So You Want to Be Promoted, Pt. 2

(You should read Part 1 first)

The elephant in the room. You are wondering why I am putting so much of the burden of being promoted on you. You have a boss. Aren’t they responsible for doing all this work? Shouldn’t they understand job levels and the intricacies of the promotion process?

Yes, they should.

Let’s talk about the word “should’ for a bit. Should doesn’t mean they will, it means they could. Should indicates a desirable future state, not a defined future. Your manager should understand your job level, and they should have a plan for your eventual promotion, but have they? The Big Three, the hardest and highest risk conversations new managers have with an individual, revolve around:

Space 1

Title

Compensation

The promotion conversation hits two of the Big Three, and sometimes it’s all three when the promotion involves a new office. Managers, especially new managers, walk into these conversations thinking it’s just another conversation, but the Big Three are the hardest because they aren’t about space, title, and compensation; they are answers to fundamental questions:

Where do I live?

What do I do?

How am I valued?

A lack of experience in both preparing for and having these questions will not just make for awkward conversations, but often irrevocable blows to professional trust. So, yeah, your manager should be ready to discuss your promotion, but if they’ve screwed it up before, they might avoid it until the last possible moment.

So, let’s help them prepare.

Simplify

This article began with a simple realization after being a part of vastly different and innumerable promotion processes. There are two core, well-defined deliverables supporting your next promotion:

A Pinnacle Accomplishment

Network of Trustworthy Feedback

You are wondering about that job level document from Part 1. It has an impressive list of focus areas and expectations that grow increasingly complex with each level. How can these two deliverables address all of those attributes?

They might not.

If there are clearly defined expectations for your role, I recommend understanding them and reflecting on whether or not you’re achieving them. There are likely a couple in there where you are ignoring or are less adept at than others2, but I’ve been in the room where we make the decision, and it consistently boils down to two questions:

What significant work did they achieve?

Who do we trust that agrees?

Let’s start with significant work.

A Pinnacle Achievement

This is a set of work, a deliverable, or an accomplishment that demonstrates you are capable of working at your next job level. There’s a significant assumption baked into this sentence that you need to digest. You mean I am expected to work at a higher level before I am promoted?

Yes.

But I haven’t worked at that level before. How do you expect me to do work where I have no experience?

That’s the rub. Your job is to figure out how to do that work (with help) before you’re promoted to that level. I will acknowledge that this is a prerequisite at the company I’ve worked for the last three decades, and your company’s culture might be different. Still, you know the places I’ve worked, and if you think that this set of companies got it wrong, I’m not sure if much of my writing will resonate with you, but keep reading, ok?

It’s hard to understand this without specifics, so here are real-world examples of what I’d consider Pinnacle work at three levels: junior, experienced, and senior engineers.

Junior:

Contribute significantly to the development of a feature.

Support driving a key metric from X to Y.

Maintain an existing feature with no drama.

Experienced:

Drive a new feature from design through development and finally deployment.

Define a new engineering process that was adopted widely with an obvious measurable impact.

Identify a critical learning for the service/product/process and transformed that idea into a product improvement.

Senior:

Drove a major new feature that required significant cross-functional work.

Led a substantive initiative within engineering that greatly affected engineering productivity.

Solved a complex issue that required collaboration across the entire company.

Real-world is a stretch for these examples. You need to plug in the specifics of your company, the products or services, and your culture. Good news, unless you’re the CEO, you have a boss, and it’s as crucial that they either define or critique this work and agree that it’s sufficient.

I’m going to type that again because this step is critical. You need to suggest to your boss that you consider a piece of work to be grounds for promotion, and then you need to listen hard to their response. The goals in this conversation are:

Are they clear that you are working to get promoted?

Is this set of work sufficient to support a promotion? If not, why?

If this work is insufficient, what similar projects are?

It’s a massive red flag if you leave this conversation either confused or without a concrete set of next steps to get to less confusion. It’s ok if this conversation takes a couple of attempts, but if you’ve done it three times and you can’t define a set of promotion-worthy work with your manager, then… you might be talking to the wrong person.

Yikes.

But it happens. There exist companies where even the managers wonder about the black art of promotions. Where the process happens in a black hole of a room, where information goes in, but can never escape. Sorry. In this unlikely case, my recommendation is to figure out who is in that room and get their advice.

Nervous about talking with other humans? Good news, you’re going to be doing it…. a lot.

A Network of Trustworthy Feedback

Chances are, the folks who are reviewing your promotion are not directly familiar with your work. The likelihood of this occurring increases as a function of the size of your organization, so how are they going to know if you are ready for a promotion? Yes, you have documented your Pinnacle Achievement in great detail, an Achievement that your manager agrees is worthy. Your manager might even be in the room discussing this promotion and is capable of representing you and your fine work. There are a lot of scenarios where this is insufficient. For example:

Your manager is not a part of the committee, or,

Your manager is present, but does not have sufficient context, or,

Your manager is there, has context, but is not trusted by other members, so they ask, “Who else agrees this Pinnacle work was Pinnacle?”

For any achievement, there are a handful of humans around the work that you need to cultivate so that when it comes to promotion time, if they are asked, “Did this person do this work well?” they enthusiastically respond, “Why yes. It was fully Pinnacle.”

But who? And how?

It varies by the work, but there are always a set of humans surrounding your work. They might be:

Fellow engineers are contributing to the same project.

Partner teams need this feature to be done in order for them to complete their features.

Quality, support, or other partners teams who worked closely on the development and can intelligently comment on the effort.

I think of these humans as customers. Who needs this work to succeed, and how can I best deliver that work to them? You need to be aware of who these humans are and their evolving impression of your work.

This relationship does not start with you identifying these humans and declaring, “Hey, so my boss and I agree this is Pinnacle, and I’m really looking to get promoted, so it’d be super if you could eventually support me in this effort.” This starts by identifying which humans are critical to the success of this project and making sure they, like you, are successful. The word “promotion” is never uttered.

Like the Pinnacle Achievement, the amount of work you need to do here scales with the seniority of the role. The group of humans you support as a junior engineer is a much smaller list than the lengthy list of humans necessary to ship a major feature as a senior engineer. Also, the different types of humans increase, as well. For a more senior role, you might have senior engineers, Directors, and VPs on your list of customers.3

As I don’t know what your Pinnacle Achievement is, I can’t advise on how to make you and your customer successful, but you should schedule time outside of regular meetings devoted to the project to check in. 1;1s, a lunch, a walk around the block. The goal is to get their perspective. How’s the work proceeding? Are they feeling progress? Where are they blocked? How can you help? Promotion aside, this is a practice you should deploy for any project of significance with as many disparate humans as possible because complex systems fail in small ways quietly before they fail spectacularly… and loudly.

How do you know you identified the right customers? How do you know when they will share a positive report of your work? How do you know they did? You probably won’t, but the list you want to have ready is when your boss asks, “How can I talk about this work?”

The Elephant in the Room

… is that every promotion process is different. There are critical aspects to your process that are as important as defining a critical project and having a trusted set of supporters. This is why I suggest that you figure this out first. As a manager, when I know I have a tricky promotion coming up for one of my directs, I find the last person who received this promotion and talk with the manager. What worked? What didn’t work? How long did it take? I’m looking for a successful playbook that I can use. It’s harder to find these stories as an individual because many organizations don’t broadcast promotions, but some do. Find those folks; learn the playbook that worked for them.

And understand your promotion might not be approved. Sorry. The reasons are myriad, and if the manager said it was a sure thing, they were wrong. However, once you get past the disappointment, the one piece of information you are looking for in the process is:

Where was my performance insufficient?

What do I need to do to improve?

If your manager can’t provide helpful versions of these answers, keep asking. If they can’t answer, ask others who’ve been successful.

I’d say good luck, but luck has nothing to do with your promotion; it’s just hard work.

Not joking. If you haven’t moved a team from one space to another, it creates heretofore unimaginable drama for managers. ↩

If someone is going to have an issue with this piece, it’s this part. A well-written job level document captures detailed, specific expectations for a role, but, well, we usually cast the net too wide. It’s every single possible expectation rather than a subset of required expectations. Which apply to you with your experience and in that specific team? It depends on too many to list. I continue to believe that Pinnacle and Network of Trustworthy Feedback are the correct moves, but you may also need to know what specifics from your level that actually matter. Which? The best way is talk to someone who has been recently promoted is not to ask about promotion specifics, but how they measured. If your company encourages promotion secrecy, well, that’s another problem. ↩

An essential point about more senior promotions. More often than not, one of the essential customers won’t be in the room, but their boss will be. This means the impressions of your customer need to be strong enoug to infect their boss. Hey, I didn’t say senior promotions were easy. ↩