The experience behind the advice
Esmailzadeh has more than 200,000 LinkedIn followers and is one of Germany's best-known business influencers. She joined ServiceNow, a cloud-based AI platform, in a management role in 2026 after four years at SAP and management positions serving chemicals and energy customers at Microsoft.
According to German Wikipedia, she was born in Munich in 1992 and grew up in Westend, a district regarded as socially deprived in the 1990s. Her father was a taxi driver and her mother a saleswoman. She studied business informatics at Hochschule München. Her first book, "Von Quotenfrauen und alten weißen Männern," debuted at No. 3 on the Spiegel bestseller list in August 2023.
Her column challenges the belief that effort reliably brings rewards. Starting advantages, connections, structural inequality, personal bias and luck all affect careers, she writes, although employees still have some control. She also cautions that success has no single definition: leadership, pay and influence matter to some people; others prioritize flexibility, professional growth or time for their personal lives.
1. Make achievements visible
Managers do not necessarily see the work behind an employee's results. They build impressions from outcomes and feedback, Esmailzadeh writes, and those impressions can be incomplete. An excellent employee who quietly waits for recognition may therefore remain overlooked.
Promotion decisions also involve judgments about who can handle greater responsibility, who is known to decision-makers and who is already considered a contender. Technical competence provides a foundation, but keeping achievements private leaves too much to chance, she argues.
The PIE model, attributed to career researcher Harvey Coleman and described by Karrierebibel, gives visibility a central role. The model assigns 10% of career success to Performance, 30% to Image, or others' perceptions, and 60% to Exposure, meaning visibility among decision-makers. Those percentages are the model's framework, rather than a breakdown of any individual promotion decision.
2. Build relationships, not just a contact list
For Esmailzadeh, a useful network rests on trust developed over time and a willingness to help one another. Collecting contacts or cultivating influential people is not a substitute for giving others a reason to rely on you.
She says desirable positions often circulate through personal connections before they are publicly advertised. For roles with substantial responsibility, employers want reassurance about a candidate's reliability and response to challenges as well as professional ability. A connection may create an opening; competence and performance still matter afterward.
An analysis by recruiting software company Lever covered more than 4 million candidates and tens of thousands of hires at roughly 1,000 employers. One in 16 referred candidates was hired, compared with one in 152 applicants using job boards or company careers sites, giving referrals about nine times the hiring odds. That advantage did not make referrals the dominant hiring route: they represented 16% of hires, while applicants accounted for about half.
Relationships need not be close to be useful. A 2022 Science study used randomized experiments involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users over five years. Moderately weak ties, or acquaintances with whom people rarely interacted, were more than twice as effective as strong ties at helping people move to another employer. The effect was strongest in more digital industries, including software.
3. Readiness can develop after taking the role
A realistic assessment of skills can become an obstacle when it turns into a demand for perfect preparation, Esmailzadeh argues. Some responsibilities cannot be fully learned before taking them on.
She recalls doubting herself when offered her first leadership position, especially because her predecessor was twice her age. A mentor persuaded her to accept. She made mistakes and encountered problems her earlier jobs could not have prepared her for, but gradually grew into the position. Along the way, she discovered that colleagues she had admired also had insecurities.
4. More hours do not guarantee advancement
Effort and discipline matter, but hours worked are not a reliable measure of performance or promotion prospects, Esmailzadeh writes. She points to necessary but underrecognized work: arranging meetings, helping new employees get started, taking minutes and coordinating colleagues.
Repeatedly absorbing these duties can consume a large share of an employee's time without doing much for their advancement. The work helps the organization, she says, but often carries little weight when promotions are decided.
Laboratory experiments published in the American Economic Review in 2017 examined how unwanted group tasks were assigned. Researchers Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart found that women volunteered about 50% more often than men and received more requests to volunteer. In single-sex groups, the volunteering difference disappeared, which the authors interpreted as evidence that expectations, rather than preferences, drove the gap.
In another part of the experiments, a fourth participant had to ask someone in the group to volunteer. Both male and female participants directed more requests to women. Women accepted roughly three-quarters of the requests they received; men accepted about half.
A recognition gap also appeared in the 2021 "Women in the Workplace" report from McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org, which covered 423 companies in the U.S. and Canada. Senior-level women were about twice as likely as men at the same level to devote substantial time to diversity and inclusion activities beyond their formal duties, including recruiting and supporting employee networks. Fewer than one-quarter of companies reported giving that work substantial recognition in performance reviews.
5. Constant availability can become the expectation
Esmailzadeh distinguishes commitment from an open-ended willingness to take on more. Employees, especially early in their careers, may accept extra assignments, cover for colleagues and keep saying yes after their schedules are full.
The problem, she writes, is that others adjust their expectations. Always being reachable, accepting every additional task and routinely correcting other people's mistakes can establish a level of availability that colleagues come to regard as normal. What initially earns appreciation can eventually be taken for granted.
6. Consider who is giving the feedback
Being willing to learn from criticism does not mean giving every opinion equal authority, Esmailzadeh argues. Some feedback comes from people who understand the work and genuinely want to help. Other judgments reflect a brief encounter, personal tastes or the critic's limited experience.
Ambitious employees can give those less-informed assessments disproportionate weight, she writes. Her distinction is between remaining open to criticism and treating every criticism as equally useful.
7. Loyalty should leave room for your own interests
Good working relationships take time, and a difficult period alone is not necessarily a reason to leave, Esmailzadeh writes. But loyalty can become costly when employees wait years for a promised promotion, accept more responsibility without corresponding pay or remain in jobs that no longer offer development.
U.S. pay figures provide context, though they do not predict what any particular employee would gain by leaving. ADP payroll data reported by Investopedia in February 2026 showed annual pay growth of 6.4% for job-changers in January 2026, versus 4.5% for workers who stayed.
Investopedia also reported estimates based on ADP's average pay-growth gap between job-changers and job-stayers since 2020. Using a median U.S. salary of $62,608, the estimates put the first-year advantage from switching at about $2,300 and the five-year shortfall for staying at about $13,300.
Esmailzadeh says employees may stay because they hope their commitment will finally be recognized, or because they feel indebted to a manager who gave them an opportunity or an employer that supported them through a difficult time. Gratitude becomes a problem, in her view, when it creates a lasting obligation that prevents people from advocating for themselves.
