Favoritism in the Workplace: What It Actually Rewards

There is a specific kind of promotion announcement that does not just surprise you. It rearranges how you see every year that led up to it. I know exactly what favoritism in the workplace looks like from the inside, because I watched it happen in a meeting I still remember in detail.

My Technology PMO team had been folded into the Business PMO the year before, same projects, new senior leadership. Twice a month we sat through what I called talking head sessions, calls that repeated the quarterly deck and told us nothing useful. A man on those calls sat a level or two below me on the org chart. He asked the kind of question that made me grateful the calls were audio only, so no one could see me roll my eyes. His projects were the easiest on the roster, yet still in trouble more often than not. I was the one who kept them from becoming visible problems, off the record, before anyone above him knew there had been a problem at all.

Then his name was read off a list of promotions, several levels up, past the title I held at the time. The role had never been posted. I called my manager that same day, still too angry to sound calm, and asked her outright how this had happened. She told me she was sitting in the same disbelief. "All I've got," she said, "is that he's been asking his idiot questions in front of the division head for two years, and somehow that's what got remembered." He had been visible in a way that got noticed. I had been visible in a way nobody in that room was ever asked to see.

You do not have to have run a PMO to know this feeling, or work in technology, or finance, or manufacturing. If you have ever watched someone less capable move past you while your own work stayed backstage holding the operation together, you already know what favoritism in the workplace costs.

What Favoritism in the Workplace Actually Rewards

Favoritism in the workplace rarely looks like the word suggests. Nobody making that decision consciously chooses incompetence over skill. What gets rewarded is familiarity. The person in front of leadership regularly, taking up airtime, becomes a known quantity to whoever signs off on the promotion. Your contribution, the problem that never became visible because you caught it first, is the version of the work that room will never see. The room does not promote the best work. It promotes whoever is easiest to picture in the next job. You will hear this called office politics after the fact, once comfort has already stood in for competence.

How Office Politics Erases the Work You Actually Did

If you have spent years catching problems before they became anyone else's emergency, here is the part that lands uncomfortably. The behavior that made you indispensable is the same behavior that kept you invisible to the people deciding who got promoted. You solved problems too well and too early for any of it to become data anyone above you could see. I wrote a piece a while back about why the most reliable person in the room is so often the one nobody thinks to promote. This is the pattern the SoulFIRE Method calls the Competence Trap: absorbing what others do not handle, carrying what goes unacknowledged. It earns you the trust of everyone below you and almost no visibility above you.

SoulFIRE Leadership was built around the signals women are taught to distrust, including this one. It is the framework for leading from your actual read of the room, not the version you were told was acceptable. Get more information and read 2 chapters for free here. Available now on Amazon.

Why Leadership Turnover Gets You Passed Over for Promotion

There is a second layer to this that makes it worse, and it shows up across finance, technology, engineering, and manufacturing alike. Leadership rotates every two to four years in most large institutions, and the people who leave take your track record with them. Nobody new has watched you rescue anything. What they have instead is a snapshot: who shows up, who talks, who feels familiar right now. This is why being passed over for promotion by someone less qualified so often lines up with organizational turnover. Promotion decisions are rarely audits of the last five years. They are impressions formed in the last five months, made by whoever holds the authority to decide, and if your value was built under leadership that has moved on, it does not exist to the people making the call. You were not forgotten. You were never entered into a record that survived the transition. This is part of what I mean when I talk about the broken rung, the specific point in a woman's climb where the ladder itself stops being the problem and the memory of her becomes the problem instead.

The Difference Between Being Promoted and Being Seen

Here is the reframe that thirty-three years inside these rooms taught me. Being excellent at your job and being visible for it are not the same skill. You cannot out-perform your way into visibility if the performance is happening where no one with promotion authority is looking. I did not need to become the person asking easy questions in every meeting, and neither do you. I needed to stop believing the work would speak for itself, because I had just watched it fail to speak at all.

What I now understand that I did not in that meeting is that I had been building my value within an institution's memory, and institutions do not retain memory the way people do. They keep it the way that call kept it: five months deep, reset every time the org chart moves. I was never competing with him for a promotion. I was competing with my own disappearance. The record I needed did not exist anywhere the decision was actually being made, and no amount of doing the work better would ever put it there.

So I stopped waiting to be remembered and started building something that would travel with me regardless of who sat in that room next. A written account of what I had actually done, sent to my own inbox the week it happened, not left to survive on someone else's memory. A relationship with at least one person above my manager who had watched me work directly, not heard about it secondhand from someone about to leave. A reputation that did not live or die with the next reorg.

Favoritism in the workplace is not going anywhere, and the five months is not going to get longer. But you can stop building a case for a jury that keeps getting replaced, and start building a record that belongs to you instead of to a room that will not remember either of you in two years.

The SoulFIRE Leadership Audit measures exactly this kind of erosion, the pattern that never shows up on a performance review but shapes every promotion decision anyway. If you have been carrying the work while someone else collected the credit, the audit will show you where else that pattern is costing you. Identify what it's costing you before it becomes irreversible.