand how they’re coming across. It’s usually a top-down thing like going out for lunch. I’ve been fortunate to have mentors. You can cultivate a mentor. You can ask. I would differentiate a sponsor in that you can’t ask for a sponsor. A sponsor is someone who sees your work either from afar or hears about you. Someone puts a powerful comment in their ear and they start noticing you. You may not even know that you have one. It’s great if you know that you do because then, you can build a relationship more and get more visibility with them. Perhaps they can be a mentor and a sponsor.

A sponsor is the kind of person in what HR would call a 9-box meeting. That is the format that most companies use when rating employees and deciding who is close to promotion or who’s high potential. You want someone to say, “I’ve seen them. I know their work. They’re a high potential,” in those meetings. It is someone who has power, who’s well-placed, and who when they speak for you, everyone listens. There, by saying that, everyone else in that room who also has power is hearing that as well. That’s a very special thing. Carla Harris, who’s one of my favorite executives, is a Wall Street financier and opera singer. I know you’ll appreciate her. She has a wonderful TED Talk on who’s going to speak for you. She’s fantastic. It’s a very powerful TED Talk.

I’ll go into this a little deeper because it’s so important. I find very often, women especially, have all sorts of networks with people on the same level. They’re people who are peers, but they’re afraid to ask someone who’s a couple of levels higher to be a mentor or a sponsor. How could somebody appreciate that or get the courage to ask?

It is better that your mentor not necessarily be your boss. Ideally, they’re already doing that as part of their job. They support you. You want to strengthen and broaden the information you’re getting about how to do your job and how to continue to grow and scale as a leader. I would try to find someone with that you have something in common and that seems to like you. You could get an introduction to one that can also be powerful. Outside your organization, it can be a little harder to connect with them, but even if you connect once or twice a year, that can be helpful.

If someone takes an interest in you, then that’s the opening. It is hard to do a cold call because it’s hard for someone to say no. Some people are already mentoring 4 or 5 people. You may catch them at a rough time, so saying no might not necessarily even be about you. It may be about their level of commitment and wanting to do what you ask, but realizing they’re not capable at the time because of their other commitments. You do need to have a bit of a thick skin about hearing no and not make it a pressured or desperate request.

Also, not personal.

Make it easy for them to say no and to be a mentee. That’s another thing. You go to them. You go to their office or favorite coffee shop, do it by phone, or whatever it is to ask, “How can I make this easy on you?” it’s because they’re doing you a huge favor.

Going back to something you said earlier about the promoting is having external validation. Having a third party say how great you are. Always counts for more than you saying how great you are. I’m curious. I was re-reading my way through the Promotability Index Guidebook and looking at some of this. I’ve had several conversations with people who want to be promoted. They think they deserve a promotion and they’re not qualified. How can we, as business people, measure, “Are we qualified for that promotion?” You certainly don’t want to be promoted and then do a terrible job. There are people who do want that, but let’s hope that nobody who reads this wants to be promoted unless they know they’re going to do a good job.

Are these people being told that they’re not qualified?

We were talking about external awareness. I was at the California Conference for Women, which has a big area where people can talk to a career coach. I wasn’t part of that, but I knew several of the career coaches. That was a recurring theme from the coaches. They would have someone who was fairly junior in their company say, “I should be promoted. How do I get this promotion?” without having figured out whether the company has the money to promote anybody. Are they expanding or contracting? It was more about external awareness. I thought that the Promotability Index letting you figure out if you are promotable might be a help. Had I been there, I would’ve recommended it.

You raise a great point. I wrote another article on this. I was asked by Harvard because they have an Ask an Expert column that I hadn’t known about. It was for their younger assent, which is typically under 40 professionals. This person said they’d worked in the same job for four years, had gotten nothing but stellar reviews, and still wasn’t getting promoted. When they went to their boss, their boss put it on the back burner and said to them vague things like, “It’s not up to me. I’m not sure yet.”

I was delighted to get this question because I see so much frustration. People don’t educate themselves enough about what it takes to get promoted. I was able to finally share the other side, so it’s worth reading if someone is reading and they’re in this position. It’s called Why am I Not Getting Promoted? I said, “If everything you say is true, you’re an amazing performer, and you’re doing a great job, there are a couple of reasons why you might not be getting promoted. You already raised one. They might not have the money. Number two, they may never have the position available.”

People don't educate themselves enough about what it takes to get promoted. Click To Tweet

This person happened to be in an audit capacity, which is an overhead function. It’s not a money-generating function. I’m familiar with that having been in overhead roles and executive roles my whole life. I am fighting for raises for my team and understanding what I can do and what I can’t do in terms of the company overhead because that’s to be a percentage of the gross.

Can you pause for a second and define it for our international audience?

Overhead means that the job is not making a profit for the business like sales, product development, and arguably some of the other functions that are close to bringing in the money to support the business’s existence. If companies have too high of overhead or if they overstaff overhead positions like legal, HR, marketing, and audit, they will not survive. A smart CEO and HR look at that and realize, “We can handle this much cost to run our business,” which is important.

Operations is important. Legal is important. Having an ethical culture is important as well as hiring. All this is so important. It still can’t be over, “A certain percentage of the company is going to go down,” and then no one has a job. It can be that reason. I suggested this person asks their boss, “Has this position ever existed before? What’s my job family? Where am I in the job family?” Most smart companies and HR have a progression and a job family. They do market pay salaries to make sure that you’re paid according to a range that is validated by professional salary companies to see how things are going up or down for the profession.

Some professions go down. That’s another thing. Most people always expect it to continue to go up, but with AI and other stuff, we know some professions are going to be downgraded in terms of their value because it can be automated. You also have to watch out for that. You already mentioned another one. What cycle is your business in? If you’re laying off people, it might not be a great time to ask for a raise or a promotion. It may be the shuffling of the chairs will lead to opportunity.

You need to be savvy about how you ask your questions and when. You can lose credibility with your manager about being completely out of touch if you go in and ask for a promotion and a raise the day after they’ve announced half of your team is being laid off. I’m using an extreme example. I hope no one would have the lack of empathy to do that. My point is what’s going on? Who else has gotten promoted? Look at their trajectory. How long do they work for the company?

You need to be savvy about how you ask your questions and when. Click To Tweet

I had one guy I was coaching. His boss’s boss said, “I’m interested in promoting him, but I was here fifteen years before I got my first promotion.” This guy was going to do the same thing. We wound up fast-tracking it a little better, but that was his initial reaction. That’s not an illegitimate reaction. That’s a difference in generational. This was an old-school manufacturing American Midwest company. This is not a high-tech startup where they can fluff around job titles, there was a step progression, people worked there for 30 years, and it is a different culture. It didn’t mean that you weren’t a good worker or valued if you weren’t getting a promotion.

That’s the other thing I would think about. Why do you want it? Are you attaching your self-worth to the promotion? Are you being fair to yourself when you do that? Look around. If people are moving every two years and you’re not, that would be hard to take possibly but maybe you need to look at yourself. If it’s a company where there are only 1 or 2 promotions a year or they’ve never had anyone above your role, or there’s been a higher pay freeze for executives, which a lot of my clients had to stave off rifts, you may have to do your part for a little bit.

It’s different if you don’t think you’re being paid equitably or the same as the person doing the same job at the same level next to you. I’ve written a lot on pay equity. That’s a different issue. They’re right. My hope is that this will enable people to appreciate this beyond skills. The Promotability Index does not teach you core technical job skills. I can’t do that for thousands of professions. What I can do is tell you regardless of what your profession is, how you need to show up to begin to be noticed in the right way.

It’s all in how you show up. 

I had one employee who was fantastic. She reached out to me for some advice, so she was on my mind. She was so difficult to manage because she was so demanding. It was all about her. She did fantastic work. I loved having her on my team. You mentioned earlier having a diversity of the team. She was my hardcore, had-to-be-a-star, and always right, and she usually was right. She was remarkable at her job.

There was a cost to my team dynamic on morale because she sucked a lot of air out of the room. I didn’t enjoy managing her as much because she always had an agenda of getting promoted in every conversation. I couldn’t mentor her as well. She got defensive with feedback, so she got less feedback from me. That’s another thing. You’ve got to be open to feedback. Managers have a difficult enough job as it is, so make it easy and psychologically safe. Be proactive about asking for feedback and genuinely accept it by listening to it even if you disagree with it.

Be proactive about asking for feedback and genuinely accept it by listening to it even if you disagree with it. Click To Tweet

That’s a story I’ve heard so many times. It has happened to me, someone like that. As a manager or a boss, the results might be great but they’re no fun to work with, so why give them the promotion? Let me ask 5 or 6 questions all trying to come out of my mouth at once here. If you are not sure how to start a conversation about a promotion with your manager, what’s a good way to start?

The great way to start, number one, is to separate it completely from your compensation discussion timeline. Usually, that is anywhere from the 4th quarter to the 1st quarter. It’s around January and February if people are on a calendar year or fiscal year. It’s important to separate it from this forward-looking and the manager isn’t already all caught up in all the work they had to do for their entire team or department around compensation. You want to catch them in a relaxed, easy environment so it can be a discussion.

My number one tip is to make it a discussion. A lot of people feel like they have to go to battle for what they’re owed, and that is the wrong attitude to take. If you feel that way, you probably shouldn’t be working there because it needs to be a dialogue. Create a safe space for your manager to give you candid feedback about where you are in the pay range and what’s possible and doable both within the business environment and the pay range.

HR may have certain practices and protocols. People usually are unaware of what their colleagues make. There is an equilibrium and a fairness component that needs to go into that. It may be years of service or someone who has a credential that you don’t have. Ask about all that stuff. Maybe they suggest you get a credential or there’s an education fund at your company where that would pay for part of it. If not, you need to invest in yourself. I always did that. Ongoing education and investing in yourself is an important things. You can’t always rely on your employer to give you this stuff. That’s not a part of the contract.

It reminds me of the whole thing about making it a discussion. Be aware that this is the external awareness you’re talking about and the self-awareness. Do your homework. Many people don’t do the homework and then they create stories in their heads about why they haven’t been promoted or why the promotion went to somebody else.

I have one more question. One thing that happens a lot, especially with the people who show up at my door, is someone who has been with a company for 10 or 15 years and feels like they’re taken for granted. They’re seeing the new hires come in, making more money, and getting all sorts of attention. The good, steady, and faithful Susan who is doing her job and things don’t go wrong is taken for granted and ignored. If you are Susan, what could you do about being promotable?

Take the Promotability Index. I would see where my weak spots are and what’s valued by the company. I would share my results with my manager and say, “I found this tool. I’m interested in continuing with the company. I love it. I’ve been here a long time. I’d like to keep learning, growing, and getting more opportunities,” whether that’s stretch opportunities, a raise, a promotion, or working on cool cross-functional projects. I’m not bored if I’ve been there for twenty years.

I’ll say, “I’m going to give this to you. I’d like for you to rate me on these things. I want to validate myself from this evaluation and then have a discussion with you about where the gaps are and where I should invest. Is it speaking? Is it building more relationships? Is it thought leadership and writing some pieces either internal or external around my level of expertise? Is it that I need to be building better relationships with my peers or stepping up and volunteering for more things?” You learn a lot that way because you’re presenting a shared language, which is very specific.

One of the goals of the Promotability Index is to take subjectivity out of the promotion process and put as much objectivity in there as possible. It’s because that’s when we get more of a meritocracy as opposed to subjective bias creeping in and people I’m comfortable with are getting promoted. The question you can ask is, “Here’s where I see myself now. How do you see me?” That is what you’re saying. You’re like, “Is this what I need to be working on? What skills and abilities do I need to be developing to do what so-and-so is doing? That looks cool to me and I would love to do something like that at one point. What do I need to be developing? Is the next level possible at the company for me here?”

 

I’ve had some clients, probably like you, who have had to make a decision when they get possibly a lukewarm response because they may have missed their window of opportunity. I feel like there’s a window of opportunity for everyone at every company. If you’re a go-getter, it’s usually between 3 and 5 years in job shifting. Some people stay. One of the number one mistakes women make specifically is to think that their achievements will speak for themselves, and they don’t.

You have to tell people what you’re good at. That is a huge part of the work I do.

There’s a right way and a wrong way. We all know that annoying bragger, so I’m not recommending anybody do that. There is a savvy political way to do it. There are tons of stuff written about it. There are ways to be confident and secure, give credit to others, be a good colleague, and own your work. If you’ve been sitting there for twenty years and have done none of that, you’re going to have to work to shift perceptions.

I find many clients are faced with, and sometimes in their 50s, which can be a real challenge with ageism, the decision to, “Am I going to leave the sure thing even though I’m completely bored, feel undervalued, and know I’m getting underpaid? Have I made my bed and I need to lie at this point because it’s too late?” It is a very impersonal decision, but I was delighted.

I was coaching one woman. She’s fantastic at her job. There was never going to be a promotion there. I got that out of her boss. I get real clarity on that, which at least she knows. It’s not what she wanted to hear, but she knows. I said, “There is never going to be another role in that position. Everyone is young enough. They’re staying and happy with them unless something catastrophic happens.”

It could be that there’s someone else whose division is being merged with another division and they have to give him that position. The position that you’d be moving into is already promised to someone else who they can’t afford to fire.

There are so many things that can be going on behind the scenes that managers aren’t always privy to share.

That is happening to one of the clients I’m working with.

They themselves might not even know. The manager may be denied because the person ahead of them knows something else that’s coming and they’re not at liberty to tell yet. That’s especially at publicly traded companies. With my client, we talked about it. I said, “You’re making a great income.” She’s already benchmarked, talked to recruiters, and everything. She already knew her pay was good. She was bored and wanted to move up, so it wasn’t the money for her, which I appreciated.

We circled everything and realized, “This probably has an 85% chance that it won’t happen here.” She decided, “I’m pretty lucky where I am. I’m making a good six-figure income in Silicon Valley. My kid is independent. I can now live my own life. I don’t have to work as hard. I’m going to stay where I am.” We had a long talk about the pros and cons of her leaving somewhere else, starting completely over, probably having to take a pay cut to earn her stripes to rework back up again somewhere else, and not having job security because she worked at a company that still had a good severance plan and a bunch of old-school benefits that are at question at a lot of other places.

She was settled and happy when we ended our engagement. I don’t tell people what to do. This is their life. They have to decide. You can put the choice in front of them. Six months later, I was delighted. I saw her appear on my LinkedIn news. She popped up at a high-growth tech company that everyone would know if I said the name and has probably used them personally. She was an assistant general counsel there. She wanted to be general counsel, so she’d taken a lateral.

I was so happy for her that she decided to go for it. She’d always been like, “I should be a general counsel.” You can say that forever, but if the market doesn’t see you that way and you show up with that specific attitude, it’s not going to happen. There’s some humility about all of this. Leaders need a combination of humility and courage to keep learning and growing that humility and vulnerability to say, “What can I do better? I’m not perfect. Clearly, I’m doing something that’s not working.”

Leaders need a combination of humility and courage to keep learning and growing that humility and vulnerability to acknowledge that they’re not perfect. Click To Tweet

Amii, this has been so interesting. I could keep going but I know you have appointments and I have appointments. Let me ask you. Out of this whole conversation, if someone says, “She’s talking about me,” what is the first thing someone should do?

I would say take the assessment. If you like it, you’re welcome to buy the Guidebook. That gives you over 30 exercises to get better at the things you’ve decided you’re not as good at. It’s very powerful if you feel comfortable sharing it with your leader. That alone, sharing that, shows you’re a go-getter, open, and willing to learn. You already get brownie points for sharing that and then you get this great discussion.

People don’t pay enough attention to development. Everything is looking back like, “What did you do last year? Here’s your rating.” My goal was to try to keep it fun. Choose your own adventure. You can read the book backward, forward, or start in the middle. I love doing that myself. You can say, “I only care about executive presses right now.” Next year, you can pick another.

You can come back to the Promotability Index annually. I recommend taking it annually because if you’ve been doing the work, it’s exciting. You’re like, “This is paying off. I’m moving ahead.” You don’t have to share it with anyone if you don’t want to. You can do it with a buddy or a friend but it’s super cool. I created the questions that also raise insight because a lot of people are like, “Until I took the assessment, I never knew some of these things were important. I didn’t know my boss cared about this.” There are even a-ha moments in taking the quiz. It’s free. It’s on my website. You could buy the book. It’s in a QR code. It’s mobile-friendly. I tried to keep it super fun. I would start with that, and then I have lots of resources that are more specific around salary negotiations and things like that on my website.

You should be following Amii Barnard-Bahn. I’ve been following her ever since I first met her. Whenever she pops up on my LinkedIn feed, I say, “I got to read this one. I’m not going to past this.”

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having been a guest on the show. Before I forget, you said you had a favorite leadership quote. 

My favorite quote is from Peter Drucker. It is, “You should not change yourself, but create yourself. That means build around your strengths and get rid of your bad habits.”

You should not change yourself, but create yourself, that means building around your strengths and removing bad habits. ― Peter F. Drucker Click To Tweet

I love it.

I forgot to tell you. I’m happy to give away a digital copy of my book. If you want to have the first person that reads this and stays through the end with us send you an email, I’ll then coordinate with you to send them a digital book by email.

If you want a digital copy of the book, which is really good and I highly recommend it, then email me. I will tell Amii who the first person is. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. If you found this interesting, please tell your friends or colleagues. Leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts. That’s the one that counts in the statistics. I‘ll see you at the next one.

 

Important Links

• Promotability Index
• Amii Barnard-Bahn
• The Promotability Index Guidebook
• Ida B. Wells
• Coqual
• Promotions Aren’t Just About Your Skills – They’re About Your Relationships
• California Conference for Women
• Why am I Not Getting Promoted?
• Apple Podcasts – Speakers Who Get Results
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/AmiiBarnardBahn
• https://www.Facebook.com/BarnardBahn/
• https://Instagram.com/BarnardBahn/
• https://Twitter.com/AmiiBB/

 

About Amii Barnard-Bahn

A former Fortune Global 50 executive, Amii Barnard-Bahn is a consultant to the C-Suite and leaders at global companies like Bank of the West, Adobe and The Gap. Recognized by Forbes as one of the top coaches for legal and compliance executives, she is a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches. Amii guest lectures at Stanford and UC Berkeley, is a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Compliance Week, and is a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Coaching. Amii earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and her BA from Tufts. A lifelong diversity advocate, Amii testified for the successful passage of first laws in the U.S. requiring corporate boards to include women.