Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got

Summary

Published on 2026-01-02 by Andrew Graham-Yooll My CTO leaned back in our 1-on-1 and said something that sounded almost threatening: "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position." I must have looked confused because he quickly added, "I don't mean literally." Though I still wonder sometimes... What he meant was simpler and more powerful: start doing the job before you have the title. Take on more responsibility before you're officially given it. This advice has stuck with me through years of career growth, and later when I became a manager myself, I saw exactly why it works. What "Taking the Position" Actually Looks Like The most memorable moment when someone tried to take my position as an engineering manager happened with a more junior engineer on the team. They came to me and said: "I have a proposal on how to lower the number of incidents on this service. The RFC is written up here and I think it'll take me 4 weeks to execute." I couldn't have been happier. Here's what made this powerful: they had clearly identified an issue I'd been thinking about, come up with a solution, written the proposal, and estimated the cost. This wasn't in their wheelhouse of expertise. But the mere fact that they had thought about this issue showed me they were expanding their vision beyond what was right in front of them to the wider team's problems. This engineer was doing exactly what my CTO had told me to do, they were trying to take my position. They were thinking about the problems I thought about. They were taking ownership of team-level issues, not just their individual tasks. They came with a solution, not just a complaint. That's what taking the position looks like. Not waiting to be asked. Not just flagging the problem. Doing the thinking, the planning, and coming ready with a path forward. Why Sustained Performance Is What Counts Here's the thing most people miss: promotions don't fall off the tree and land in your lap. You've got to show that you're capable of handl...