Make Rank Because of the Work

A caveat before we start

I’m not telling you not to do things to get promoted. If those things are valuable to you, do them. I haven’t made Chief. If that’s your goal, listen to the people who have, and look at what they did to get there.

What I’m telling you is how I got to where I am in life, and why I did it the way I did. My way is different. It works for me. It might not work for everybody. So please don’t go around saying, “Nick Hazelett said not to do Top III, the 5/6, or the Airman’s Council,” and then get beat down for it. Take what fits and leave the rest.

The checklist

Once you start promoting, people start handing you the checklist. Get involved in Top III, the 5/6 Council, or the Airman’s Council. Run for an officer position. Volunteer, and make sure it shows up on paper. Get the right awards. Collect the right lines.

I get that feedback regularly, and I value it. The people giving it mean well, and most of them are describing what worked for them. But I don’t operate that way. I think you should make rank because of the things you do, not do things to make rank. Promotions and awards should be side effects of work you care about.

I’d love to keep promoting. I’m not pretending the next stripe doesn’t matter to me. It just isn’t the most important thing. It’s more important to me that I do something of value with the one shot I’ve got.

That sounds like a feel-good philosophy. It turns out it’s also a pretty good strategy.

Promotion is a tournament, not a test

A test says, “Clear this bar and you pass.” A tournament says, “Beat the other people in the room.”

The checklist is written like a test, but promotion is a tournament. There are only so many slots. If I hand everyone the same blueprint and everybody follows it to a T, it can’t separate anyone. The board ends up deciding on whatever’s left over, which is usually timing, luck, or who wrote the better narrative.

So the checklist isn’t the safe bet. It’s a guaranteed tie. The only thing that separates you in a tournament is work nobody else is doing. Not more of the same. Different. The people who promote by checklist are competing with everyone else who followed it. The people who promote because they built something that didn’t exist are competing with nobody.

Signals that stopped meaning anything

Michael Spence shared a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on signaling: how people show something about themselves that others can’t see directly.¹ His big point was that a signal only works if it’s costly and hard to fake. If everyone can send it cheaply, it stops telling you anything.

Top III, the 5/6 Council, and the Airman’s Council used to be real signals. They meant you showed up and engaged beyond your desk. Then everybody learned that boards reward them, so everybody does them, and now they’re lines on a package that carry almost no information. But they’re still on the template, and leaving them off feels like a risk, so they stay.

Steven Kerr wrote a famous paper in 1975 with a title that says it all: “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.”² Organizations say they want one thing, reward something else, and then act surprised when people do what gets rewarded.

Here’s our version. Something like three quarters of our enlisted contracting force has less than five years of experience. That tells me technical experts are the scarce thing in this career field. So what I want to see in someone I’m putting up for promotion is a person striving for technical expertise, because that’s what we don’t have. Instead, we’re stuck in the old ways. We hope for experts, and we reward meeting attendance.

Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics is a whole book about what happens next.³ Once you attach a reward to a measure, people start working the measure instead of the work. Then the measure stops telling you anything.

So here’s my pitch, and I’m only half joking: put base involvement on the form as a checkbox. If you want me to do it, I’ll go check that box. But don’t make me waste narrative space on it, when that space could be selling how someone is different, better, and doing innovative things.

Doing it for the stripe makes worse work

There’s another reason to do the work for the work’s sake. It’s better work.

Researchers pulled together 40 years of studies on motivation and performance, covering more than 200,000 people.⁴ Intrinsic motivation, doing something because you care about it, was a solid predictor of performance whether rewards were in the picture or not. And the split is telling: incentives did a better job predicting how much people produced. Intrinsic motivation did a better job predicting how good it was.

Daniel Pink built a whole book around this idea, Drive.⁵ The work that matters in a career like ours, the work that takes judgment and creativity, runs on autonomy, mastery, and purpose, not on a carrot.

When you do things to make rank, you’re optimizing for what the board can see. When you do things because you care, you’re optimizing for what the work needs. Those aren’t always the same. And the people who notice the difference are usually the ones you’d want to impress anyway.

Be so good they can’t ignore you

Cal Newport took his book’s title from Steve Martin’s advice to young comedians: So Good They Can’t Ignore You.⁶ His argument is that the things people want from a career, like interesting work, autonomy, and impact, are rare and valuable. To get them, you need rare and valuable skills to trade for them. He calls that career capital.

That’s the promotion argument in one sentence. Build skills nobody else in the shop has. Build things nobody else has built. A board can ignore one more council line. It has a much harder time ignoring the person who rewrote the handbook everyone uses.

Am I willing?

This is the part I had to work out for myself, and Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck helped.⁷ His point isn’t that you shouldn’t care. It’s that you only have so much caring to spend, so spend it on the right things. The honest question isn’t “What do I want?” Everybody wants to promote. It’s “What am I willing to struggle for?”

So I asked myself: would I like to promote? Yes. Am I willing to do things I find no value in to get there? No.

That isn’t laziness. Lazy would be not knowing the answer. I know exactly what I’m willing to struggle for: tools that help CCOs, training that gets people ready to deploy, the airman at my door who needs help. I’ve been told more than once that I need more base involvement. Fair feedback. I’d rather lose the line than put something on my package that says I value a thing I don’t.

The honest downside

This is a higher-variance bet. Different work can be ignored as easily as it can be rewarded. I’ll be honest: it’s easier to say all this when your work has been noticed, and mine has been, in ways I didn’t expect. Not everyone gets that.

So two things help.

Make your work visible. Not braggy. Visible. Put your name on what you build. Tell your boss what it fixed. Make it easy for someone to write it up. Great work nobody knows about doesn’t help your people or your package.

Check the boxes that are actually required. If something’s mandatory, do it. Just don’t confuse the box with the work, and don’t let it eat your narrative.

If you’re the one writing the package

This applies to leaders too. Maybe more.

When you advocate for someone, sell what’s different about them. What did they build? What did they fix? What do they know that nobody else in the shop knows? Don’t burn a line on something every other package also has.

When you mentor someone, don’t just hand them the checklist. Ask them what they care about getting good at, and help them get so good at it that nobody can ignore them.

When you rate someone, reward the thing you’re actually hoping for. If you want technical experts, promote technical experts.

The short version

1. Do the work because it matters. The promotion is a side effect.
2. Remember it’s a tournament. The checklist is a tie. Different work is the only thing that separates you.
3. Get good at something rare. In this career field, that’s technical depth.
4. Know what you’re willing to struggle for. And what you’re not.
5. Make your work visible. Put your name on it.
6. Check the required boxes. Don’t confuse them with the work.

And if the promotion never comes, you still did the work. That’s the part that outlasts you.