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Ep. 23 - Getting Promoted [2026]: Show Proof of Value
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Episode Description
In this episode, Ken Freire and Patrick Lowndes dismantle the belief that simply working hard, staying humble, and waiting your turn will automatically lead to promotion. Instead, they introduce a practical and biblical framework for showing proof of value in the workplace—especially in a world where AI is rapidly commoditizing many roles. The conversation walks through a five-part playbook to help Christian professionals stand out, serve well, and steward their calling with integrity as they pursue growth in 2026.
Timestamps
- 00:00–01:30 – Introduction & the false belief about promotion (hard work + time = advancement)
- 01:30–03:30 – Faith, humility, and why “just waiting” breaks down at work
- 03:30–04:30 – AI, job commoditization, and why proof of value matters more than ever
- 04:30–05:40 – Proof of Concept vs. Proof of Value (POC vs. POV)
- 05:40–07:00 – Playbook Part 1: Human-in-the-loop discernment
- 07:00–08:40 – Playbook Part 2: Monthly value logs
- 08:40–10:20 – Playbook Part 3: Soft skill mastery (leadership, empathy, conflict resolution)
- 10:20–12:50 – Playbook Part 4: ROI ledger and quantifying impact
- 12:50–14:40 – Playbook Part 5: Solving the unasked question
- 14:40–16:00 – Biblical grounding, integrity, and preview of the performance review conversation
Recommended
Transcript
Intro
Introduction to Bury Talent
00:00:08
Ken Freire
Welcome to Bury Talent, the show for young professionals that tears down false beliefs about faith and work so you can unbury your God-given talent right where you are.
How to Get Promoted in 2026: Strategies and Challenges
00:00:17
Ken Freire
I'm Ken Freire, and today with my co-host Patrick Lowndes, we're talking about getting promoted in 2026, show proof of value.
00:00:26
Ken Freire
Patrick, this is going to great conversation because everybody's always struggling with figuring out how do we get promoted.
00:00:32
Patrick
That's right. That's right. And we can kick it off in just a second.
Casual Conversation and Transition to Main Topic
00:00:36
Patrick
Briefly, let's do a check-in. It's February now. We're recording this the day after the Super Bowl. So as a Seahawks once a year fan, I'm usually a fan only if they make it to the Super Bowl.
00:00:48
Patrick
We had a great party last night, a bunch of people over. Did you enjoy it from Nashville or not so much?
00:00:54
Ken Freire
You know, I think I watched like about 20 minutes of it and then I put my kids to bed and I went to bed. So.
00:01:00
Patrick
Oh my goodness. Well, you weren't missing much. It just, it went, it spiraled downhill in the fourth quarter for the Pats. So anyway, there's that. But, but yeah, it was this topic today that we're going to talk about is, is near dear to my heart.
Debunking Myths About Workplace Promotions
00:01:12
Patrick
Cause worked in the compensation industry and very closely tied to pay is performance.
00:01:19
Patrick
And so just, and then now I've got 15 years of actually getting out there and doing that and being in that myself. You've also run lots of these conversations over the years. So yeah, I'd love to, to jump into it. What's, what's the false belief we're getting after today?
00:01:33
Ken Freire
I think a lot of people would say, hey, if I just work hard, stay humble and put in my time, I'll get rewarded. I'll get promoted. it sounds spiritual, right? It sounds like, hey, faithfulness, humility, trusting God.
00:01:45
Ken Freire
But we have found that that breaks down when it comes to the workplace.
Balancing Faith and Professional Value as Christians
00:01:50
Patrick
Yeah. And let me just also just provide the counter here too. We're not saying here that you shouldn't be faithful and humble and that you shouldn't trust God. You absolutely should.
00:02:01
Patrick
But the thing is, is you can go for two, three, four years, five years running the same play in your job. And basically leave possible promotion growth on the table.
00:02:09
Ken Freire
Bye.
00:02:14
Patrick
And as Christians, one of the ways we like to show up in the workplace is always looking for how can we serve in a way that differentiates our value and our inputs from our peers, not just not for ourself and our selfish gain, but because we have a better king in a kingdom, like a better way to show the king and what his way of work looks like.
00:02:39
Patrick
And there are some times when, Ken, that doesn't actually lead to the most expedient outcome, and that's okay, but what we want to figure out is, How can we as Christians be leaning into showing the proof of our value?
Unique Value in the Age of AI
00:02:52
Patrick
And then when our managers look like, man, that guy always is just coming, showing up here and serving us really well, like better than anyone else with the attitude and the posture, like I want more of that guy or that gal.
00:03:03
Patrick
If your boss is saying, how do I copy and paste and multiply you? That's great, especially if they know that you also love Jesus. So that's kind of the combo we're looking for.
00:03:14
Patrick
And it's not just this really kind of quiet, drab, like, I'll just do my work like Eeyore. It's something more than that.
00:03:20
Ken Freire
Yeah. Well, and to compound the issue, right, when it comes to showing proof of your value, we also have the problem of AI.
00:03:27
Patrick
Yeah.
00:03:29
Ken Freire
AI is commoditizing your job. AI is coming for your lunch money, right? Every little thing you're doing that AI can do, all of a sudden your manager and your business person is like, hey, I'm not just going to reward you for effort.
00:03:43
Ken Freire
They want to see what can you bring to the business. And if AI is able to do that for you, they start to question, are you really necessary? So you may be thinking, hey, I want level up advance in my career.
00:03:55
Ken Freire
Your manager may be thinking,
00:03:56
Patrick
Yeah.
00:03:57
Ken Freire
Is there even a seat on the bus for you? So that's why we're going to talk about this concept.
00:04:00
Patrick
Yeah. Yep.
Developing Proof of Value: A Five-Part Playbook
00:04:02
Ken Freire
And Patrick, before we go into the proof of value playbook, you have beautiful insight on the difference between a proof of value and proof of concept.
00:04:06
Patrick
Yes.
00:04:10
Ken Freire
So kind of walk us through that.
00:04:11
Patrick
Yeah. So when I was at ServiceNow and in the sales industry in general, there's a lot of professionals that learn this concept of a proof of concept or POC. What it means is when you're trying to sell to a client, especially the bigger the ticket, you know, the offer is like enterprise software, you want to show a little bite sized kernel of, hey, this is kind of what we think we can do. And you usually have like a demo in there and maybe has like, here's kind of what the the value we can give you. But the thing is, is people call that like, it's just a conceptual slice of value. Here's what could happen. They call that a proof of concept. ServiceNow is like, no, like we're not selling concepts. We're selling actual value. And so internally, they would not use POC. They would call it a POV, proof of value.
00:04:57
Patrick
Because if I can't demonstrate to you the value that I'm trying to sell you in this $400,000 or $4 million contract, you shouldn't even be wasting your time talking with me about it. And so ServiceNow is really bent on how can I demonstrate actual value? And so today, as we talk about ourselves and getting promoted, we want to talk about what is the proof of your value in your current role. So we have a bit of playbook here. We really love as we're kind of pulling this together, some of the insights, some of the stats that back this up. So Ken, why don't you step us into part one? It's a five-part playbook of how you can develop proof of value in 2026.
00:05:36
Ken Freire
So the first one, we call it build the human in the loop mode. This is really about discernment. If you think about in 2026, right, and at the end of 2025, 75% of Gen Z right now is using AI upskill, right, to grow their skills, to level up. But here's the problem. 55% of hiring managers still believe Gen Z lacks work ethic.
00:05:59
Ken Freire
This is coming from intelligent.com. So the reason why there is this gap is because what the managers are not seeing is the discernment in Gen Z.
00:06:10
Ken Freire
So really, anyone can generate a report, anyone could do the stuff that AI is doing.
00:06:10
Patrick
Mm-hmm.
00:06:14
Ken Freire
But where you come in, if you want to get proof of value for yourself, you have to show that you are able to discern what's the right next step.
00:06:25
Patrick
Yep, that's right. And a great example of this is like, here's some AI that we got out of this report. Like, catch a hallucination. Like, it might sound little bit like this. Hey, I identified a hallucination with this Q3 legacy data projections that would have totally misinformed our budget, like to the tune of 10 12%.
00:06:43
Patrick
Like if you catch something like that, all of a sudden what's going through the manager's mind? Wow, Ken, man, that's on point. Like I need Ken around so he can catch all this AI garbage that's being thrown out there on these reports.
The Irreplaceable Soft Skills
00:06:55
Patrick
So that's number one is a human in the loop.
00:06:56
Ken Freire
Yeah.
00:06:58
Patrick
Number two is monthly value logs. This is almost like an ROI ledger, right? And some people have called it, if you do some searching on this, some people call it like a brag sheet, right? Which is like, hey, here's the stuff that I've accomplished. But what this does is it's not just, here's a task that I did, right? You don't want to like, I manage the social media calendar. It's like, well, so what? Who cares? Like we could have hired some dude on Upwork to manage it halfway across the world and that he would have told us the same thing.
00:07:25
Patrick
So really what you're getting after here is what is the value you added within your company? So like, for example, saying like, I leveraged AI to reduce the content production time by 40%, which gave me 15 more hours a week to do deeper, let's say competitive intelligence analysis. Or maybe I picked up an extra project with the sales team that let us close another $50,000 deal this quarter. didn't have that space last quarter, but because of the automation, that's one things I was able to accomplish. And if you can draw dotted line every month
00:07:58
Patrick
to value that you create in the business. Even if you are on an engineering or technical side of the house, how you are tied to certain outcomes and you're able to talk about that with fluency every month, it's a great way to demonstrate, here's the value that I've
Quantifying Impact: ROI and Strategic Initiatives
00:08:12
Patrick
done.
00:08:13
Patrick
You want to see like, here's January, here's February, here's March. And that's the kind of thing where if you know your value, it's a lot easier to defend that value and talk about it in a confident way, if I can call it that.
00:08:16
Ken Freire
Thank you.
00:08:24
Patrick
So that's number two, monthly value logs.
00:08:27
Ken Freire
Which brings us to number three, the soft skill mastery. And the reason why I like to call it mastery is because here's what's going on. Like I said earlier, technical tasks are being automated, but the things that cannot be automated are like leadership, empathy, negotiation.
00:08:43
Ken Freire
That's the stuff where you come into play and you need this. So here's a great stat in LinkedIn's 2025 Global Talent Trend Report identified that people management and conflict resolution are the top two most durable skills for Gen Z.
00:08:58
Ken Freire
And really any leader, if you can do these two things, it's going to be massive. And that's something that AI can do. And this is how you can bring value to your company. If you can show people management, so leading group of people and conflict resolution,
00:09:07
Patrick
Same again. What are those two things again? Yep.
00:09:15
Ken Freire
Right. So negotiating, being able to empathize, being able to like, hey, Sally's over here is right. You're wrong. Don't call him an idiot.
00:09:23
Ken Freire
Right. HR will be will be brought in.
00:09:26
Patrick
Yeah.
00:09:27
Ken Freire
But here's the thing. Right. If you can collect, quote unquote, like social proof where you're saving DMs or emails, you're showing how you're doing peer reviews with people and helping them level up.
00:09:38
Ken Freire
Then all of a sudden you can come to your boss and say something like, hey, I led cross-functional teams here. I'm able to innovate. I've saved the company money by helping save 10 hours just by oversight, just by helping the people. So this is the stuff that we want to be able to show is that you have the soft skill mastery. Most people don't have this.
00:10:01
Ken Freire
And this is the thing that could really help you show proof of value.
00:10:05
Patrick
That's right. Yeah. And that's number three. And so if you haven't done a bit of an inventory, you might even consider going online and taking like an emotional intelligence, like an EQ test and be like, what emotional intelligence do I have? That usually correlates to my soft skills. There's lots of ways to...
00:10:19
Ken Freire
Thank you.
00:10:19
Patrick
to evaluate that. So consider that. Obviously, you need them in customer facing roles, but quite frankly, everybody in the business, that's the stuff that will not get automated out so fast. Number four, the ROI ledger.
00:10:34
Patrick
This one's really fun. So before when we were talking, it was more like monthly value logs. This is more laying out with numbers. Here's the direct revenue that I helped drive or the direct efficiency gains. And so again, the way you wanna think about this is high impact employee. How are you fitting the bucket of a high impact employee? So Gartner, you might've heard of Gartner, pretty reputable source of research and intelligence. They said that the high impact employee usually delivers 2X the value that core employees offer.
00:11:10
Patrick
and, and the thing is, is they usually only cost 20% more. So think about that. If you're like a team lead, if you're one of the top performers, you probably do cost a little bit more than the average person, but two X the value, some studies say two and a half X the value. I mean, so if you think about it, like if you're,
00:11:28
Patrick
Performance in 2025, let's say you led some process optimization efforts and that maybe, let's say, came up with about $45,000 of direct savings for the company. You're like, wow, that just really sped up the back end process. But then you could look ahead to 2026 and say, hey, I implemented some new strategies that helped us gain $120,000 of this new implementation that we had talked about as a theory, but now we're implementing it. If you can have sort of ledger of like, hey, this is what I did last year. This is what I'm working on this year. It's quantifying the value of your contributions. And the more you can do that and demonstrate what you've done kind of as an ROI factor, the easier it will be to when you show up to the annual performance review, which will be our next episode, how do you have that conversation?
00:12:21
Patrick
The more that you track it like this and demonstrate your proof of value, it's going to be way easier because you're not like making up pie in the sky. Like, well, I've been here for this long or I vaguely did this thing or vaguely did that thing. It's going to be concrete and clear. So that's number four.
00:12:36
Patrick
Ken, bring us home with number five.
00:12:38
Ken Freire
And right before I bring this home with number five, some people might be listening to this and like be thinking, wow, this sounds like a lot of self-promotion and I'm promoting myself. Is that what believers are supposed to do?
00:12:50
Ken Freire
I just want to encourage you, like there's a difference between acting like you're prideful versus just showing the facts of like, here's what we're doing. Here's what I'm able to bring to the team.
00:13:01
Patrick
Yeah, it's a good word.
00:13:02
Ken Freire
Day to day, we just forget, right? We're like, as managers, as leaders, sometimes we're dealing with so many fires that we forget about everything else that's going on. And we just need to be reminded.
00:13:13
Ken Freire
And if you think about this, like even in the Bible, the book of Numbers is there.
00:13:13
Patrick
Yep.
00:13:17
Ken Freire
There's like all this facts. There's all this stuff that's happened and it's okay to do that, right? Okay. With that being said, let me walk through last one. Number five, this is resolve the unasked question.
00:13:29
Patrick
Hmm.
00:13:30
Ken Freire
think if you are trying to level up your leadership every quarter, you can ask your manager a question like this. Hey, what's the one problem keeping you up at night that you haven't had time to delegate?
00:13:41
Patrick
Mm-hmm.
00:13:41
Ken Freire
And when tell you that problem, You go solve it. You go make it happen. Cause then all of a sudden they're going to equate you to the problem solver. You're the go-getter. You're the leader. You're the one that they can rely on.
00:13:54
Ken Freire
And you don't want to just be like, oh, cool. This is Bob. Who's a great coworker. You want to be known as Bob, the strategic partner.
00:14:02
Patrick
Mm-hmm.
00:14:03
Ken Freire
So helping take initiative and being proactive on this stuff is going to immensely helpful.
Integrity and Strategic Self-Promotion
00:14:08
Patrick
That's right. And just to kind of anchor us in the truth of all this here, in case you haven't heard it, this is like the third or fourth time we're going to reiterate this. As believers, our goal is not to simply maximize our compensation and try to humble brag and really just be an arrogant jerk about what we've accomplished. Do not hear that in this episode. What we want you to hear There's integrity in some of the data and the proof that I'm bringing to bear. The ROI ledgers, as much as possible, are conservative. It shows, like, here's kind of what I think I've accomplished. It could have been more, but I know it was at least this. There's got to be honesty there. Because when they see that you're honest, your boss might like, actually, no, it was more than that. You take the higher road in terms of being conservative on those estimates. And remember that as you're working, love this Proverbs 21.1, the heart of the manager in God's hands, right? I think it's also Psalm 25 says the Lord directs the king's heart like a water course, right? And so if you just follow how the Lord is leading you in your role to serve with a servant's posture to see the kingdom come into your office place,
00:15:17
Patrick
Let the Lord direct your leaders what they should do. And you'll know if it's time to stick around or to look for another opportunity. But in fact, we're going to dive in a lot deeper on this in the next episode, talking about that annual performance review. How do you have a great conversation with your boss about your value, your compensation? What are your goals? I mean, that might not even be just one episode. It might be multiple. But let's jump into that on the next episode of Buried Talent.