Five Promotions in Five Years

By Ragunauth Ramsaroop Excerpt from “From Teller to Director” 12 min read

The question people ask me most often is how that kept happening. Not whether the record is what it is — that part is printed, verifiable, public. They ask how: how one person goes from answering phones in General Administration in 2020 to leading corporate, social, compliance and government relations work across a large-scale mining operation by 2025. Five roles in five years: Administration Secretary, then Liaison Superintendent, then Deputy Manager, then Liaison Manager, then Liaison Director — five promotions in five years, the fastest progression track within the Corporate and Social, Compliance and Government Relations division. It happened inside AGM Inc., one of Guyana's largest mining operations, part of an international group with Chinese ownership — in five years when Guyana's extractive sector was expanding quickly and the standards around it were tightening. It sounds like a career strategy, or luck, or the product of a plan I refuse to admit I had. It was none of those. It was a pattern, and the pattern was repeatable.

I want to be careful about what this chapter claims. The previous chapter ended with a caveat, and I want it to stand: no way of working guarantees recognition, and some organisations never notice. Everything I describe here is what made the promotions possible from my side of the desk — the work that was visible before the title changed. The other side of the desk, the decision to promote, belonged to leaders who noticed, and I will not pretend that part is in anyone's control. But the mechanics are worth examining anyway, because they were the same five times over, and because they trace back, one by one, to the principles I have described in these pages: prepare before engaging, communicate with precision, respect institutions, take ownership, and think beyond the immediate issue. The promotions are the evidence. The principles are the cause.

The pattern that repeated

The first thing to understand about the five years is that every promotion came after the performance, never before it. I have written about these lessons before, and the book gives me the space to say what the sentence actually meant in practice. At each level, the question being answered was the same: had the work of the current role been done so completely, so reliably, that the next level was already being practised?

The promotion to Liaison Superintendent in 2021 did not happen because I wanted it. It happened because the administrative year that preceded it — the phones answered, the correspondence managed, the briefings prepared, the gaps stepped into — had built a record that said this person is ready for more. The move to Deputy Manager in 2023 followed two years of owning regulatory submissions and stakeholder correspondence in the Social Responsibility Department, the period I described in the last chapter, and the formal evaluation that accompanied it. The role of Liaison Manager came a year later, and Liaison Director followed in 2025. None of those titles arrived as a surprise to anyone who had been reading the work — because by the time each title changed, the work of the title was already being done.

That is the honest mechanics, and it is unglamorous. There is no moment in the five years where a single achievement won a promotion. There is a long sequence of ordinary weeks in which the current role was treated as if it mattered completely — and the organisation, reading that sequence, kept concluding that the scope of the role was too small for the work being delivered. Promotion is what it looks like when capability outgrows a job description and someone in authority is paying attention.

Think beyond the immediate issue

The second element of the pattern was that the work never stayed inside my role. From the first year, I studied the organisation the way I had studied the counter: how decisions got made, who needed to know what, where things tended to stall. The gaps between departments were the most instructive. Operations did not always know what government relations was managing. Compliance might not be looped into a decision that touched it. Leadership often needed information that sat across three departments, and nobody's job was to assemble it.

So I made it my business to understand the whole board — mining operations, procurement, human resources, aviation logistics, community relations — none of it in my original job description. Not as a distraction from the role, but as the context the role existed in. The principle is think beyond the immediate issue: the document you are preparing has a purpose beyond the document; the correspondence you are drafting is part of a relationship; the task you were given belongs to an outcome someone else is waiting for.

This is what made the pattern repeatable. Every promotion widened the problems I was asked to solve, and the person who could see across departments was ready for each widening. The connector is not someone who abandons their role to know everyone else's. The connector is the person who understands how the pieces fit, so that when a complex problem arrives — and in any large organisation, complex problems arrive every week — they can hold the whole picture and keep it moving. At every level I have held, that value has only grown, because the organisation grew with it.

Preparation is the quietest form of confidence

The third element was preparation, and it is the one I am most tempted to skip describing, because it sounds obvious. It is also uncommon, which is why it works. Walking into a meeting with a ministry official or a senior executive without preparation is a form of professional negligence — I have said that before and I believe it more every year. Before any significant engagement, I understood the objective, reviewed the background, anticipated the questions, and prepared the responses. Not in my head. On the record, in the file, so that the preparation could be checked and retrieved.

This habit did not begin at AGM. The counter taught it: before every shift, I made sure I understood the day's priorities, because accuracy is a habit that begins before the work. The agency sharpened it: honest scope conversations before the work prevented crises after it. The mining years gave it its final form — prepare before engaging became the principle, and it governed submissions, meetings, and correspondence alike. The pattern is always the same: do the work beforehand so that the moment itself is a confirmation, not a test.

What I did not expect was how quickly preparation became visible to others, and how quickly that visibility turned into trust. People notice when you have done the work. They share more, they ask your opinion, they give you harder problems — and harder problems are the ones that produce growth and, eventually, promotion. Preparation earns trust faster than charm. Charm gets remembered in the room; preparation gets remembered when the next room's guest list is being drawn.

Own the outcome, not the task

The fourth element was ownership, and it is where the counter's deepest lesson re-emerged at every level of the five years. A task is "send the regulatory submission." An outcome is "the regulator has what they need, understands our position, and the process moves forward." The difference is follow-through, communication, and problem-solving after the initial step — and it is the difference between doing your part and being responsible for the result.

Owning outcomes changed what people saw when they looked at my work. Tasks are invisible; outcomes accumulate into a record. When something was promised in one room, it was honoured in another. When a stakeholder was promised a response, they received it, complete, with the context they needed. When a mistake happened — and mistakes happened, as they do in every organisation — the discipline was to own it promptly and clearly, to explain what had occurred and what was being done about it, and to verify that the correction worked. That is uncomfortable in the short term. It is also what people remember, and it is what makes an owner of outcomes harder to replace than a completer of tasks.

This is also, honestly, where the pattern could have broken at any time, because ownership without authority is the hardest position to hold. You can take responsibility for results you do not fully control, and sometimes you will absorb criticism for outcomes that were not yours alone. That is the cost of the position, and it is the reason leadership is eventually offered to the people who have already been paying it. Taking ownership when you have no title to hide behind is precisely what demonstrates that you are ready for the title.

Relationships built before you need them

The fifth element was the institutional relationships, and I want to describe it carefully, because it is the most misunderstood part of the pattern. It was not networking in the transactional sense — no card-collecting, no favours banked against a future ask. It was the slow, unglamorous work of showing up consistently: across ministries, regulators, financial organisations, and industry peers, treating people with respect and honesty long before I needed anything from them.

The principle underneath it is respect institutions. Institutions in Guyana are not abstractions — they are people with mandates, constraints, and timelines, and they are the same people next year as they are this year. A relationship built through consistent, accurate, honest work in ordinary months is the one that serves you when a difficult moment arrives, and difficult moments always arrive. Trust compounds, as I learned at the agency: it is built in small deposits, and it is the only currency that earns interest.

There is also a distinctly Guyanese element to this, and I would be dishonest to leave it out: in a country our size, with professional circles as small and interconnected as ours, reputation travels fast. The way you treat a regulator, a counterpart, or a colleague in one setting walks ahead of you into every other setting. You cannot outrun a reputation, and you cannot hurry one into existence. You can only build it, one ordinary interaction at a time, and let it accumulate. By the time I was promoted into roles where the organisation's external standing was part of my responsibility, the relationships that made that work possible were already in place — built before they were needed, which is the only way to build them.

The record, stated plainly

None of this, I want to be clear, is my self-assessment. The organisation conducted its own evaluations, and its evaluations are the record: A+ for 2023 and A for 2024 and 2025 — the highest performance tier, rated Exceptional Performance in each year. In 2021, the year I moved into the Corporate and Social, Compliance and Government Relations function, I received an Advanced Individual Award at group level, Second Merit — recognition measured against group-wide standards across all operating subsidiaries. In 2023, the year of the next promotion, a Third Merit, for sustained performance and contribution beyond the core role. This record underpinned five promotions within five years.

I report these numbers the way I have reported them elsewhere: plainly, as record. They matter to this book for one reason only — this book promises that its claims are verifiable, and these are part of the verification. They are also the final form of the communication principle at work. The documents I prepared, the submissions I owned, the correspondence I drafted — those were the communication; precision was the standard; and the record is what happens when communication is precise enough to survive being read by people who will never meet you. A rating is the organisation's reading of a body of work. The work itself was the message.

The record has limits, and I have named them before: it measures the work an organisation could see, not the preparation that never appeared or the error caught before it left the building. Keep that in mind when you read any record, including mine. What the record proves is that the pattern worked, at one organisation, over five years, under leaders who were paying attention. It does not prove the pattern works everywhere, and the next section is about exactly that.

The caveat

Everything I have described — delivery on the current role, ownership, preparation, relationships, communication — was necessary. It was not sufficient. The five promotions required something I could not produce from my side of the desk: leaders who noticed, and a system that acted on what it saw. There are organisations where none of that exists — where potential is not recognised, where promotion follows tenure or visibility or politics, where no amount of demonstrated capability changes the outcome. I said it in the first chapter and I will say it again: some employers never notice. No way of working guarantees recognition.

That caveat is not an escape hatch; it is the honest shape of the claim. The pattern makes you the kind of professional who deserves the promotion. Whether the promotion arrives depends on people and systems you do not control. What the pattern does do — and this is the part I can promise — is make the question moot in the only way that is possible: when the opportunity comes, you are ready; and if it never comes at that organisation, you carry the record with you. The five promotions at AGM were made possible by leaders who noticed when someone was ready for more. I have never forgotten that, and it is the part of the story I can least take credit for.

The mechanics of progression are, in the end, an inside story: one person, one organisation, five years, a way of working, and the record that connected them. But the work of a corporate affairs leader does not stay inside the organisation. It turns outward — to the institutions whose confidence an operation depends on, the regulators who read the submissions, the officials who sit on the other side of the table. That is where the next part of this book begins.

Key Points

Promotion follows demonstrated capability: titles catch up to work that is already being done; deliver on the current role completely, and the question of the next role answers itself.
Connectors become irreplaceable: the person who understands how departments fit together is the one ready when problems widen.
Preparation earns trust faster than charm: the work done beforehand is visible, and it draws harder problems — the kind that produce growth.
Relationships built before you need them: institutional trust is deposited in ordinary months and spent in difficult ones, and in Guyana it travels with your name.
The record verifies the story: ratings and awards are the organisation's reading, stated as evidence — the principles are the cause, and the promotions are the result.