So You Want to Be Promoted, Pt. 1

My expectation early in my career was that promotions just showed up. You worked hard, and you figured out how to get along with your teammates. Every year or so, my boss would have a one-off conversation with me and alert me that I had a new role along with increased compensation. This hands-off cycle went on a lot longer than I am comfortable admitting. Years.

You start your career believing that your boss “knows.” They know how to do the job, how to get the project done, and how to grow you professionally. Most do, but many do not. More importantly, most are compulsively quite busy, and the essential strategic work of growing the team becomes a lower priority than whatever fire drill we’re all worrying about this week.

My advice: while you are not the decision maker regarding your next promotion, you are 100% accountable for driving it.

Before I start, we need to frame this piece:

You can replace the word promotion with review for much of this piece. Promotions usually align with the review process, but this article is focused on the promotion, not the review process.

Promotion processes are a reflection of a company’s culture. While I’ve seen a lot of different engineering cultures and there are common elements to their processes, there is always something slightly different in each company. One place promotions were never spoken of, ever, to anyone. Another place left it totally up to the manager — no oversight other than budgets. While I hope threads of this article resonate with you, there is something essential about your current promotion process that I’ve never seen.

We good? Ok, we’re going to start this process with you answering three questions:

Is there a publicly available rubric that clearly describes the different job levels at your company?

Is there a repeating, usually annual, process whereby promotions are reviewed and approved?

Do you understand both the rubric and the process?

It would be easier on all of us if your answer to all of the above questions were a confident “Yes,” but, well, there are well-known forces that act in opposition to defining clear rubrics and processes and making sure everyone understands them. The greatest hits of these oppositional forces include:

Growth. A rapidly growing start-up that has not kept up with the growth of the team and has not invested in job levels or a promotion process.

Experience. Managers who have not been or have little experience in understanding and applying job levels, or adeptly using the promotion process, and/or managers who are just poor communicators.

Risk. This is more of a big company oppositional force, but the larger a company becomes, the more it dismantles what used to be a pretty rich job level and promotion process. Why? Risk mitigation. Having a rich and well-documented process that captures a lot of information about the individuals on the team, their accomplishments, and promotions often comes back to bite you — legally speaking, so “Let’s simplify the process and save the team a lot of time!” This is how you end up with a review form comprised of two text fields: Accomplishments and Goals combined with simple 1 to 5 rating systems, “You are 4, but with work I’m certain you can be a solid 5.” I wish I were joking.

Budget. One of the most disappointing outcomes from a promotion process is when you hear back from your boss, “Sorry, we don’t have the budget this year,” except they don’t say that. They find some aspect of your work this year that barely justifies the lack of a promotion because they know you did the work and deserve the promotion, but budgets didn’t align this year, and that’s the last thing they want to say. This oppositional force increases in intensity and confusion with the seniority of the job, where the compensation is higher and there is more competition for fewer roles.

Power. Similar to risk, the holders of this information have been burned in the past when they’ve shared this information completely, so they are reluctant to share complete job levels and the detailed promotion process. If you find this odd or unsatisfying, I’ll raise you a “this is complete bullshit.” I’ve professionally screwed up by sharing too much information or sharing job or promotion information sans proper context, and this has blown up in my face. This was my error to learn from, and the lesson wasn’t “share less,” it was “do better.”

I have constructive advice on specific work you can do to invest in your future promotion, but this advice will be less helpful until you discover what boils down to two pieces of critical information.

A document that describes the job expectations for your current level. It’s usually a table of some form. It’d be great if you could get the expectations for all levels, but, again, folks get twitchy sharing the complete set of this information. This is one of the reasons I advise you to get a document. Word of mouth on this information guarantees misunderstanding regarding expectations.

A schedule for the promotion process. There is one for managers and one for individuals, but they contain similar information and dates:

This is when the promotion cycle begins.

This is the deadline for promotions.

This is when promotions will be decided.

This is when promotions will be communicated and take effect.

I’m less tense about finding a document for this information because the core of what we need to know here is timing: when can we expect what?

You have questions. Many questions.

Who wrote these job levels? In smaller companies, it’s the leadership team along with the HR/People team. In larger organizations, it’s the HR/People team. I’ve written many; here’s a cleaned-up and anonymized one I wrote for a start-up that you can have right now1.

Why are promotions at this particular time? It’s usually annual budget dependent, which is why this process happens in the early Fall in the United States. Sometimes, the promotion process happens twice a year, with the non-Fall process existing to error correct a handful of heinous promotion situations.

How are promotions decided? It’s usually a group of managers with additional oversight for more senior promotions. Some companies have invested a lot in having this review group be an anonymous entity that knows nothing about you except what is included in your promotion packet. The idea is to make the approval as neutral and unbiased as possible. More on the promotion process and this packet shortly.

What if I can’t find some or all of this information? In this likely scenario, you need to push a little harder because the answer will help you. Ask your boss, ask your HR person. Listen to their answer. What oppositional force do they invoke? Does it make sense? Are you buying it? Pushing a little usually results in more information, and you get all you can get because your initial question remains:

How do I get promoted?

I’m glad you asked. Go ahead and read Part 2 now.2

The comparison levels at other companies were derived from public sources and are six years old, so I wouldn’t trust them. ↩

Thanks to the denizens of #perf-management channel on the Rands Leadership Slack for jamming on the hard questions about promotions. Their questions improved this piece. ↩