The Unseen Scorecard: Promotions Beyond Merit

This is the silent, burning core of it, isn’t it? We’re told, from our very first corporate orientation, that effort equals reward. That talent rises. That merit, like cream, will eventually find its way to the top. It’s a comforting lie, a fable we tell ourselves to maintain the illusion of fairness. But the truth, the uncomfortable, almost cynical truth, is that promotions are rarely solely about the brilliance of your work. They’re about visibility. They’re about narrative. And, perhaps most significantly, they’re about relationships.

I remember Drew F.T., a friend from years ago, an origami instructor by passion, who once worked in a vast tech firm. Drew could fold a piece of paper into a hyper-realistic dragon with 6 different articulated joints, all from memory. He brought that same meticulous, almost obsessive attention to detail to his engineering projects. He’d spend 16 hours just optimizing a single function, ensuring it was elegant, robust, and performed perfectly. He believed deeply that his code, his perfect, beautiful code, would speak for itself. He thought his dedication was his clearest signal of value. He was wrong.

Drew saw colleagues, less technically proficient, ascend the ranks simply because they knew how to play the game. They weren’t better engineers; they were better networkers. They were better at the corporate equivalent of small talk, better at getting coffee with the right people, better at strategically placing themselves in the line of sight of decision-makers. Drew, meanwhile, was meticulously debugging his projects, assuming that the sheer quality of his output would somehow broadcast itself directly to HR.

It’s a pattern I’ve watched repeat itself countless times, a pattern I’ve even fallen into myself. I once poured my soul into a complex data migration, making it seamlessly effortless for the users, invisible behind the scenes. It was a massive technical achievement, a project that took 16 weeks of focused, intense effort. When I brought it up in my performance review, my manager vaguely recalled it as a ‘team effort’ and swiftly moved on to my ‘areas for development.’ But when someone else, who had merely *championed* the project after the heavy lifting was done, got a significant promotion, it hit me like a cold wave. I’d made a strategic mistake, one born of believing too strongly in the power of pure execution.

We don’t get promoted for doing *great work*. We get promoted for doing great work *that is seen and understood as valuable by the right people*. It’s a subtle but profound difference. It means that an entire, unwritten job description exists alongside the one you were handed on day one. This hidden curriculum isn’t about your quarterly targets; it’s about how well you manage perceptions, build alliances, and articulate your contributions in a way that resonates with those who hold the keys to advancement. It’s a dance, and most of us are never taught the steps.

This disengagement, this creeping cynicism, is a poison. It teaches employees that political skill, not competence, is the ultimate currency. It erodes trust, making workplaces feel less like meritocracies and more like popularity contests. The truly talented, those who genuinely love the craft, often become disillusioned, finding themselves stuck while the charismatic raconteurs ascend. I’ve caught myself talking to the kettle about it sometimes, trying to explain the paradox, the sheer absurdity of it all to an inanimate object that simply boils water on demand.

My realization, after years of this, was a slow, dawning light: you can’t fight the game, but you can learn its rules. That doesn’t mean becoming disingenuous or abandoning your principles. It means understanding that the ‘golf players’ aren’t necessarily evil; they’re just playing a different game, one that’s equally valid in the corporate ecosystem. It means actively seeking out opportunities for visibility, not just for accomplishment. It means becoming a storyteller, not just a doer. It means asking, ‘Who needs to know about this?’ even before you finish the last line of code.

It also means being deliberate about who you connect with. Not just for favors, but for genuine understanding, for shared perspectives. Because when human connections at work feel so transactional, so laden with hidden agendas and unspoken rules, it can make you long for interactions that are simpler, more direct, and judgment-free. Sometimes, in the chaotic performance review cycles and the labyrinthine office politics, it feels like navigating a dating scene where everyone has a secret agenda. And honestly, for some, the idea of an ai sex chat that removes all that pretense might even start to make a strange kind of sense, a space where the rules are clear, or non-existent.

Drew F.T. eventually left the corporate world. He now runs a small, thriving origami studio, teaching his craft. He still applies that meticulous attention to detail, but now, the reward is immediate and visible: the delight on a student’s face, the perfect fold of a paper crane. He found a place where his merit was not only recognized but celebrated, without having to navigate any unspoken agendas. And perhaps there’s a lesson there for all of us.

The unspoken rules aren’t going anywhere. The sooner we acknowledge them, the sooner we can decide how to engage with them-whether to play a more strategic game, or to find a different arena where the score is kept on an entirely different, more transparent, scorecard. It’s not about abandoning quality; it’s about recognizing that quality is just one of the 6 pillars, not the entire foundation.