Want to Impress Your Boss? Compliment a Colleague

This office-life hack comes from researchers at Vanderbilt University, George Mason University, and the University of Pennsylvania. They say we should celebrate our colleagues’ successes as vividly and convincingly as our own. The team calls this career strategy “double promotion” or “double advertising”.

The Essence of “Double Promotion”

Humility can mean being overlooked. In recent years, millions of people who work on teams have embraced a more visible approach to getting ahead. In the complex world of workplace relationships, everyone occasionally engages in self-promotion.

Psychologists caution that there’s a fine line with self-praise: push too hard and you risk coming across as boastful or even comically arrogant.

To avoid sounding like a braggart, promote not only your own achievements but also those of your colleagues. The researchers say that when you use the “double promotion” tactic, others tend to see you as both competent and warm.

The goal of “double promotion” isn’t just to strengthen your relationship with the person you praise; it’s to show a third party that you care about that person while also demonstrating your own warmth and competence, said Dr. Eric VanEpps, one of the study’s authors.

When someone speaks positively about both themselves and someone else, it creates a favorable impression—especially if the other person isn’t present. For example, you can use this approach in a job interview, where colleagues aren’t there to vouch for you, the Daily Mail reported.

What the Research Revealed

But Dr. Eric VanEpps points out that most people don’t use double promotion at moments when it could help them.

The team surveyed 1,488 hiring managers about their interview experiences. The managers reported that 69.1 percent of job seekers relied only on self-promotion, while just 12.6 percent used double promotion.

“It seems people either don’t think to speak positively about others or worry they’ll look worse compared with their colleagues,” Dr. VanEpps suggested.

Previous work from the team identified several behavioral tactics people use to promote themselves. Those tactics can make a good impression in one way but hurt them in another, which the researchers called the “self-promotion dilemma.”

Now the team says double promotion is a way to resolve the self-promotion dilemma.