When asked about where I wanted to be in my career by my boss (boss' boss actually), I was honest about having my resume out there and looking for other opportunities outside my current company. Now, I've heard from other sources a promotion that was possible in my future has been basically pulled.
Honesty is not a good policy. Keep lying.
Everyone says they want the truth, but if you are told you're not doing meaningful work, the justification for your job is vanity metrics, and the guy with less experience than you who does terrible work makes more money than you, how happy would you be?
If you told management, you're using the position and any promotion as a jumping off area for a newer better job at a different company, how happy would management be?
Not happy, and why would they? Flip it around, how happy would you be if you knew they were out there shopping around for your replacement? Only keeping you so long as they didn't find someone better?
Tenure isn't worth zero, but it's not a "guarantee for greater responsibility and compensation".
Pleasant loyalty is a good way to stay employed when you're doing a mediocre job.
So I like being ruthlessly honest about this stuff. I'm much much happier this way than I have been in the past where my relationship with my employer involved more charades around future plans.
Why would they have to be idiots? Doesn't this just create a crummy atmosphere where promotions only go to people unwilling or unable to leave the organization?
If you're shopping around this can mean your employer has already refused to invest in you, no?
I think that's a bad idea for reasons different than the ones you seem to have intuited. If you are asked where you want to be in your career by your employer, they are asking what you want to be doing (with a subtext that they are trying to find out whether and how they can be the employer for which you are doing it.)
If the focus of your answer to that question is that you are shopping around for opportunities outside of the company, you are basically answering that what you want is, above all else, to be somewhere else.
I don't think the lesson that should be learned from this is "keep lying", I think the lesson is "be honest, but -- in business dealings -- focus on the parts of the truth that the person you are dealing with can, at least potentially, act on in a mutually beneficial way". In this case -- if you are asked where you want to be in your career, you tell your boss what you'd like to be doing.
Obviously you are omitting the myriad of cases that an employer would like to invest in you but can't (yet) from your statement. Plenty of things like a lack of funding, individual ability, market timing, etc. prevents them from investing in you.
If I was waiting for the cash flow to move someone from A to B, and was working diligently to do so, to then have them state they are looking elsewhere for the B position, I would clearly re-evaluate my candidate selection as they may be gone by the time I get the opportunity to promote.
Because when the employee was asked what they wanted to be doing in their career, their answer amounted to "be working somewhere else".
> Doesn't this just create a crummy atmosphere where promotions only go to people unwilling or unable to leave the organization?
There's a difference between "people who are willing to leave the company if it cannot provide them what they want" and "people whose desires appear to center around leaving the company".
OP: "When asked about where I wanted to be in my career [...] I was honest about having my resume out there"
He didn't "advertise" it -- he just gave a honest answer when questioned. If this is "advertising" for you, then your "default" behaviour would be "be economical with the truth", i.e. white lies, i.e. being fundamentally dishonest... which means OP is right.
The only time it's acceptable IMO is when you're thinking about leaving for an actual, offered role that's much different, eg, "I'm thinking of leaving to be CTO of Startup X, what do you think?"; in any event it's probably OK if the reasons are beyond the company's control (you're moving, etc).
"I am actively looking for jobs at other firms" is not an answer to the question of "where do you want to be in your career", except insofar as it can be read to imply an answer of "not here".
So, it was honest, but not really (except indirectly) an answer to the question asked, and quite likely, in any case, not the most productive and relevant honest answer.
If the reason other opportunities were being sought is that those opportunities offered features X, Y, and Z that the employee's current position didn't, an honest but more direct and relevant answer would be "I'd like to be doing more of things like X, Y, and Z". That would directly answer the question, and provide something positively actionable by the employer, and be no less honest than "I've got my resume out and am actively looking at outside opportunities".
There's two possibilities (based on the scenario as described): either the employee was fed up with the company and really wanted out, and then the answer given was not only honest but reasonably relevant (if somewhat, perhaps diplomatically, indirect), or the employee had particular things they wanted in their career that they weren't currently getting, and failed to give the most relevant perfectly honest answer to the question asked, and instead gave an incomplete, tangentially relevant non-answer which implied an unfortunate and inaccurate answer to the question actually asked.
It does not amount to that. In many, many, cases people start looking for jobs wishing they could stay at their current job.
Assuming no relevant facts were omitted from the description of events, it does, in the context of the question it was offered in response to.
> In many, many, cases people start looking for jobs wishing they could stay at their current job.
Sure, they do. But the answer to the question "Where do you want to be in your career?" in those cases would focus on the things that they wanted to enable themselves to stay in and love the job with their current employer, not the fact that they are looking for outside opportunities (the latter might be mentioned in the context of specific desires and the fact that certain outside opportunities seemed to be the only way to realize them, but even then the looking for outside opportunities would be secondary to the main answer about desired job features, not the main answer to the question.)
Merit/track-record is a key metric, but not the only requirement. Interpersonal skills, future plans (loyalty, career track, etc), attitude, potential...
We discussed opportunities within the company, what's a good fit for me, starting my own business and eventually that I'd been looking at what else is out there. I actually told him he should be looking too.
He did offer me more money, but I have to wait until our next bonus round to get it. So he used that against me too. It was well played.
Basically, when in doubt, be vague.
Its usually better to hire the internal person who you know can do a good job, than to hire an external who looks twice as impressive on paper. Yet we often do the opposite.