I Was Promoted Over a Colleague Who Deserved It and Had to Work Beside Her Anyway

I had been working alongside Priya at the same level in the same team in Denver for two years when the senior role opened and we were both, as far as anyone had communicated, equally strong candidates. We both knew this.

We had discussed the role obliquely in the way of colleagues who are too professional to say what they are each thinking directly. When the decision came, it came to me. The rationale my manager provided was reasonable and probably accurate in the specific dimensions it highlighted.

It did not address the dimensions where Priya was stronger than me, which were real and which I had sat with honestly before concluding that the decision, while mine, was not obviously correct. Working beside Priya after the announcement was the most sustained exercise in interpersonal navigation I have had in a professional setting.

She was professional and also visibly hurt, which she had every right to be and which I had to resist feeling personally responsible for in a way that would have been self-indulgent. I could not change the decision. I could not make it feel less unfair to her by being sorry about it.

I could acknowledge her capability directly, which I did, once, in a way that was honest rather than performative. What I found most difficult was the specific guilt of having something that had been distributed between two people, with one receiving it and the other not, based partly on factors that were not purely merit.

I had not done anything wrong. I also had not chosen a result that I could look at from every angle and feel was fully just. At 30, Priya was promoted to a role that was more senior than mine, which I regarded as late correction and felt genuinely happy about.

The two years in between had required both of us to be better than the situation invited us to be.