Somehow, Everything Is Fast,Except Your Promotion.

In the modern corporate jungle, everything is engineered for speed...except your career progression. Deadlines appear overnight, Zoom invites materialize in real-time, organizational changes are rolled out before lunch, and layoffs are often announced with the precision of a lunar eclipse. Yet amidst this breakneck velocity, one thing remains excruciatingly sluggish: your promotion.

You meet targets consistently. You exceed expectations with the tenacity of a marathon runner. You manage not only projects but personalities especially the delicate emotional terrain of your superiors. You even train the new hire who, in a bewildering twist of fate, gets promoted within weeks while you’re still waiting for your “growth conversation” to be scheduled. It’s an experience so widespread that it has become an unspoken rite of passage for the ambitious and the overlooked.

The ladder of success, once seen as linear and merit-based, now resembles a maze—ill-lit, poorly mapped, and full of detours disguised as “development opportunities.” Worse still, this labyrinth is navigated blindfolded, using your last performance review as a compass, even though it was written by someone who forgot what you actually do.

When you finally build the courage to ask the inevitable “What’s next for me?” question, the responses come cloaked in corporate euphemisms. “We’re restructuring” typically means we have no intention of allocating a budget for your growth. “You’re too valuable where you are” translates to please stay underpaid and over-utilized. And perhaps the most soul-crushing of all: “Let’s revisit this in six months,” which really means we hope your ambition expires quietly.

Meanwhile, you watch with a blend of admiration and existential dread as someone else often less experienced, marginally committed, but socially strategic ascends to a leadership role after nothing more than a strategic coffee meeting and a well-filtered LinkedIn post. The message is painfully clear: career growth in many organizations has little to do with merit and much to do with visibility, proximity to power, and the politics of perception.

Everything moves except you. Your inbox is flooded. Your workload expands like a well-fed balloon. Your ideas get borrowed, repackaged, and presented without attribution. Your effort is acknowledged privately, but the public accolades seem reserved for those who mastered the art of being seen rather than the discipline of delivery. And yet, you keep showing up. You register for leadership webinars, attend performance coaching sessions, and hope desperately that your carefully curated vision board will somehow manifest the change you crave.

But hope is not a strategy. It’s time to stop waiting for recognition in systems that are allergic to fairness and addicted to status quo. You must learn to flip the script. Stop waiting for the elevator when you can build the stairs. Stop shrinking your voice in rooms where noise not nuance—gets noticed. Start marketing your value with the same intensity you use to deliver it. Speak about your achievements. Document your impact. Take the mic even when no one offers it to you.

Networking is not betrayal of merit; it is the reinforcement of relevance. Build alliances. Find mentors. Tell your story before someone else writes the footnote. And if all else fails—if the bureaucracy becomes too thick, the ladder too broken, and the recognition too distant—then do the bravest thing of all: write your own title. Craft your own lane. And leave the building, not bitter, but better.

Because if your promotion moves at the speed of prayer, perhaps it’s time you became the answer to it.

"Change is only realistic if it is personal. A hammer a day keeps regrets at bay"-Bunyala elder.

Signed

S.S