How does Steve Huynh suggest asking your manager about a promotion?

Steve Huynh advises against asking what it takes to get promoted in the last minutes of a one-on-one, which gives a busy manager a big task and earns a vague reply. Instead, ask to bring ideas on how you could grow to the next meeting, then arrive with a one-page comparison of your work against the next level's criteria, placed first on the agenda. Revisit it for about 10 minutes monthly.

• Huynh says managers mostly invest in people who say they want to grow, citing Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer, whose reports were 75% content to stay put.
• Huynh says some of his clients were promoted within a month of telling their manager they wanted it.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-11-02). Read the whole episode summary →

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