With the cost of living climbing and many companies planning to hand out uninspiring “peanut butter raises” this year, workers are scrambling to figure out what actually earns a promotion in 2026. According to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, the answer may involve buttering up your colleagues and getting their approval first.
In his eyes, that’s far more important than how you might perform in an interview.
“Every day you’re working is your interview for your next job,” Robbins said last week on TBPN.
In fact, when it comes to internal promotions, Robbins isn’t convinced interviews add much value at all.
“I think when we have two or three internal candidates for a promotion, the whole interview process is stupid to me,” Robbins added. “We’ve been watching these people work for a decade. What are we going to learn about them when we sit down in a room for 30 minutes and ask them questions when we can watch them work?”
Instead, Robbins wants to know whether the people you work with would support your move to the next level.
“If your peer group would look at your promotion announcement and go, ‘That makes perfect sense,’ then you’ve done your job, right?” Robbins said.
“And if you can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘Okay, those people, would they be happy, and would they believe it’s the right decision?’ And if they wouldn’t, you’re probably not quite where you ought to be.”
Fortune reached out to Cisco for further comment.
Why the approval of your peers is the secret to landing a promotion
Robbins joined Cisco in late 1997 as an account manager before being named CEO in 2015, but learned during his own climb that the people moving ahead aren’t just strong individual performers—they are willing to pull their peers up along with them.
“You also have to have people who care about making sure their peers are successful as well,” Robbins said. “The person who’s solely focused on getting to the top as an individual—it’s not going to happen.”
That team-first mindset is something other Cisco leaders have echoed.
Jeetu Patel, the company’s chief product officer, told Fortune last year that one of the biggest mistakes ambitious workers make is believing they can succeed on their own.
“Oftentimes, we let our pride and ego get in the way,” Patel said. “We’re like, ‘I’m going to try to be a self-made person.’ There’s no such thing as a self-made person; we live in an interconnected society where humans depend on humans, and so if you can stand on shoulders of giants, it just takes you farther.”
But because access to opportunities are often not evenly distributed, Patel added, leaning on others isn’t something to feel guilty about: “If you have access to the resources and you don’t use them, then shame on you.”
Pano Christou, CEO of British coffee giant Pret A Manger, similarly revealed that his secret to climbing from the shop floor to the C-suite has not been “shortcutting” his peers or “stabbing them in the back.” Rather, he focused on being the best at his responsibilities, and thus his peers often celebrated his success.
“I won’t stitch people up on my way up the ladder,” he told Fortune in 2024. “And I think that has, over time, really reaped rewards.”
From Walmart to Nvidia, top leaders say there’s power in doing the jobs no one else wants
The call to be a reliable teammate—and to take on unglamorous work—has long been a staple of executive advice to Gen Z employees.
Former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who started out unloading trucks at a distribution center, has said climbing the ladder begins with mastering the role you already have.
“Don’t take your current job for granted,” the 59-year-old chief exec said. “The next job doesn’t come if you don’t do the one you’ve got well.”
Just as important is how you treat the people around you: “Be a great teammate—you learn how to lead, you learn how to influence by the way you interact with your peers,” he said. “Treat them well, help them, help them do a better job.”
Even at the helm of Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, CEO Jensen Huang argued that no assignment should be considered beneath him.
“You can’t show me a task that is beneath me,” Huang said at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, referring to his early job as a dishwasher at Denny’s.
“I cleaned a lot of toilets. I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined, and some of them you just can’t unsee.”
